I sort of forgot the Internet there for a few days. Not intentionally either, I just literally
forgot. Forgot to answer emails, forgot
to post, forgot to read. I was on
Twitter Thursday night and the next thing I know it’s Sunday.
The world has been very distracting lately. With floods
and hurricanes
and politicians,
oh my! (Except the first two really are
OH MY! and I’m sending out prayers for safety.
The third is just Toto taking a dump.)
I’ve been cruising through job ads again (OK, maybe I wasn’t
totally offline but I was doing a lot of intensive research, you know, on jobs
and SPD and breadmakers and I forgot this
part of the Internet) and, as many of you know, I work primarily in Marketing.
Da da duh! (hiss! boo! hack!) I know this is indicative of my job field in
general, but you wouldn’t believe the number of job listings where the marketing
copy is semantically blowing smoke up the ass of grammar! Seriously. There is a new Inquisition about and Strunk
and White is writhing on the rack. And
this is the part I don’t get… there are so
many of us marketers with a liberal arts background! How the heck do we stand it? I can’t be the only one that this bugs.
(Disclaimer: Any
grammatically errors on this blog don’t count as it is a blog and it is, in the particular case of said blog, the equivalent
of listening to me talk. AND despite the
fact that those poopyhead Internet “reading level” analyzers keep saying that
my blog writing is at the 4th grade level I would like to assure you
all that I AM, in fact, quite educated. Thank you.)
(says the girl looking for work)
Wait, I guess I’m not a “girl” anymore.
What was I talking about?
– wg
Hey there. Been wondering how it is going. I find grammatical errors to be distracting, but am guilty of making them all the time. My excuse is that I don’t have a liberal arts/writing background. On twitter the other day people were busting on stupid things people write, like “irregardless”, and someone said, “deplane the plane”. I panicked b/c I thought I wrote that very thing, but luckily, I didn’t.
If you ever read my blog and find something like that, please tell me. If you didn’t it would be like not telling a friend she has spinach stuck in her teeth or that her skirt is unzipped.
Here’s what’s happened to me lately – when I’ve not been sidetracked by the grammatical errors, I’ve forgotten how to spell even the most basic of words. I type them, but then I cock my head to the left and really look at combination of letters and think “Is ‘water’ really spelled ‘whather’?” Because I doubt myself to even correct it, I then delete it and type ‘the clear beverage (spelled as ‘beveridge,’ btw) that you drink when thirsty or dry of throat.’ Then I think people will be all, “Honey, that’s called water (but whather in my head),” leaving me feel dumb (more dumb!), so I resort to dictionary.com.
Then scrap the post entirely.
Or something like that.
I also deleted and retyped the words “I’m just a girl” at least six times the other night. “Can you still call yourself a girl at 40, self?” I kept asking. I think I ended up with using ‘woman,’ but it made me feel weird.
So, long story short, yeah for that journalism degree and all the A’s I got in my editing classes. Maybe foresaking this part of the Internet isn’t a bad thing from time to time!
Lori and FADKOG – Oh trust me, I am guilty of the grammar errors myself! Especially here. And dictionary.com is my BFF. I can spell the words but sometimes I’m not sure if I’m using the correct word. And then sometimes I use an incorrect word on purpose because I think it’s funny. And then I get confused about which is the right word after being a smartass too many times. Plus, the memory is not so good any more.
(How many times can I incorrectly start a sentence with “and then”?)
What drives me nuts in the marketing world are sentences like, “The [We’re So Cool] team leads the creative experience of new [Fluffy Name] brands for [Big Company] and brings to market.”
What?
I don’t know. What were you talking about? 😉
I’m the kind of grammatical errors. There always seems to be too many distractions when I’m trying to write. At least, that’s my excuse.
I’m the king of grammatical errors. There always seems to be too many distractions when I’m trying to write. At least, that’s my excuse.
Thank god my wife is an English/Literature teacher and looks at some of my post “before” they go out. My grammatical errors are not for faint of heart. And I too have a great deal of education, well, California education…
Grammatical errors make me lose my shit. Any I make are intentional, for style, because I certainly don’t speak perfect English but I can come damn close to writing in when the occasion calls for it.
You see them a lot in the news crawl on CNN, especially “your” when “you’re” was meant. Gaaa. I want that job. Apparently spelling and grammar skills are not a pre-requisite.