Re: Job Offer

On 3/15/2025 9:28 AM, AMuzi wrote:

On 3/14/2025 10:02 PM, Frank Krygowski wrote:

>

If my department hiring committee were looking for a full time
professor, or if I were hiring a part timer, we'd reject anyone whose
communications included words like "elszwhere" or "arroused" or
"jnterviewing" OR "mowt orf."

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After all, there is nothing more important than correct spelling on a newsgroup.

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Most of us here handle that with barely a thought.
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John is always misspelling "college" as "collage" (which is an artwork assembled from parts) and I've seen many people confuse "loose" and "lose", but their mistakes are a tiny fraction of yours.
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It makes a person wonder whether you have very low standards, or whether you're incapable of normal accuracy. Either possibility is probably fatal for a job application.
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We'll see, I guess. Let us know when you're _actually_ working and getting paid by this company. If you don't, we can discuss whether the "offer" was only as real as the dent in your top tube, or whether they ultimately rejected you.
>

 While I do notice usage, grammar and spelling (I read the newspaper pen in hand) such as errant or superfluous apostrophes, who/whom, the all too common 'indexes' for 'indices' and so on, drawing attention to others' writing eccentricities is usually picayune and borders on snarky.
 Except when there's some shared humor to be found!

I almost always ignore misspellings here. It does require a bit of self control, because my work history makes the "correction" reflex strong. Part of my job was to correct and grade student work, and I corrected _all_ of it. Even for a solution to a mathematical problem, if a student misspelled a word, I'd circle it.
Note that I've never bothered to correct John's "collage" even though he spells it that way every time.
Vaguely related: Among the private emails Jobst and I traded, there were two times he offered me advice on English sentence structure, when he thought I could have expressed myself better. I was, shall we say, bemused.
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- Frank Krygowski