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Why are college-educated adults still making the its vs it's mistake?

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Doppel

Doppel

Lifer
Really people, there's no excuse for this anymore. I even see otherwise well-written people messing this up and occasionally in media publications as well. If you do this at work you'll be judged by people like me. We are judging you. When it's promotion time you'll get passed over. When the zombies attack and there's limited room on the helicopter for you, if you're messing this up you'll be left behind as zombie food.

http://garyes.stormloader.com/its.html

*readies self for the comments from people who "could care less"* 😀
the_grammar_nazi_party__141265.png
 
Because it really doesn't matter for many of us. Most engineers aren't judged on English... and many engineers don't even have english as a first language so it's not a focus. If you think a misplaced apostrophe dictates position then you simply don't understand how many industries work. And if a misplaced apostrophe held you back from a position, then something tells me you aren't doing anything else worthwhile to the company. If you're making them money that is priority #1.
 
It was REALLY discouraging to see my my retard ex-boss (full Brit) constantly wrote "should of".

Idiot. English isn't my first language and even I get that shit right.
 
Or, you could write like crap in memos, reports, etc., that get read by upper management and have your career get artificially stunted.

Attended a conference/discussion at a university that had several CEO's from some major companies (Coca-Cola, Home Depot, HP among others) and all were unanimous in the assertion that they can teach you your job but won't spend any time teaching you grammar....they expected the people who they hired for their exec. track to write correctly. Send out reports with crap for grammar and you'd definitely get noticed...and have your career/ascension into/through upper management stop before it should. The HP CEO said he hated getting reports/exec. summaries with grammatical errors and he noticed them and the person who wrote them.

Belittle the notion that proper grammar matters, but in the upper reaches of the corporate world, it does. If you're satisfied with being a peon and engineering drone, continue on. If you want to really progress into the true upper management areas, learn some grammar.
 
Meghan54 said:
Or, you could write like crap in memos, reports, etc., that get read by upper management and have your career get artificially stunted.

Attended a conference/discussion at a university that had several CEO's from some major companies (Coca-Cola, Home Depot, HP among others) and all were unanimous in the assertion that they can teach you your job but won't spend any time teaching you grammar....they expected the people who they hired for their exec. track to write correctly. Send out reports with crap for grammar and you'd definitely get noticed...and have your career/ascension into/through upper management stop before it should. The HP CEO said he hated getting reports/exec. summaries with grammatical errors and he noticed them and the person who wrote them.

Belittle the notion that proper grammar matters, but in the upper reaches of the corporate world, it does. If you're satisfied with being a peon and engineering drone, continue on. If you want to really progress into the true upper management areas, learn some grammar.
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what
 
Its crazy how poor some peoples english is. Perhaps somebody should of made an unified anti-bad-grammar law.
 
If it's something like a quick email or memo that they send out without thoroughly proof-reading, I could see how they'd make the mistake--everyone has certain rules/laws/whatever that more easily slip by, or take an extra second or two to think through. Thus, if the memo doesn't have much else in the way of grammatical mistakes, I'd usually just chock it up to it slipping the person's mind.

If they have no notion of the correct usage of the two, though, that could be another matter entirely, given how commonly-encountered a rule it is. Same thing with using 's to pluralize acronyms, although with the number of people who make that mistake I tend to care a bit less about it.
 
Probably because half the people who read what we write can't tell the difference. Frankly I really don't care when I'm reading something too.

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using Tapatalk
 
Cogman said:
Its crazy how poor some peoples english is. Perhaps somebody should of made an unified anti-bad-grammar law.
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Its a mystery to me why people screw this up. Their just no good at grammar. I guess your just going to have to ignore them OP.


Yes, this was a parody post with intentional mistakes. Did I annoy you OP? 😀
 
Well, you can shrug off what Meghan54 is saying, but she's right. In my own experience I know that having good (not perfect) writing skills has helped my career.

I once worked for a division head who farmed out reports he was responsible for to his subordinates. Of course they ended up being submitted under his own name, but we wrote them and gave them to him. He'd fine-tune them and then submit. After a while he told me I was the only person whose reports he did not have to rewrite. A while later he would just leave my name on the reports and note that he approved it.

I have no doubt that contributed to a promotion I received a year later because it got my name noticed - in a good way.

Much of success in the working world is all about communication - written reports, when doing presentations, when creating training material or any number of other things. Good writing skills, proper grammar, correct spelling... all contribute to good communication.

My personal #1 irritant is "sneak peak", which I have seen on CNN.com and in magazines, believe it or not. IMHO using the wrong word is actually MORE common now with people relying on spell checkers, and that's why I think the issue raised by the OP is rampant.
 
Meghan54 said:
Or, you could write like crap in memos, reports, etc., that get read by upper management and have your career get artificially stunted.

Attended a conference/discussion at a university that had several CEO's from some major companies (Coca-Cola, Home Depot, HP among others) and all were unanimous in the assertion that they can teach you your job but won't spend any time teaching you grammar....they expected the people who they hired for their exec. track to write correctly. Send out reports with crap for grammar and you'd definitely get noticed...and have your career/ascension into/through upper management stop before it should. The HP CEO said he hated getting reports/exec. summaries with grammatical errors and he noticed them and the person who wrote them.

Belittle the notion that proper grammar matters, but in the upper reaches of the corporate world, it does. If you're satisfied with being a peon and engineering drone, continue on. If you want to really progress into the true upper management areas, learn some grammar.
Click to expand...

I'll bet dollars to donuts the number of people from this forum who will ever be in an upper level executive position for a major multinational firm could be counted on 1 hand.

Is grammar important? Of course. But then so is a good understanding of your target audience. For most people it simply doesnt matter. For those who do, well if you are writing to them then you should understand the importance of proper communications.

To be clear, I wont be on that 1 hand. 😉
 
Meghan54 said:
Or, you could write like crap in memos, reports, etc., that get read by upper management and have your career get artificially stunted.

Attended a conference/discussion at a university that had several CEO's from some major companies (Coca-Cola, Home Depot, HP among others) and all were unanimous in the assertion that they can teach you your job but won't spend any time teaching you grammar....they expected the people who they hired for their exec. track to write correctly. Send out reports with crap for grammar and you'd definitely get noticed...and have your career/ascension into/through upper management stop before it should. The HP CEO said he hated getting reports/exec. summaries with grammatical errors and he noticed them and the person who wrote them.

Belittle the notion that proper grammar matters, but in the upper reaches of the corporate world, it does. If you're satisfied with being a peon and engineering drone, continue on. If you want to really progress into the true upper management areas, learn some grammar.
Click to expand...

Some of the worst grammar I have seen in a corporate environment came from VPs, Presidents, and CEOs
 
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