I taught technical writing at a college once. Most of my students were engineers, and had been told all along that “English doesn’t matter.” It showed in their writing. We generally did an intensive review of grammar and punctuation, and it was all new to some of them. Of course, some asked why it was so important, and my answer was always the same: “You may be the world’s greatest engineer, but if you cannot communicate your ideas clearly and concisely in writing, nobody will want to hire you. Because that’s how ideas are communicated in the business world, where people don’t want to waste time and money trying to figure out what you might be saying.” It usually did the trick.
IME a lot of people without education in language use can’t see a lot of those errors. Many of us can absorb general language skills through lots of reading, but lots of people can’t, or don’t do enough reading to make up the difference.
I absorbed a lot of good language by reading, but I also have gaps–and I don’t know those gaps are there until they’re pointed out to me. Without systematic language education, the lucky folks wind up with blind spots and a vague feeling that they aren’t really properly educated. The unlucky ones float in a sea of confusing and muddled words, not realizing that language can be clear and precise. For those people, gaining a knowledge of grammar is a bit like putting on glasses for the first time–“Hey! Trees have leaves! They’re not just fuzzy blobs!”
This sounds like my older sister. She is very intelligent but cannot spell. It’s a learning disability of some sort. Spellcheck has been life-changing for her.
Some friends of mine in school ask me to proof-read for them and I have been shocked by some of the writing. “I got nervous when I seen the patient was a girl only a year younger than me” is the first example that came to mind. My green editing pen has become a class resource. On the other hand, I always have someone proofread/edit my work. I get too attached to my prose and it helps to have a fresh set of eyes look it over.
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Otto’s ** right about the errors in textbooks, too. I’ll be reading along and all of a sudden a error will jump out at me. Some of my books are in the 10th editions; do the publishers want to hear about errata?
When they become postdocs or professors, they’re going to spend a fair bit of time writing grant proposals. Mr. Neville tells me that “are you bringing in money from grants?” is a very important question in a tenure review. If they want to be professors of physics, some writing skills will be required.
And tell her that email has displaced a lot of face-to-face discussion and meetings. You have to be able to carry on coherent discussions in writing in most offices, or you look like a fool. I’m an IT guy, and I spend about 25% of my day just writing emails. One time, a guy wrote me an email requesting that I design a query to “compulate” some figures. I marked him down in the “fool” column. One of my current co-workers is a super nice guy, but writes completely incoherent emails, even by IT standards. I finally ran out of patience and responded to one of his emails with a single word: “What?” Now he just calls me.
I’ve had to edit copy from “science people” on several occasions. If their grasp of grammar is truly atrocious, they can’t communicate their science ideas effectively.
I recently witnessed (well, not in person, I saw the email exchange) a conference speaker be un-invited to present at a conference because no one could understand what the hell his abstract was trying to say. His hand out materials were so confusing and difficult to decipher that they were practically meaningless. Sentences had no subject or predicate and he used punctuation in the most bizarre ways, “including” randomly putting “quotation” marks “around” words. He liked using big words, but they often didn’t really go together. (Hard to explain. Sort of like using inappropriate modifiers that didn’t quite fit what they were modifying… like… I’ll make some up: “tinted running”, “machine-pressed solitude”, or “proficient deadness”.)
English is his first language, he has a Bachelors Degree in science and is a practicing lawyer. He refused to let our professional proofreader modify his work, insisting it had to stay the way it was.
Other speakers were concerned that his session was undermining the credibility of the event. He seemed to be able to speak well, but his articles were utterly incomprehensible, even by people who were experts in the topic.
Aye, that’s the rub. The above dude’s grammar was so bad, you couldn’t follow his thought process, let alone evaluate the quality of his ideas.
This reminds me of my husband’s frustration with the project he was working on a couple of years ago. He does a lot of physics and high-level calculus in his job, and was working with a physics professor on the other side of the country, mostly through email. The professor’s emails were so incoherent and frustrating that it seriously impeded the work; my husband would ask about some specific element of the project, and he would receive a mass of nonsensical rambling that didn’t appear to answer the question at all. It could take weeks to figure out what the guy was saying.
My husband is working at a new company now, and recently came back from a two-day meeting on his project. He said it was an absolute joy; everything was clear, they communicated well and made a lot of progress and now he knows exactly what the requirements are. His work is significantly easier with these folks who can tell him exactly what they need.
It isn’t just the fact that the business world revolves around coherent writing skills but that many other parts of her life will require written communications as well. What if she ever wants to take out a personal ad? What about writing letters to the teachers and principal at her child’s school? Does she ever want to be able to send a letter of complaint if she purchases a faulty product? She will be judged, often times harshly, based on her ability (or in this case inability) to communicate through writing.
I’m a science PhD student, and even when I was an undergrad, I was a good writer. I think it is ridiculous that anyone can get a degree (much less a high school diploma) with some of the terrible writing I’ve seen from PhD students. If you’re smart enough to wrap your mind around theoretical physics, molecular biology, electrical engineering, computer science, etc., you’re damn well smart enough to know how to construct an intelligible sentence. What’s the point of learning these things if you cannot express your thoughts about them?
IMO, the solution is to have more and stricter language arts requirements so that professors shouldn’t be stuck with these sorts of dilemmas. However, in the same breath, I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to penalize excessively for grammar. Many of my professors, when they have to read something hand-written, would make statements like “If I can’t read it, I won’t grade it.” I would probably make the same stance with regard to grammar. If I can understand it, then I’d grade it, if I can’t, then I wouldn’t.
I would, however, reserve the right to dock points for things presentation, of which grammar would be a part. If someone ends a few sentences with prepositions, I wouldn’t worry, but if it looks sloppy or careless, then they deserve the same amount of effort getting it graded as they put into it.
I guess the critical question I have is, when you say you’re “Grading for grammar,” are you dinging the student for every conceivable error, or are you marking whether or not the student’s paper has grammar good enough that it doesn’t interfere with the purpose of the paper?
It’s unreasonable - to be honest, it’s probably impossible - for most people to compose a 5,000-word report and not come up with at least a few errors. You’re at least going to throw a few silly tautologies in there; lots of people who fancy themselves good writers will write things like “plan ahead” and “past history,” which are absolutely, unquestionably bad English, or confusing “contagious” with “infectious,” also bad English. I’d bet 500 bright posters on the SDMB have used the word “sentient” when they actually meant “intelligent,” and lots of seemingly bright folks will still use the wrong choice between its and it’s. But if there’s one “plan ahead” in a 5,000 word essay that’s otherwise written at a level appropriate for the class, is that worth deducting marks? I don’t think so.
On the other hand, if the sentence structure actually forces you to go back and think “now, just what the hell does she mean here?” then I think docking marks is appropriate.
I also agree with those who’ve pointed out that anyone who wants to be taken seriously as a professional needs a good command of written English. Someone who actually types “supposively” or “for all intensive purposes” makes a terrible impression no matter how smart they might be when not using a keyboard. The quality of one’s writing can have a tremendously negative impact on one’s reputation if it’s blatantly ignorant.
This is more in line with my feelings, though I wasn’t entirely clear in the OP. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been called upon to proof read final drafts of essays for friends, only to have no fuckin’ clue what they are trying to say.
(Way bad example, but it’s all that comes to mind at the moment):
“There are 4 kinds of fish in the experiment, blue ones; red ones; purple ones; and black ones. It needed the water two times warmer than the rest of the fish to survive the waters because it needs that kind of climate to survive.”
Using “it” improperly drives me insane. Like I said, it probably goes back to ye olde professor who wouldn’t let us use pronouns, but SO MANY PEOPLE use a pronoun when there is no obvious subject reference.
Anywho, the above is unreadable. THAT should be marked off and someone should explain why, exactly, the deduction of points happened (incorrect list, no subject-pronoun relation, etc.).
All undergraduate computer science students now have to take a course in technical writing and professional issues as part of their degree, in order to qualify for BCS exemption, in the UK, I think, for precisely this reason.
Apparently one of the major complaints about new graduates from employers is that they are near illiterate.
I would assume that profs are being discretionary. My boss will send copy along to me for editing only after he’s approved it. I’d say a good number of the employees here don’t know how to use hyphens or emdashes correctly a very, very few seem to be able to remember the rules of capitalization. Mostly it’s small styleguide stuff, no big deal. My boss doesn’t give a rat’s ass about that, he approves the copy and passes it along to me.
If however, basic grammar and syntax is so far out of whack that stuff doesn’t make sense, he’ll send it back for them to revise, and that has occasionally meant the employee has missed a deadline and lost out on a bonus related to that deadline. In his opinion, “muddled writing is a sign of muddled thinking!”
In a perfect world, this would guarantee that physicists had a modicum of writing ability. In practice, the people reviewing the grants are themselves physicists, who themselves have a general lack of writing ability. So while the grant proposal process does ensure some level of communicability, it doesn’t require good writing.
This has been my general experience. I recently graduated from an engineering school that didn’t even have an English department. The closest thing we had was a Liberal Arts and Internationals Studies department and all of those classes were electives of which you had to pick three. I am an awful speller and my grammar is probably worse if not for spell check and grammar check I would be worthless. But I have those things and I use them. Although when I’m in a rush I do have a tendency to forget to copy and paste into Word.
I don’t think that a meaningful part of the grade in any work outside of English classes. You should be graded on the information presented and if that information is lacking due either to being incomprehensible or wrong then the grade should be reduced. this happened to me quite often on hand written papers because on top of the other problems my handwriting is illegible to me at times. But I don’t understand why it should be necessary for me to cut my run on sentences if you understand after reading it that the bridge will fall if the wind speed is over 20 knots.
Since I’ve been in the working world my bosses and the people who read the well plans that I write care less about grammar then my teachers did all they want is to be able to read it and go ok I can do that and so I see no reason to understand how to join two sentences with a semicolon for better writing. On the other hand I don’t use pronouns in my writing unless there could be no confusion and I try to just write 5-10 word sentences. this post being the obvious exception.
Oh by the way I misspelled grammar every time I typed it for this post. :smack:
Oh. My. I have so much to say on this subject, I hardly know where to start.
I’m a technical writer. I’d like to be a science writer someday, but haven’t worked too hard to move in that direction, yet.
Academic writing in general – even the best of it – sucks. It’s not only a matter of grammar and punctuation, but a matter of style. The academic style of writing has gotten so bloated and dysfunctional that it’s hardly recognizable as English sometimes. Unfortunately, the same is often true of writing in business and engineering and other fields.
In other words, the commonly accepted idiom prevents folks from seeing that they. Just. Don’t. Make. Sense.
Some specifics:
Overuse of passive voice. Og forbid we should have a recognizable subject, verb, and object. Omitting the actor, or relegating the actor to the end of a long convoluted sentence, confuses the reader.
Nounification (it’s made up, but it works). Don’t turn a perfectly good verb into noun and then help it along with another weak verb. Don’t “make a proposal” when you can “propose.”
Deadwood. “Due to the fact that” = “because.” All those extra words just muddy the water.
I could probably go on. Were I to grade science papers, I’d mark the grammar and punctuation and downgrade if I have to read a sentence more than once to understand it.
Good writing is invisible. Bad writing gets in the way, and worse, leads to misunderstanding.
I’ve had several professors say that if you switch into passive voice at any point throughout a paper, they will stop reading it. I’ve been told on numerous occasions that there is absolutely no excuse for passive voice in a paper.
The other two, well, those are major point deductions with any of my professors.
Then again, I’m a Poli Sci major, so maybe this is just another example of the difference between humanities and sciences.
Makes me remember one of my history lecturers, who was walking us trough the obligatory “how to write a paper” segment of the class (they have to go through this in every low-level university class here, at least in humanities - no idea what the science people do.)
Anyway, he spent a few minutes ranting about all the silly nonsense people generally manage to turn in - footnotes refering to Wikipedia, misspelled names, all that stuff. The thing I remember most from him (a wonderfull lecturer), is the complaint “…and I spent half an hour wondering ‘Who the Hell is General Asemblie!?’”
The mythical General Asemblie, presumed to be African, possibly involved in WWII, has since been the subject of much speculation and ridicule.
I agree with the general (ha!) consensus here - a typo here and there, or comma out of place shouldn’t matter. Total and complete nonsense should.
This thread scares me. So many supposedly learned people cannot seem to write a complete sentence. And what is a complete sentence but a complete thought? Augh.
You should see some of the charting that I have read in my time. Nurses cannot spell, cannot conjugate, cannot punctuate. It’s frightening. The docs are somewhat better, although that’s mostly because their handwriting is illegible.
I say, haul out the big guns (aka the Red Pen) and mark away. True, points don’t necessarily need to be taken off if the assignment was for Voice (like upthread) but the student should be aware of the mistakes.
IMO, this all starts waaaaay back in upper elementary or middle school. Somehow these folks got through HS (and college essays on applications!) and now here they are. It’s a kindness to be hard on them now.