I was meeting with someone the other day who was an admitted terrible speller. He gave me the title to this blog as a matter of fact because even Google can’t figure out what he’s trying to search sometimes. It brings up, yet again, a point worth mentioning. Spelling matters. Grammar matters. In everyday life for sure, but definitely in the business I am in.
When you send an email to someone, write a resume, send anything in written form and you misspell or have a hot mess of grammatical errors, you are likely causing some level of frustration for your audience. At a minimum. If what you are writing is for a professional setting or with the purposes of landing a job, you may well lose the opportunity before you have it.
My theory (lots of people’s theory) is that it is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better. With Google voice and Siri trying to type our words, spell check, auto-correct, shortening words for texting, and let’s not even talk about the relatives we all have blasting stuff on Facebook that sounds like gibberish – we’re screwed. I don’t speak other languages, but I have to assume these issues are universal.
Having a son in 8th grade it’s interesting to see the difference in what he learns versus what I learned. In grade school, “write it like it sounds” was the mantra. Yellow could be yelo and he got a perfect score. Huh? It did get harder and it’s getting better, but when was it okay to have a SPELLING test and get a check mark next to yelo?
He hasn’t ‘yet’ won any spelling bees, but is killing it in Geography bees. I know that being my kid, spelling and grammar won’t likely be his worries.
Math, on the other hand – well, we have tutors for that.