On the face of it, my zero tolerance approach to grammar errors might seem a little unfair. After all, grammar has nothing to do with job performance, or creativity, or intelligence, right?
Wrong. If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use “it’s,” then that’s not a learning curve I’m comfortable with. So, even in this hyper-competitive market, I will pass on a great programmer who cannot write.
I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here’s Why.
If you think an apostrophe was one of the 12 disciples of Jesus, you will never work for me. If you think a semicolon is a regular colon with an identity crisis, I will not hire you. If you scatter…
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ok
+Jonathon Barton = +1 x 500,000
w3|| I"m f/(|<3D
I love grammar. I can't spell to save myself though. 🙂 But to counter, I try to stay away from people who won't be flexible. There's an exception to every rule.
I like the URL your article has.
The article had 4002 comments when I read it. Easily the most comments I have ever seen on a blog.
People who can't keep to, two and too straight are not in need of a longer learning curve. It is some kind of ld I believe. But you can discriminate in any way you like, if it's legal. It took my sister 30 years to pronounce shoulder properly without pausing first. I'm glad the word never came up in an interview for her.
I warn my students I will knock a mark off if they mis-spell the word "lose" (or "loser" or "losing"). Even people with SpLD chits ("specific learning difficulty", ie. dyslexia) lose a mark if they mis-spell it. This is because in the games industry it's a technical term and if they can't spell it then they have no future working in games.
Every year in the exams, I do indeed have to knock a mark off one or two people who mis-spell it…
+Laura Novakovics I will add my own opinion to the quote from the article I shared.
First: You are correct. People who
can'thave chosen not to learn the difference between 'a pair', 'also', and the multipurpose prepositional form of that homonym are definitely not in need of a longer learning curve. However, given how thoroughly widespread that error is, it is pretty clearly not a learning disability.It is a deliberate and persistent choice to not recognise, accept, and take action to correct a habitual error – no matter how many times that error is pointed out to you, and no matter the consequences of that choice¹.
If your writing demonstrates that you're not willing to engage in activities of even a small scope² to better yourself, in doing so demonstrating a commitment to lifetime learning and a strong desire for continuous self-improvement, why should I believe that you'll go out of your way to correct habitual errors or engage in activities to increase your efficiency or stretch your personal capabilities for your employer, a relationship in which you have FAR less investment than your investment in yourself, to the benefit of you both?
¹ That consequence being that you habitually and persistently present yourself – for YEARS – in writing as being either lazy, uneducated, sloppy, or straight up stupid.
² such as: taking time every day for two or three weeks at some point in your post-school life to learn once and for all the difference between a small set of tricky English constructions that you definitely struggled with in school.
I mostly agree with you, +Jonathon Barton , though zero tolerance seems overly harsh. Doesn't put you in the class of employers who can actually teach or be flexible. I'd consider not being hired by you as "dodging a bullet".
– signed self-confessed grammar nerd
I'm driven nuts with the focus on grammar. Grammar isn't the only part of language that matters. When someone calls me a grammar Nazi, I get pissed and demand they call me a language Nazi.
+Brad Esau I'll counter with a question: Why would I, as an employer, willingly choose to devote finite resources – time, energy, and productivity toward teaching someone who has already demonstrated a clear and stubborn unwillingness to learn.
Management has five essential responsibilities:
1) Hire and retain the very most talented individuals you can afford.
2) Work hard to deliver to those talented individuals all the tools, environment, and compensation they need to be wildly successful in producing value for the company, no matter what their role in the company may be.
3) Give recognition and praise to the talented individuals for their accomplishments – promote that praise to Management above you to the very best of your ability.
4) Protect those talented individuals from shit rolling downhill to the very best of your ability.
5) If not executing on missions 1-4, stay the fuck out of the way.
Human beings have an innate desire to do good work that is rewarding. They don't need external motivation to do so – it's a matter of not de-motivating them.
+Jonathon Barton – fair enough, and I totally get that. I just think you have a very narrow view of human resources and furthermore a very imperfect judgement of a person's worth, not to mention ignorance of how people learn.
I don't mean ignorance as pejorative, but in the most literal sense. As a teacher of English for over fifteen years, I learned quickly that there were all sorts of reasons people had difficulties, none – NONE – of them to do with "stubbornness" or "unwillingness" to learn. I'll leave the real reasons aside as you'd "not have time" for them.
Anyway, good luck with your "masters of grammar" employees. They might be soulless drones, but hey, they've applied their rote memorization skills to discerning its from it's and whom from who.
Oh, don't get me wrong – there are thousands of reasons why someone might struggle in school, and might have difficulty with some of the things presented therein, ranging the gamut from profound learning disabilities to massively oversized and understaffed classrooms, to having several years of apathetic (or worse, discouraging) teachers and beyond.
Learning doesn't stop outside the classroom, nor did it stop once you graduated from wherever it is that you graduated.
OK. You had trouble with "too/two/to", "they're/their/there", "its/it's", etc., when you were in school. Fine.
A) You're not 12 anymore. You're 32. You've become a highly skilled Civil Engineer, or Accountant, or HR Manager, or Arson Investigator, or Registered Nurse, or…whatever.
B) We live in an age where how clearly and accurately you are able to express yourself in writing becomes increasingly tied to people's perception of who you are. This trend is exceptionally unlikely to reverse itself.
C) You have the compendium of the entirety of collected human knowledge at your instant disposal, and….you carry it in your pocket. Surely, you could set aside some time to read any of the roughly 2.9 million results for "common grammar errors" in an effort to up your game and stand out from all the other people who are just like you.
Like the last line of +Kyle Wiens' article says,
All applicants say they’re detail-oriented; I just make my employees prove it.
wherever it was that you graduated…
🙂