I think that Anthony is spot-on (sp. ?) about the rhetorical dimension of
judgements/advice on punctuation and spelling. I have only a couple of
points to add to his take on the issue. One is that I think
skillfully-employed punctuation operates like a pattern of stop-lights/signs
that help an attuned reader to navigate through a text, inferring the
writer's intended meaning and accessing/interpreting the information that
the reader wants to obtain from the text, as quickly and easily as possible.
It may be that this holds more true for non-literary, more instrumental
texts, but then again, this may be a questionable qualification. The other
point relates to my experience with readers, typically though not always
higher up the totem-pole than the writer, at the Bank of Canada, in
government agencies, and to a lesser extend in the private sector (was it
really my writing consulting with Nortel that laid (sp. ?) them low?). These
readers appear--indeed I've heard many claim that this is the case--to infer
from mistakes in punctuation, grammar, and/or spelling that the writer isn't
be trusted vis-a-vis his or her thinking, logic, analysis, argumentation,
and problem-solving. When I was teaching at Purdue, I saw a written comment
left by a company rep at a University jobs fair that said, with regard to
student resumes (as best as I can remember at this point): "Why would I want
to hire someone to work in my organization whose problem-solving skills and
attention to detail are so poor that they can't even avoid spelling and
grammar mistakes in their resume. What we do in our organization is too
important to have people like that around."
Graham
----- Original Message -----
From: "Anthony Paré, Dr." <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2008 3:40 PM
Subject: Re: spelling!
> Hi Virginia,
>
> I have a semi-colon fetish, wince at comma splices, and get queasy when
> lists aren't grammatically parallel, so I understand your struggle with
> questions regarding convention and "correctness." For me, the test is
> always rhetorical: to what does the text respond? where and when will it
> come to life? who will participate in it? what is it expected to do? and
> so on. How do misspellings or deviations from Standard English grammar
> affect the text as a social action? If spelling snobs by the dozen avoid
> the florist with the unnecessary apostophe, the begonia sign might not be
> doing the job it was meant to do. (Of course, if it was meant to keep
> those snobs out of the store, it's doing a great job, and thank-you very
> much.) Do errors reduce the chances that a student's paper will achieve
> the social action it's meant to perform? (And what is that action,
> anyway?) I guess, then, that I feel spelling errors are a problem to the
> extent that they prevent the text from doing what the wr!
> iter wants it to do.
>
> There's something about ethos to consider here, too, I think. I tell
> students that shoddy editing may raise the reader's doubts about the
> deeper qualities of the paper. If the spelling is inaccurate, are the
> facts as well? Can I trust this writer? As Janet Giltrow notes, there's no
> surface to texts: everything that appears to be surface has deep
> implications, deep justifications, deep consequences.
>
> However, I don't expect that all this helps in the face of irate callers
> demanding a return to that golden time when everyone could spell properly.
>
> Good luck with the show.
>
> Anthony
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: CASLL/Inkshed on behalf of Virginia Ryan
> Sent: Wed 8/27/2008 2:55 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: spelling!
>
>
>
> Greetings to everyone on this list! I have just been invited to sit in
> as the "visiting expert" on a CBC radio "Cross-talk" show on the topic
> "Does Spelling Matter?" It sounds to me like Pandora's box is once
> again to be opened in the province of Newfoundland. With equal parts
> delight and terror, I said "yes," and now I'm turning to all of you for
> positions, epiphanies, and metaphors. You see, they wanted someone who
> "sees both sides of the issue," and in me they found such a someone. I
> am old enough (and old-fashioned enough???) to feel that yes, it matters
> very much (in many contexts). But I also listen every day to brilliant
> and passionate young tutors who argue for simplicity and accessibility,
> and who point out that deliberate, alternate spellings shouldn't matter
> if they do not interfere with understanding (as Charles Shultz once put
> it in one of his cartoons, "If K-A-T doesn't spell 'cat,' what /does /it
> spell?")
>
> This issue is forcing me to try to resolve a dilemma I've carried around
> for years. For example, I absolutely hate comma splices, but I've never
> quite determined whether my hatred of them stems from some justifiable
> philosophical principle that I haven't yet managed to articulate, or
> rather from simple snobbishness and adherence to
> rules-for-the-sake-of-rules. Similarly, and more to the point, here, I
> hate the sign outside the garden centre that says "Begonia's for sale,"
> but wonder whether my reaction is really justifiable, since any reader
> will understand that all the sign /means/ is that there is more than one
> begonia being sold.
>
> Now, I understand and can readily explain to any call-in guest that in
> the context of a student paper submitted for a grade at a university,
> while misspellings generally (not always! I know!) do not interfere with
> meaning, they are also generally considered unacceptable by the intended
> readership and so should be avoided. But the bigger questions are _why_
> are such spellings unacceptable? Do they matter outside of academia
> (and business)? And if they matter, why do they matter?
>
> I welcome any and all reactions, apologize for my own lengthy silence on
> this list, and hope that despite it you'll be vocal!
>
> Ginny Ryan
> The Writing Centre
> Memorial University of Newfoundland
> St. John's, Newfoundland
>
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