I have been fighting a losing battle all semester with students who do not see the importance of plural versus possessive, capitalizing proper nouns, distinguishing between “it’s” and “its”, etc. Many won’t take the trouble to click right when Microsoft Word underlines something in red or blue to suggest a correction. I have stressed that in the world of Information Technology details matter and it is important to demonstrate the characteristic of attention to detail and conscientiousness (prized by employers and mostly genetic so it can’t be fixed on a post-hire basis).
On the very eve of the latest class, a tweet from one of America’s leaders:
Representative Greene did correct part of this a few minutes later with “*You’re for the spellcheck police.” (it isn’t possible to edit tweets once they’ve been sent out to the Interweb) But “RINO’s” remains incorrect if we’re talking about plural individuals.
I can’t tell students that they’ll never get anywhere in life if they won’t adhere to the demands of Standard English if one of our top 535 legislators (out of 200 million potential within the estimated 333 million residents of the U.S.?) got this position without being a slave to grammar and spelling.
(My other big problem is that I can’t tell them they need to accomplish something in order to be valuable since Rivian became the world’s third most valuable vehicle maker without shipping any product.)
Not caring about English grammar worked for me. My promotions were negatively affected by my attitude, my disregard for proper English speech and grammar for a time being made my attitude opaque and I was selected for managerial grooming. However in time my speech and writing skills improved against my will and I was kicked out when those who select understood what I was saying.
Reminds me of when I asked the professor, “where’s the bathroom at?” He replied, you can’t end a sentence with a preposition. So I said “where’s the bathroom at, asshole?”
What’s your evidence that conscientiousness is mostly genetic?
At Wikipedia the heritability of conscientiousness is 49%:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Heritability
At the Psychology Today link you provided it says:
“Is conscientiousness genetic?
Studies in behavioral genetics have shown that this trait is about half attributable to genetics, …”
There are many studies that find personality traits like conscientiousness are about 50% inherited and 50% environmental. But often they also find that the environmental component is mostly random: twin studies typically don’t find much more correlation when twins are raised separately vs. apart. In which case the bad examples set by Rep Greene, parents, educators, and others may have little effect
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32772950/
I guess I was being sloppy! Should have said “mostly baked in via genetics and childhood”. I am sure that environment can play a role, but probably not if the reeducation process starts at age 24.
(Remember that assessments of students before and after four years of college don’t show huge changes compared to what they were capable of after finishing high school.)
The Big Five personality dimensions (conscientiousness is one of those) are discussed starting at time 51:50 in Lecture 17 (Kinship and Socialization) at the Harvard Psy 1 course lecture by Steven Pinker:
https://harvard.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=1097e58f-b2f2-495a-bfef-acf8004fac87
At 1:09 of that Harvard Psy 1 lecture, you can find the so-called Second Law of Behavioral Genetics: “the effects of families are much smaller than the effects of genes.” In twin studies they find that only 0-10% of the variance in personality traits is due to shared environment. So most of the environmental influence appears to just be random. https://harvard.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=1097e58f-b2f2-495a-bfef-acf8004fac87
They’ll be on the fast track for management, precision is not required. Teach them proper power talk phrases like “let’s have a little chat”, “we [i.e., the persons doing the actual work] need to hit it out of the park”, “I reached out to X”, “I have a big ask”. Also, always use the incorrect “transpire” when you actually mean “happen”. Very important for a manager!
Youve made some bigly and covfefe points.
“The Commas That Cost Companies Millions: For most people, a stray comma isn’t the end of the world. But in some cases, the exact placement of a punctuation mark can cost huge sums of money.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-commas-that-cost-companies-millions
I can give anyone who would like to learn proper spelling, usage and punctuation usage the best prescription: become the Secretary to the Dean of a law school. You should angle to be hired by a female Dean who was an English Literature major as an undergraduate, prior to studying law and focusing on the death penalty. Make sure she harbors a deep suspicion and withering disdain for email, smartphones and technology in general, and prefers to communicate via snail mail that she dictates via magnetic audio tape cassette. She must also be a micromanager who produces at least 5,000 words a day writing letters to at least a dozen people. Do that for one semester and trust me – you’ll never be able to get it wrong without feeling anticipatory pain for the rest of your life.
Or just step back from the edge and put the Twitter account away for a while. You’re turning yourselves into an illiterate morons, you assjacks. It astonishes me that one of the most important educational products spawned by the digital communication revolution should be courses in Remedial English, Spelling and Grammar.
And thank you to our host — for not going easy on us by giving us an “edit” button. Thus we ae forced to edit our posts in advance before hitting “post.” We may not have anything incisive or pertinent to say, but most people here seem to try to say whatever it is they’re saying a little better than they would on Twitter, for example.
P.S. — You guess which errors in the above post were intentional. 🙂
This is not a database/programming course, it seems. Or do you emphasize appropriate syntax and grammar from your students in technical courses as well?
Students at MIT and Harvard do most things better than the teachers, including spelling/grammar. But if I did find a mistake or a way to phrase something better I would point it out and there was no pushback. In the hands-on coding courses there were still write-ups of design plans and final project summaries.