And excuse me, but it’s transgender. It’s who your slightly autistic, militant atheist 18-month old toddler is, not something that was *done *to zhim.
It’s fixed in one sense – he won’t repeat the mistake. While he might feel bad for a few minutes, he’ll pay closer attention next time. Standards are higher for him, or they should be.
I used to get notes home all the time when my kids were smaller, saying things like “please make sure your child has their permission slip” blah, blah, blah. I felt tempted to correct them, but never did.
People who absolutely cannot make mistakes in their correspondence with outside stakeholders- CEOs, advertisers, academics and the like- typically have a communications team at their disposal. I know I cannot send a single email from my organization without it being reviewed by several sets of eyes. Everyone makes bonehead errors, and a second review is the only way to prevent it.
Feeding everything through a coms team, of course, would be an enormous waste for a public school, where there is almost certainly a better use for those resources and the parents presumably can be a little understanding if notes home are not quite making publishable standards.
I probably would have approached it more diplomatically by responding with an email using the proper form of the word without directly correcting the principal, maybe saying something like, “It’s great to know you have a counselor available. Thank you for notifying me.”
If the principal repeated the mistake in the future, then I’d be forced to resort to marginal discourtesy.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with pointing it out, but you really should have prefaced it with something to tone it down, the way you responded was terse, which can be mistaken for rudeness.
The other issue is that there’s a matter of context. It was an official communication, sure, but still relatively informal. You’d be absolutely right to correct it in a flier, press release, or other formal public or professional paper. In a relatively informal communication though? A few misspellings or minor errors like spliced commas are no big deal. So long as it’s not completely illegible or n txt sp33k of course.
I’ve had English professors who admit they can’t spell, they forewarned that they’re not going to thoroughly and rigorously proofread every email – it’s context that matter, a paper submission or syllabus should be proofread and combed over, but when you’re making a quick communication being understood is all that matters. It’s a fine line, sure, you have to proofread and make sure your errors won’t cause a problem in interpretation, but if you write “loose” instead of “lose” (my personal spelling peeve) 99% of the time people will know what you mean.
Besides, proofreading without a peer-editor can make things worse, I know I’ve restructured entire sentences which ended up making my to/too or there/their/they’re incorrect without noticing.
ETA: If he was communicating with the POTUS to get him to come give a presentation or a journalist reporting on the “competence of school administrators” that would, of course, be different, but one would hope you’d have a few sets of eyes combing over THAT letter. Everybody makes mistakes, and in most cases it’s simply not important to be flawless as long as you’re understod.
Indeed, that was definitely not a run-on (or even a particularly long) sentence. The only change I would make at this point would be removing the last two commas.
I probably wouldn’t have corrected him. So far I have resisted the urge to correct our Band Booster president, who keeps sending email to all the band parents concerning the payment of our “fee’s”. I’m considering doing it anonymously, because I would want to know if I was repeatedly making a mistake like that when communicating with hundreds of people.
But when there’s a way to accomplish that without making him think you are a dick, you should probably take it.
The proof that he thinks you are a dick: the fact that he didn’t respond. He knows that socially, such a harmless faux pas is not something you are supposed to talk about. Learn from his example.
You’d be doing him a favor.
In the principal’s case, if he’s misusing “councilor”, he may also be misusing “council”. “Counsel” and “counselor” are words he’ll use often. Correcting him is a kindness.
And “councilor” for “counselor” isn’t a common error, like there/their/they’re.
Momentary embarrassment is better than continuing the misuse of a word that he should use correctly. He’s a principal, an educator. He should know the difference between “counsel” and “council” and he should accept correction the same way he’d expect his teachers and students to accept correction.
I should mention that the e-mail from the principal was two sentences long and had a pdf attached which spelled counselor correctly, which had been written by, you know, the counselor.
I kind of felt like my terseness was akin to the verbal "psst, it’s ‘counselor’ ". His reply was equally terse. He said “Thanks for the clarification.” I like to think it’s akin to the verbal “psst - thanks!”
This is exactly what I was thinking.
I posted this before but it is fitting again:
So, I totally would have told him.
Hey, it could be worse. I come from a city where the school board president was, literally, too illiterate to write a coherent sentence. And people wonder why I think society really is becoming “Idiocracy”.
Personally, I would suggest trying to find a gentler way to phrase it if this kind of thing happens again. It’s hard to convey tone over email and it wouldn’t surprise me if he thought you were being snarky by pointing out his mistake in such a terse way. I probably would have taken it that way, myself.
His response could have been meant with sincere politeness, but it’s also quite possible that he knows it would look really bad to send a rude email to a parent and that’s why he acted like he was okay with it even if he took offense.
After having a terrible encounter with the kids from a particular high school from my area, I shot a quick email over to the principal that laid out what I witnessed. I emphasized that there was no need to get back in contact with me, I just thought that they would like to know what their kids were doing.
Principal emails me back. First thing I notice: my incredibly simple last name is spelled wrong. Ok. That happens, I guess. Then I read the rest and, among other things, she misspelled principal (as “principle”). Dios mio. . .
It was rude. My husband would have done the same thing, and does, and mortifies me when he does so.
I figure with spelling errors and typos, “let he who is without blame cast the first stone” - that ain’t me.
That’s how I would have taken it. I’m surprised at how many people on here feel that it was rude. Rude would have been a ‘reply-all’ response.
Honestly, I would have found a long drawn out message about setting examples, etc, etc to be the work of someone who has no life. Depending on how it was worded, that would be more likely to make me feel like the sender was a nutbag to avoid. (Who spends that much time to point out a simple word choice error?)
I wouldn’t suggest going into a lengthy lecture on setting examples either. I would instead suggest something more like, “I know how easy it is to make a typo, but I just thought you’d like to know that you mis-typed ‘counselor’. Thanks for the information though!”
The problem with Caricci’s email as it is written is that it focused solely on his mistake, and it didn’t really allow him any way of saving face on it (whereas at least in my example he can chalk it up to a “typo” to save face). Most people dislike having their mistakes pointed out, and the face that she emailed ONLY to point out his mistake makes it a lot worse than if she had tried to cushion things by at least having a comment on the content of the principal’s email in my opinion.
It could easily come across as her thinking she is smarter than this guy and intentionally trying to embarrass him. If he’s sensitive to this kind of thing he might perceive a tone of “Hey, dummy, you misspelled counselor on this email you sent to everyone. HAW HAW HAW! I know more than you!” even if that’s not what she MEANT.
Another reason to correct him - what if the poor thing just resends the same email over and over again every year?