Definately or Definitely? Spelling and Grammar in Today’s Schools and Workplaces

As someone who has spent my entire life in the school system as a student, and will very likely spend most of my future as a teacher, I have a vested interest in the education system and what it can do for society. I have had the good fortune, although it seems strange to think of it that way, to have frequently come across an alarming trend: people with poor spelling and grammar skills.

Photo from Facebook group "I judge you when you use poor grammar."

I say it’s good fortune because an awareness of the problem means the potential to fix the problem. You don’t have to be capable of writing at Giller Prize-winning levels, but everyone should be capable of distinguishing between they’re, their and there. Not everyone has a copy editor available to them, so you must become your own copy editor. Misspelling easy words is a good way for your resumé to get thrown in the trash, for your coworkers to question your intelligence level, and generally to cause all sorts of unneeded confusion.

It’s hard to say where chronic misspelling stems from. Depending on the child, it could be a result of parents who did not take the time to help them with their writing, or a teacher who told them to ‘sound it out,’ even though sounding out rhythm will never produce the correct result. In recent generations, the accessibility of spell check on computers gives students an excuse not to bother learning the correct spelling of a word, since the computer will automatically fix it for them. However, everyone knows that spell checkers are not flawless. The library in my high school has this poem posted by the computers to remind us that relying on a spell checker was not enough:

Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.

Students who struggle with spelling face lower grades when they are docked for extensive spelling and grammar problems in papers. Most grading rubrics incorporate nearly a quarter of the student’s mark for good spelling and grammar. Scoring poorly on this section can mean a drop from an A paper to a B paper, or a B paper to a C paper. University professors receive more and more students whose papers are filled with spelling errors, but their job is to teach critical thinking and how to structure an argument, and so they do not have the time or resources to help students (aged 17 to 23) with their spelling. Universities are beginning to deal with problems that were not addressed in high school. The University of Waterloo currently makes its students write an English-proficiency test after they are accepted to the school; an astounding 30% of them do not pass. These are not foreign exchange students, but some of the brightest minds out of our Ontario high schools. At this level, it is often grammar that students struggle with. Paul Budra, an English professor at Simon Fraser University, says that “Punctuation errors are huge, and apostrophe errors. Students seem to have absolutely no idea what an apostrophe is for. None. Absolutely none.”

Colons and semi-colons are notoriously tricky to use, but this humourous post from theoatmeal.com explains the correct circumstances in which to use a semi-colon (I’ve posted a preview to the side). Apostrophes are causing problems too, as seen with the common exactly of it’s and its (the first is a contraction of ‘it is’ while the second is possessive). Capital letters belong only at the beginning of a sentence and on proper nouns, never in the middle of a Sentence like I’ve done Here.

People often blame chronic misspelling on the Information Age; that is, access to instant messengers and cellphones have fostered bad habits in millions of people. We type u instead of you, and the result it that some people find it difficult to differentiate between when it is okay to write like this and when it is not. A former TA of mine once told us that she received a paper for a second-year English class that was written entirely in text-speak. Computers have made everything so easy for us that actually learning for ourselves has become difficult.

In the business world, misspelled words can be devastating to a career or a business. Companies who receive hundreds of applications for a single position often use poor spelling and grammar as a way to narrow the field, which means an extremely well-qualified person with a single error on their resumé will not be considered for the job. Many businesses require their employees to fill out paperwork or send emails on an everyday basis, and errors in these reflect poorly upon the company and the employee. Poor spelling and grammar skills are simply unprofessional. Most people tend to dismiss spelling once they get past the dreaded spelling tests of elementary school, but it is a critical skill for a majority of careers.

I’m not asking for perfection; even I slip up on Renaissance and Mediterranean from time to time. English is a rather confusing language, considering that it has stolen bits and pieces of nearly every other language in the world, and the grammatical rules we follow (“i before e except after c”) always have exceptions (seize, either). But that doesn’t mean that we cannot try to improve. Spelling tests usually end in Grade 6, but that is not the end of our spelling careers. There are so many ways to help ourselves with this problem; I find that simply reading books is a good way to learn how sentences should be structured, how words should look, and where commas and apostrophes actually belong. Don’t rely solely on your computer’s spell checker, but have a friend read your work and point out your mistakes. Check out this list of the 100 most commonly misspelled words and see how many you can get right. Practice spelling the words that you struggle with, especially if you use them frequently at school or in the workplace.

Correct spelling and grammar allows us to transmit our ideas to others in a comprehensible way, so that you not only are intelligent, but you also appear intelligent to the people around you. There is no shame in keeping a dictionary at hand, or asking for a bit of editorial help from your coworker who sends flawless emails (they’ll likely be happy that you’re asking, to be perfectly honest). Watch as your marks improve and your word processor stops making those angry red squiggles under your sentences. Pass on your new-found knowledge to your children and your students so that we can avoid the widespread problem that misspelling has become today in the future. Take pride in your work, in your words and never forget that definitely is definitely never spelled with an a.

An Evening with Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms

Joel Salatin is a larger than life character. In his own words, he is a “gregarious, outgoing schmoozer.” If we’re relying on stereotypes to judge him, he is also the the opposite of what you’d expect from a farmer; intelligent, outgoing, and opinionated. Breaking the stupid farmer stereotype is just one facet of what he is trying to accomplish. His larger goal is to start a revolution that changes the way that we grow and eat our food. I was fortunate to see Salatin speak two weeks ago at the Bring Food Home conference in Kitchener Ontario, where spoke to the eager crowd on the idea of building a strong local food economy like the one that has sprung up around his family’s Polyface Farms in rural Virginia.

Perhaps the most important point that Salatin made about the industrial food system is that it can be differentiated from a healthy local food system by the concept of transparency. Industrial food production is not transparent, primarily because it tends to be a bad neighbour. Factory farms and processing facilities are noisy, smelly, polluting, and unpleasant to look at. Instead, farming in the manner practiced at Polyface concentrates on being aesthetically and aromatically pleasant, and invites people to visit. By putting the constraint of transparency on the operation, a farm is forced to be beautiful and community friendly.

In Salatin’s mind, the quest for farm transparency consists of a few key concepts:

• Diversity: Single-species environments don’t appear anywhere in nature, so it holds that single-product farms are unnatural. Companion planting can give the farm something to produce at all times of the year, and helps to reduce weeds, animal, and insect problems.
• Respect: We need to respect “the pigness of the pig.” To view animals as inanimate objects is to dishonour them, and the way that we treat our farm animals belies the way that we treat the weaker members of our society.
• Balance: Everything in nature seeks balance, and the rise of food-borne diseases like e-coli correlates nicely with the rise of factory farming. Perhaps these newly rampant infections are nature’s way of saying “enough!”

A big part of the problem is that our society has been geared to drive its top thinkers away from the farm. The business knowledge of Wall Street holds that when the average working age in a company is over 35, it’s marketplace viability beings to decline because new ideas aren’t being brought to the table. Compare that with the fact that the average farmer in the USA is over the age of 60, and the problem starts to become clear. We need to bring brains back to the farm, because our current system implicitly entrusts the quality of our air, soil, water, and food supply to C-level students. Farming should be regarded as a sexy profession, with plenty of exciting problems that need to be solved by smart people who are driven to succeed.

Alright, so we can create a responsible and aesthetically pleasing farm. But what of the large factory-based processing facilities that package the majority of the products that we consume? As far as Salatin is concerned, in an ideal world, we would process our food right on the farm. In most every other resource-extraction industry, we put processing facilities near the source of the resources that they need to function. Economically then, it makes little sense to process our food hundreds of miles away from where it’s grown. On the other hand, the government will tell you that it is safer to process our food in highly-regulated government-inspected medically-sterile facilities. Unfortunately, like everything else in life, food safety is a subjective thing. The latest research into diabetes shows without a doubt that eating massive amounts of sugar in the form of high-fructose corn syrup is a life-threatening habit, but our government allows it anyway. The following infographic from Andrew Price at Good Magazine shows an interesting comparison of the food pyramid and what North American governments tend to subsidize:

The biggest lesson to learn from our experiences with factory-based food processing is that sterility is not necessarily equitable with safety. The vast majority of bacteria are essential to sustain life; Bleaching our meat to get rid of them is not. Further, the prohibitively high entrance costs to the food processing business that are created by such strict regulations tends to starve the market of innovative ideas. This isn’t to say that we should allow just anybody to process and sell meat; safety checks are necessary to ensure everybody’s health. Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma tells the story of Bev Eggleston, an acquaintance Salatin who tried to open a small meat-processing plant for production of grass-fed beef products. He nearly bankrupted his family farm under the costs of building the facility and getting the approvals and licenses required by the USDA, only to have the plant shut down because it wasn’t processing enough animals to justify the time of the USDA-required on-site inspector.

As we know it, the factory-based food processing system also has a number of ethical issues. According to the documentary Food Inc., workers are generally underpaid semi-legal migrant workers from South- and Central-American countries trying to make a living to support their families back home. The factories know this and exploit them with low wages and unhealthy working conditions. The bottom line for workers is that it is not emotionally acceptable to have to kill animals all day, every day. Repetitive killing is a physically and mentally unhealthy chore that should not be the sole task of any person in a responsible society.

We live in abnormal times. In most cases, less than 5% of our food is grown locally, even though we have lots of farms right here in south western Ontario. As the following video sponsored by Hellman’s Mayonnaise Eat Real, Eat Local campaign illustrates, our local food system is in shambles, with the average item on the plates of eaters here in Kitchener-Waterloo having travelled well over four thousand kilometres before coming to rest on our plates:

The distribution system that has been created to serve the needs of the supermarkets and fast food restaurants has only existed for about 60 years. If we want the best food for our families, it needs to change. The supermarket is the great equalizer – the place where all food is made to look the same, with price as the only differentiating factor. The truth is that all food is not produced in the same manner, and some is better for you than others. The supermarket fails to preserve the integrity of the production behind the product, and fools people into thinking that the system isn’t broken. Good food is worth paying for, and incredibly cheap food should raise red flags with the shopper before it even enters the grocery cart. Of course, there have been efforts to create alternative markets for responsibly-produced local foods, like speciality stores and farmers markets. Unfortunately, farmers markets require that both the farmer and consumer make a commitment to get together and exchange goods. This is unproductive for the farmer and inconvenient for the customer, so it doesn’t really stand a chance of gaining widespread adoption.

Salatin finished his speech by noting that we need to bring cooking back into the home. An astounding number of families eat frozen food out of a box every night of the week, and thus create no demand for healthy, local, responsibly produced foods. Thirty years ago, every woman knew how to cut up a chicken. These days, many people have never seen a piece of chicken with skin or bones still attached. There is a sort of courtship romance to the experience of preparing food to share with your family, but somewhere along the line, we lost the idea of the family dinner; a time to share the day’s experiences over a plate of delicious nourishment prepared together and for each other.

The new food revolution doesn’t require us to give up our high-tech lifestyles. We just need to let our technology enable the local foodshed. In Salatin’s words, “We need to re-insert the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker into our communities.” Let’s learn from our mistakes – will we have a richer culture that we can be proud of with an industrial food system, or with a local food heritage?

Joel Salatin is the author of a number of books, including Everything I Want to do is Illegal, and was featured in the Oscar-nominated 2009 documentary Food Inc.