Advice

robatwork

Excellent - I am a pompous grammar troll who must lead a sad life.

Not sure what that says for the people who bothered replying to that effect.

robatwork

Coopdivi wrote: »

It's not always just jobseekers who have trouble with spelling and grammar.

http://www.reed.co.uk/jobs/sales-administrator/25861362#/jobs/wr11pa&card=details

The pay is good though :rotfl:

This is genius. Trifle overpaid.

hollydays

gik wrote: »

Grate....don't talk to me about grate. Try searching on ebay for chester draws...now that really does GRATE!

But it's also possible to pick up several cheap dinning tables-you know, the ones where you eat your dinner.

hollydays

Coopdivi wrote: »

It's not always just jobseekers who have trouble with spelling and grammar.

http://www.reed.co.uk/jobs/sales-administrator/25861362#/jobs/wr11pa&card=details

The pay is good though :rotfl:

Why would you chose that job..

geerex

People are idiots. Those who cannot tell the difference between "bought" and "brought" should be summarily executed.

Elsewhere

robatwork wrote: »

Excellent - I am a pompous grammar troll who must lead a sad life.

Not sure what that says for the people who bothered replying to that effect.

My fingers itch to correct grammar too, and sometimes I can't resist.

I don't mind having my own mistakes pointed out, I'd rather that than have people laughing behind my back or looking down on me for my errors. I feel sorry for some posters on MSE however, their use of English is so poor it's obvious that their schools have failed them.

PenguinJim

While I agree that it's annoying to read a badly-written post, and that it does say something about the poster when their writing is shoddy, this is only an informal forum, and the occasional mistake is to be expected. However, I do get annoyed when reading terrible English from someone whose job is based on using English. When people are paid to write articles in English, or paid for their English skills, they are unfairly taking money when their English skills are sub-par.

There have been a couple of people on MSE in the past year or so asking for advice on teaching English in Asia. The first one asked for us to check their letter of application for mistakes! As you can imagine (or why else would I be bringing it up) it was one of the most poorly-written letters you can imagine. Spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, punctuation mistakes, long words simply misused. That person should not have been an English teacher, as they would have corrupted the language skills of every one of their "students". The second advice-seeker couldn't spell their way out of a wet paper bag.

Another particular annoyance of mine is a terrible, terrible "journalist" (from another website) who is confused by hyphens; who cannot distinguish between "wear" and "where"; who apparently gets paid to write articles, and clearly wants to impress us with his vocabulary, but then undermines himself by confusing "fictional" with "fictitious", or "exacerbate" with "exasperate". He once described something as "woefully ambitious" when the context clearly showed that the ambition was supposed to be a good thing and had, in fact, been successful on every level.

Maybe it's just me, but if I'm paid to write an article in English, I'll stick to words that I know - or look them up if I'm not sure.

As for the deluge of advises, I quite agree. There are a few mistakes that seem to be catching on. Perhaps if the "Grammar Nazis" had been more vigilant 10-15 years ago, the mistakes would not have gone uncorrected across the Internet and resulted in common errors like "alot", "digital download" (or the misuse of "digital" when meaning "download"), "rouge" (instead of "rogue"), "seperate", "definate" and "Tatoonie".

OK, perhaps that last one is largely limited to incredibly geeky Star Wars forums...

Edit: OK, that post did NOT feel so long when I was typing it! I'm not obsessed! Honestly!

pollypenny

Thanks for your advice, OP. However, teachers do try to din in to pupils that 'c' = noun, 's' = verb

advice/advise, practice/ practise, prophecy/prophesy

The word most often misspelled is 'definite'. Some people are convinced it ends 'ate'.

Perhaps it would help if it was pronounced properly.

Izadora

pollypenny wrote: »

The word most often misspelled is 'definite'. Some people are convinced it ends 'ate'.

Perhaps it would help if it was pronounced properly.

I think it would also help if the meanings of words were more clearly explained when teaching spelling. It would be a lot easier to remember that it doesn't end 'ate' if you were aware of the similarities to 'finite'.

Absinthe_Fairy

This blog post might appeal to some of you:

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html

Every time I see a grammatical mistake, I think of this post and smile :-)