OT: more PC insanity

I have long thought it wrong to mark down for spelling and grammar, except in languages. Exams/assessments are for candidates to demonstrate a clear understanding and ability in their chosen subjects, not to test their knowledge of a different subject. Why should someone be marked down in Physics, for poor spelling, when they are showing an excellent grasp of the subject?

The pretty well universal requirement for GCSE English Language should ensure that students and workers can spell use grammar reasonably correctly (if they make the effort) and should not be tested during other exams.

In chemisty? Is ita sulphate or a sulphide?

MW or mW. It matters

When I went to university you couldn't get in without first having passed the Use of English exam.

Cheers, T i m

It depends whether the poor spelling and grammar actually mar the intelligibility. When I was at university in the early 80s, someone I knew who was doing a computer-science course asked me to sanity-check a report that he was writing, to see if it made *technical* sense. I remember it because its title was "Huh! Interactive Languages Are Really Yuk" - contrived to spell out Hilary, the name of his tutor whom I think he fancied.

Well... the report took some wading through. There were spelling mistakes all over, but I glossed over those: few of them made it difficult to understand the report. What *did* cause great problems, to the extent that I had real problems working out what he was trying to say, was his very poor grammar and his partial sentences which petered out half way through. It took me several hours to read a couple of pages, rather than a few minutes. I found myself itching to rewrite the whole thing from the ground up, if only to try and clarify in my own mind the gist of his report.

It was quite a shock to read something which was *so* illiterate from someone who would have passed his A levels to get to university and who spoke perfectly lucidly most of the time (apart from after a few pints, but that applies to all of us!). Given the sneaky acronym in the title, I almost wonder whether there was a secret code in his mistakes - the sort of thing that Inspector Morse would spot in one of Colin Dexter's novels ;-)

Sulfide or sulfate according to IUPAC

'Police' needn't be capitalised here.

Plenty of people have died due to medical staff not being able to read or understand a doctor's notes.

or sulfate

yes.

could well be, I never learned chemisty

It only changed from the English to American spelling in 1990.

A good friend of mine is dyslexic. During his Ph.D. in CS, he wrote a number of Algol programs. We moved from an ICL/Elliott 4130 to an ICL

All his programs failed to compile. More than one problem, but all the same cause. For example, he had spelled UNTIL as UNTILL. He had previously got away with it, because the 4130 compiler only checked the first four characters of reserved words (24 bit machine, 6 bit upper case only internal code).

I wonder if Hull and other universities have consulted potential employers here and abroad. With English now the language of business as well as science graduates from Hull might be at a disadvantage in the jobs market compared with those from China, India etc who can spell and write clearly.

Indeed and that has generally been the case IME. With technical subjects it's important that you can be clear, but inaccurate spelling does not usually hinder understanding. It does help if you can string a lucid sentence together though for the more wordy sections - especially on subjects like computer science.

Just as well, otherwise I would have been well screwed in every subject!

When I did English GCE, it was a split lit/lang course, where the lit section was all essay based and done as course work (and at least 2 of the essays had to be done under exam conditions). All the language parts were in the final exams. Use of language and grammar were important in all parts, but spelling was only marked in the language exam part.

No, you are right. I would capitalise the real Police out of respect so did so out of habit (where it wouldn't apply to the d-i-y spelling / grammar police).

Cheers, T i m

It was programming that taught me to spell words like "procedure" :-)

Must admit I don't think I have used a compiler that worked quite like that...

(although I have used plenty that ignore more than a variable number of significant characters on identifier names (like many CORAL 66 compilers that only read the first 12 characters), and that is whole class of subtle bugs just waiting to happen!)

When Karoun Chandouk joined the Sky F1 commentary team, it was noticeable that he was the only one who knew that the correct plural of 'apex; was 'apices'.

I have noticed that no one uses the plural cases of verbs. I think its these pidgin spiking wogs which is the problem.;-)

And 'with' mas morphed via 'wiv' into ...'iv and then 'of'. so one is 'bored of' being 'fed up of'

He was lucky that his dyslexia only made him mangle words. I could imagine some people would also have problems getting the syntax and the algebra correct, which would be harder to spot and to correct.

You "should of" corrected your typo "mas" to "was" ;-)