(Originally posted on LiveJournal)
A friend posted a link to a company blog about “Cover letters from hell”. There are some amazingly funny missives presented on it. You can check it out at http://www.killianadvertising.com/coverletters.html.
The bit that really caught my attention was this last section:
We’re trying to collect enough samples to bring this to book length. (We’re getting closer, having been featured on some national media recently. Traffic to this page has gone through the roof.) Everyone, it seems, has a juicy example or two in the files.
Especially college instructors. True story – many college teachers have told us variations of this story: they red-pencil and downgrade students for glaring errors in grammar, usage, spelling. Students go to the Dean to complain. Dean reprimands the teacher for being hard on tuition-paying future donors. Teacher (not tenured) shuts up, fumes, then collects samples to send to us.
Maybe students send incoherent gibberish to potential employers because nobody ever told them not to. That’s a scary thought.
I really hate the idea of the tyrant of the “they may some day be donors” mentality. If those students are let loose with incompetent communication skills, why would the Dean even imagine they will be in a position to donate anything?
It’s one reason that it probably a good think I am not engaged in institutional instruction. I would be inclined to start a semester with the following declaration: “For every writing assignment, I will give you a margin of ten grammatical or spelling errors. Once you reach the ten-mark, your paper is automatically rendered unacceptible, and I will stop reading. The paper will be returned to you and you will have exactly one week to correct your paper. If you do not do so, you will be given a failing grade on the assignment automatically. This is non-negotiable.”
Now, I will be the first to admit that proofreading one’s own work is difficult. Last night I was reading through my old X-Files spec script, and found a number of typos that made me cringe. My only excuse is that it was most definitely not the version I had sent out back in the day; it was re-typed specifically to post online, and I only gave it a cursory proof-read. Not setting a good example, it’s true.
But the idea (that students whining about the consequences of their own failure to learn the basics is enough to allow them to escape those consequences) offends my sensibilities. There is this assumption that their mere intention of communication is sufficient to make the communication a success. And that is an incredible and erroneous assumption. They feel quite free to indicate that someone else’s failure to communicate clearly is unacceptible to them, but when you inform them that they have failed to communication, the fault is yours (and they usually feel free to denegrate your education, even when it was far better than their own).
Anyway, reading the snippets of cover letters was chastening. Next month, I will be getting back into the swing of writing such myself, searching for employment. There seems to be a fine line between “I’m the one you want and here’s why” and “I’m absolutely wonderful and you’re an idiot if you don’t see it.” I certainly want to be in the first camp and not the second.
I try not to make assumptions about whether I’ve been clear or not. Sure, sometimes I like indulging in word play, or teasing (which occassionally calls for obscurity).
But the only time I complained to a professor about his marking of a paper of mine, it was because I did not understand what he found objectional. I had been reading a lot of essays by British writers, and liked the mind-set and phrasiology. So I used it myself. Which, for some reason, he found worthy of demarkation. And then there was the example that he marked down, and I could not understand why. I had said (forgetting the exact examples cited), “Item X is bound with Y”. According to Professor X (yes, this was the infamous Shakespeare professor mentioned before), this was just plain wrong. According to him, it had to be “bound up with”. I was flabberghasted. Why the heck was I required to use an unnecessary preposition if I did not want to?
But that is obviously not what is going on with the students mentioned in the Killian blog. I weep, for we have entered an Illiterate Age.
