Tuesday, March 5, 2013

National Grammar Day

Today is National Grammar Day.  How cool is that?  Do you care a lot about grammar?  What grammatical error most infuriates you?

A Huffington Post article about this auspicious day used a graphic with a spelling mistake rather than a grammar mistake, but I thought it was funny enough to include anyway.  I hope that teacher wasn't an English teacher.  Notice I didn't use 'hopefully' to start off that sentence, a common error that used to drive my old friend Ken Iverson* mad.

 

There was a recent post in the Harvard Business Review Blog in which Kyle Wiens justified his refusal to hire anybody with poor grammar.  He has observed that the care a person takes with grammar is correlated with the care they take with other jobs.  If they don't take the care to express themselves clearly, with good grammar, their software code tends to reflect the same sloppiness.  And, as he puts it, anybody who can't learn the difference between it's and its in two decades has a learning curve he's not comfortable with!

Today's post on HBR Blog described some (relatively unscientific) research on the correlation between correct grammar on LinkedIn profiles and job levels achieved: it showed people with better grammar rose to higher career levels.

Now guess how tense I was writing this post about grammar errors.  I hope nobody finds any mistakes I missed.

*Ken Iverson was the brilliant creator of the APL programming language.

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