On Tue, 11 Feb 1997 Heronwing at aol.com wrote:
> Thank you. I sometimes wonder what is taught in English classes in grammar
> school these days. You should see the horrors I see in business letters! If
> only people would realize that their writing is a reflection of themselves.

I tell my students this every day. I just finished a brief conference
with a student here who has no idea she is writing sentence fragments and
says, "I see no problems." What must be done is that people such as
yourself must enforce your beliefs and refuse to hire incompetent
writers, and we in academia need to start flunking more of them so that
students get the message that this is serious.

>
> Most word processing programs have spelling- and grammar-checking programs.
> If you are unsure of the proper form, use the software! It only takes a
> little more time to compose your e-mail offline, copy it, and then post it.

On the other hand, there is a slightly lower standard of expectation for
e-mail which seems to be custom. This was reflected by several people
both on line and in discussions I have had on the nature of English with
students. There are words which are important to spell correctly as they
are homophones or otherwise easily confused with other words, and we all
should be careful. But often, people are composing messages in brief
snippets of time here and there, and some sloppiness should be tolerated
given this. The glory of e-mail is that it removes the restriction of
isolation from writing--if you aren't sure, you can fire back a response
to the original author, as opposed to much of our normal reading which is
done in isolation from the author of the text (who, in many cases, is
dead). This, I think, is part of the cause for the lessening in the
level of formality in this medium.
As for spelling and grammar checkers, neither is an effective
device if the operator does not know basic grammar or spelling or if the
operator is incompetent in using the machine. Spell checkers do not
catch homophone or typo errors; grammar checkers generally identify a
problem, but often these provide little to no guidance for a solution.
Sometimes, grammar checkers are also dead wrong.
Thanks for listening. Now, for penance, I will go identify gulls
for 10 minutes.
Ray K

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ray Korpi "A person is a person, no matter how small."
Hm: Portland, OR --Dr Seuss, "Horton Hears a Who"
Wk: Clark College
Vancouver, WA
rkorpi at clark.edu