one of the benefits of blogging

...is feeling like I'm in grade school again. Some folks have probably noticed over the years that I tend to be a perfectionist at just about everything I do. This includes blogging. I can't stand bad language usage, especially on simple stuff like spelling and grammar, and I tend to have a very negative -- probably overly negative -- impression of folks who can't use their own language well enough to at least put thoughts together coherently. That includes myself. So I usually hit dictionary.com at least once per post just to check spelling, and multiple times if I have to look up meanings. But I'd much rather learn words and/or make sure I'm using them correctly correctly than let myself slip and become yet another idiot in the world can't communicate on paper/computer well. I'm hopeless enough with talking so I need to at least be able to communicate well through writing emails and such.

Since I'm already on this topic, it never ceases to amaze me how few people there are in the world can really write well, or even on a mediocre level. I would think this is a simple skill that any smart person should have by default -- and there is an abundance of very smart people in the world -- but for some reason it's as if proper English usage just gets lost in the shuffle somewhere and so a lot of folks get to college or the real world without it. And that's not just because I'm an engineer working with a bunch of geeks who avoided learning good English throughout their educational careers. I used to run into this sort of thing all the time in college too,* and a lot of people I know now who I could basically be reciting this post to are not engineers and have what should be a respectable liberal arts background.

Maybe schools stopped teaching basic writing skills before my generation went through. I say this because the problem seems less prevalent among older folks, though there are certainly some old people out there who can't write worth squat. But they can usually write at least well enough for someone to follow what they're saying. As for some of the younger crowd...let's just say there are some very dense peeps out there who couldn't put together a grammatically correct paragraph to save their lives. I kinda hesitate to say too much lest I make myself out to be a snob, but to me that's pathetic. So I admit I am a bit snobbish here in that I have a very hard time tolerating a lack of simple language skills among folks who grew up using the language and so I have less respect for such folks. Simple writing is easy enough and used often enough that any person in a professional career should have picked up basic skills in it well before entering the workforce.

What perhaps bothers me most about this problem is that bad writing seems so widely accepted these days. It's as if very few people even care. Or maybe so few know enough to recognize crap when they see it. Either way, it's annoying to see something I think is vitally important to a person's overall professional aptitude be regarded so lightly by basically the rest of the population save a few. It's yet another thing that makes me want to get into a career where I can use and build on what writing ability I have and use it to do something greater than what I do now. I mean, I'm not some awesome wordsmith or author or anything, but compared to what I often see around me it seems that God gave me a gift that I unfortunately have very few outlets by which to apply.

* This seems a good time to rant about an experience in college. A student had written a very good article for the Arkansas Traveler about roleplaying games and Christianity, and showed that there are a lot of Christians out there who play D&D and similar games regularly and don't see any problem whatsoever with them. I liked it so much that I wrote a short letter to the editor expressing my agreement with the author and supporting his conclusions with some of my own experiences. But the printed version that appeared in the newspaper was butchered beyond belief. The 'tards that put the paper together had randomly put in commas and paragraphs and such to divide up my letter such that it wasn't recognizable as what I had written and was barely readable at all. I was so pissed that I almost went to the paper's office and chewed out the crap-for-brains editor who was guilty of such stupidity, but realized I'd be arguing with people so stupid they probably wouldn't even follow what I said or care that they screwed up. That still angers me today and hopefully I'll never have to read anything any of them produced, at least not before they go back to third grade and start over from there. And just think, most if not all of those folks were journalism majors. Most if not all graduated from the U of A and went to work with that pathetic skill set. That's makin' my alma mater look great!