RAVE: Know Your Grammar, Or You're Out!

My friend Charleen Clark (who is also chief editor of a terrific local magazine for which I write a bi-monthly article called SHEQ Management) sent me this via e-mail. It is a positively stunning and razor sharp diatribe by a very successful online entrepreneur against what he sees as the unforgivable sin in business today - namely, poor grammar.

It had me grinning from ear to ear. This type of opinion piece offers much comfort and solace to all those of us who regale on a daily basis against the hacking of the English language by those too uncouth, too uncultured or simply too damn lazy to write correct English.

It's always good to know that we are not alone!

It is worth reproducing here:

I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here's Why.

by Kyle Wiens  |   8:02 AM July 20, 2012

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 commas into a sentence with all the discrimination of a shotgun, you might make it to the foyer before we politely escort you from the building.

Some might call my approach to grammar extreme, but I prefer Lynne Truss's more cuddly phraseology: I am a grammar "stickler." And, like Truss — author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves — I have a "zero tolerance approach" to grammar mistakes that make people look stupid.

Now, Truss and I disagree on what it means to have "zero tolerance." She thinks that people who mix up their itses "deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave," while I just think they deserve to be passed over for a job — even if they are otherwise qualified for the position.

Everyone who applies for a position at either of my companies, iFixit or Dozuki, takes a mandatory grammar test. Extenuating circumstances aside (dyslexia, English language learners, etc.), if job hopefuls can't distinguish between "to" and "too," their applications go into the bin.

Of course, we write for a living. iFixit.com is the world's largest online repair manual, and Dozuki helps companies write their own technical documentation, like paperless work instructions and step-by-step user manuals. So, it makes sense that we've made a preemptive strike against groan-worthy grammar errors.

But grammar is relevant for all companies. Yes, language is constantly changing, but that doesn't make grammar unimportant. Good grammar is credibility, especially on the internet. In blog posts, on Facebook statuses, in e-mails, and on company websites, your words are all you have. They are a projection of you in your physical absence. And, for better or worse, people judge you if you can't tell the difference between their, there, and they're.

Good grammar makes good business sense — and not just when it comes to hiring writers. Writing isn't in the official job description of most people in our office. Still, we give our grammar test to everybody, including our salespeople, our operations staff, and our programmers.

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.

Grammar signifies more than just a person's ability to remember high school English. I've found that people who make fewer mistakes on a grammar test also make fewer mistakes when they are doing something completely unrelated to writing — like stocking shelves or labeling parts.

In the same vein, programmers who pay attention to how they construct written language also tend to pay a lot more attention to how they code. You see, at its core, code is prose. Great programmers are more than just code monkeys; according to Stanford programming legend Donald Knuth they are "essayists who work with traditional aesthetic and literary forms." The point: programming should be easily understood by real human beings — not just computers.

And just like good writing and good grammar, when it comes to programming, the devil's in the details. In fact, when it comes to my whole business, details are everything.

I hire people who care about those details. Applicants who don't think writing is important are likely to think lots of other (important) things also aren't important. And I guarantee that even if other companies aren't issuing grammar tests, they pay attention to sloppy mistakes on résumés. After all, sloppy is as sloppy does.

That's why I grammar test people who walk in the door looking for a job. Grammar is my litmus test. All applicants say they're detail-oriented; I just make my employees prove it.

[[Editors' note: If you're interested in improving your writing skills, please consider ourGuide to Better Business Writing book]]

KYLE WIENS

Kyle Wiens is CEO of iFixit, the largest online repair community, as well as founder ofDozuki, a software company dedicated to helping manufacturers publish amazing documentation.

I simply could not have said it any better.

Hear, hear!

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Paul R. Ehrlich

This is my quote for the day:

“The mother of the year should be a sterilized woman with two adopted children.”

— Paul R. Ehrlich, biologist and educator, and author of the best-selling book The Population Bomb

It's a bit 'eco-fascist' extreme, I know, but there's a certain droll wit to this quote that really appeals to me. And especially as it comes from a noted biologist and demographer who was warning of the dangers of population growth nearly fifty years ago.

Politically correct or gender-sensitised it may not be but...

Perhaps generations in the (not to distant) future will find this quote to have been grimly prescient?

Do you get my point?

RANT: 2012 Olympics In A Word...

Well, at least the opening ceremony (of which I have already ranted earlier today) can be summed up in one word; that is, to quote the delectable drag queens from The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: as they enter a diabolically tacky hotel in the Australian outback, they deliciously quip:


TACKARAMA!


That sums up that opening ceremony in a nutshell. In fact, the same can be said of the logo for the 2012 London Olympics:





Has there ever been a tackier-looking logo for an Olympic Games? 


The mind boggles at what drug-addled London advertising execs came up with this monstrosity...


Tackiness is alive and well in the City of London, I see.

INSIGHT: Mrs Assange Pleads, Por Favor

In the ongoing saga that is Julian Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, now it is the turn of his mother to be pleading his case to the Ecaudorian authorities...and in Quito itself. Christine Assange arrived in the Ecuadorian capital yesterday, knowing only too well that the very life of her beleagured son lies in the balance.



As quoted by CNN (itself one of the biggest instigators in the bought-out establishment media's character assassination of Assange, by the way):

"The mother of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will meet with Ecuadorian authorities [on] Monday to urge them to grant her son asylum. Christine Assange, who arrived in the capital city Quito on Saturday, told reporters she will appeal to Ecuador's stance on human rights during her meeting. Her son has been holed up inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since applying for political asylum on June 19. He is seeking to avoid being sent to Sweden over claims of rape and sexual molestation and said he fears if he is extradited there, Swedish authorities could hand him over to the United States."

She knows only too well what the rest of us also know only too well - Julian Assange simply CANNOT be extradited to Sweden.

According to the state-run El Ciudadano website, and as quoted by CNN, Christine Assange stated how, "Surely, the president and his staff will make the best decision."

One would think that, Ms. Assange, but as this saga enters its sixth week, I'm really not sure about that. It's simply taking too much time...

One can only hope that the pleas of a desperate mother will not fall on deaf ears in Quito.

It's what I am hoping for as this gut-wrenching, slow-churning saga enters its sixth week...

Do you get my point?

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Charles Haas

One always gets a bit tired of cliches (well, I know I do), and this has to be one of the biggest cliches known to mankind:



Which is why I loved this twist on it that I came across a few days back:

"Give a man a fish, and he can eat for a day. But teach a man how to fish, and he'll be dead of mercury poisoning inside of three years."
~Charles Haas
Love it.

RANT: London's Calling...And It Was Appalling

Jeepers, was that a mess of an opening ceremony for the 30th Summer Olympics in London!

Talk about a mish-mash of the most bewildering, confusing and at times utterly stupid set-pieces, very few of which worked, never mind made any sense.

So, in the midst of the mess, what did work? Well, I did think that the rings of molten steel gliding in the air and coming together above the field looked quite beautiful, as shown below:



And Rowan Atkinson did quite an amusing stint on synthesizer in Mr Bean mode as Simon Rattle conducted the ever-rousing theme to Chariots of Fire.

But when a silly schtick by Mr Bean is amongst the best moments of what is the biggest show on Earth, then one has some idea of just what a crap opening ceremony it was.

That big grassy knoll of overgrown emerald green grass slap bang in the middle of the arena was disconcerting to say the least (grassly knoll pictured below - even the flags look forlorn). But it was the opening scenes that really set off the ceremony on such an awkward, even embarrassing tone. The grim, grey, wretched past of Victorian England was paraded before all, replete with people playing cricket on a village green (imagine!) being overrun by grimy, grim, grey workers invading the pitch like 19th century football hooligans. The look was tacky Dickensian, and hardly the stuff of an opening ceremony.



That grassy knoll and undulating patch of unkempt grass has to be the worst production design I have ever seen this side of The Ten Commandments.

Kenneth Branagh strutted around in a stovepipe hat looking eerily similar to Abraham Lincoln, all cheesy grin and put-on awe - a bland actor for a bland ceremony.

And as for that toe-curling paean to the National Health Service with the field strewn with children in pyjamas atop huge beds being pushed manically by nurses in 1940s garb on cocaine - what the hell was THAT?!  I loved the delicious irony of the NHS being praised with such reverence at a time when it's being slashed to nothing by the Tory-Liberal government.

And what was that neverending schtick with Daniel Craig as James Bond picking up the Queen at Buckingham Palace in a helicopter and then the two of them 'flinging' themselves over the stadium? And as for the ever-gormless David Beckham speedboating up the Thames with some hussy clutching onto the Olympic flame...enough said...

The British really have lost all sense of self, never mind irony.

The dance-music routine was another mess, this time of incoherent, dull choreography through the decades set against only half-interesting salutes to British cinema projected on an odd-looking house - never before has the centre of an Olympic arena looked so middle-class homely.

The rest was either dull, silly or downright stupefying. And I couldn't be bothered to go over it all. Rather let me quote an anoymous poster on a discussion thread about the opening ceremony on Yahoo:

"I have to say, the London opening ceremony was rather underwhelming, an incoherent hodgepodge thrown together haphazardly. Watching it was akin to observing a pool of damp vomit: oh, there are some corn kernels in there, and some pasta, and that must be the avocado I had for dinner last night, and the white stuff must be swiss cheese. The coup de grace was Sir Paul McCartney looking like an old lesbian and singing like a turkey with laryngitis... Just awful. Between watching it and getting conjunctivitis, I'd choose the latter."

Hear, hear.

And I didn't even bother to stick around for the fireworks at the end - and I am an absolute sucker for a good fireworks show. That really says it all.

I kept imagining how the Paris Olympic Bid Committee (Paris came 2nd to London in the Olympic voting in Singapore in 2005) must have felt as they watched the goings-on from London:

'Mon Dieu...and we lost against zees?! Merde!'

Sacre bleu indeed.