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.