Employers are not impressed by our CVs. Image: hectorhannibal/flickr
Being a very sociable bear the panda enters a café, it then eats, shoots and leaves. Discounting the possibility of an armed panda entering Starbucks, this grammatical construction is clearly misleading.
We have learned this week that students, as well as being incapable of waking before midday, are also lousy job applicants. A leading consultancy firm has slammed the “lazy” culture that underpins student jobseekers.
18 to 25-year-olds are the clear culprits with 71 per cent of their CVs found to contain spelling and grammatical errors, while 45 per cent were guilty of writing over the two page standard limit.
Well strike me down and call me Kenneth! That’s the last nail hammered into the proverbial student coffin; we are ripe for unemployment with our illiterate ways and funny dress sense.
While I don’t dispute the importance of clarity in writing, let’s keep some perspective. In my mind, grammar rules are comparative with national days; its good to know their meaning, but hardly essential for the continuation of humanity.
In writing this article I have Microsoft suggesting I capitalise its company name and place a strategic comma prior to deploying the word which.
Failure to obey the powers of the leviathan will result in the user having their document underlined in aggressive green marker, a punishment that hardly fits the crime.
Lynne Truss, whose quote began this article, bemoans the state of punctuation in the UK. She marvels at the population’s inability to utilise an ellipsis or pay credence to a colon.
Quite what she thought of the satirical publication ‘Eats Shites and Leaves: Crap English and How to Use It’, is as yet unknown.
Though there is a certain novelty to watching Truss’s long lost sister Susie Dent – Countdown’s resident word anorak – providing meaning to the modern day meaningless; surely the beauty of language lies not only in how it’s written but how it’s delivered.
As many famous orators, authors and entrepreneurs will attest, there is more to success than a sterile CV and a spell-checked covering letter.
John Lennon, Whoopi Goldberg and Robin Williams, all of whom were diagnosed with dyslexia, went on to carve out successful careers in professions that rely on expression and communication.
In an era of social networking and abbreviations, we have to ask with which language 18-25 year olds will more readily associate with: that of a lol or rofl, or Orwell’s Animal Farm.
Grammar and spelling, rather like skirting boards, are functional if little understood facts of life.
Their importance, however, rests with their instrumental, not intrinsic value. For this reason I voice opposition to Lynne Truss , who hankers after a bygone era where, like nostalgia, the present is tense and the past perfect.
So lets hear a collective hurrah for a holistic approach to communication, where a misplaced apostrophe need not equal catastrophe, and where applicants are judged as people rather than processors.
Employers should no longer withhold opportunity on the basis of grammar and spelling mistakes, much of which is the preserve of lexicographers and losers.