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well, ok, we decided against her as a team, and not only because of her writing, but:
last week we interviewed two candidates for our open tech writer position. one of them was a former english teacher with a whole lot of experience -- but she didn't have the technical skills we were looking for, and she also had a couple of egregious mistakes on her resume, one of which appeared on the fourth line as follows:
the same error also appears six lines further down. in the next section, she has an incomplete sentence:
i gave her a pass on the incorrect capitalization of "help," which in this context does not require a capital H, but she's missing an "and" before "interactive Help systems" and the comma after it doesn't belong there.
this morning she called two of the other people who interviewed her, and just now she called me, wanting to know what the problem was. apparently HR told her we had some issues with her grammar. when i spoke to her she sounded breathless and semi-hysterical, and when i pointed out the comma error she argued with me. she cited her teaching experience and insisted the comma after "current" was a serial comma and therefore correct. it was an excruciatingly uncomfortable conversation in which she repeatedly assured me that she didn't want to put me on the spot. which, of course, is exactly what she was doing. i think i handled it with a fair degree of professionalism and aplomb, but i still feel crappy about it.
nevertheless, per Strunk and White, 3rd ed., "In a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term except the last.” now, i know this rule, and i don’t follow it in informal writing because i, too, appreciate the serial comma. this rule does not actually explain her error. she’s treating “current” as a continuation of the “test, analyze, and debug” series, when in fact it is the beginning of a new series, “current and new.” thus she is WRONG WRONG WRONGITY WRONG WRONG.
but i still feel crappy.
addendum: the other writer here just appointed me "Grammar Jedi." grammar skills mad i have, oh yes.
last week we interviewed two candidates for our open tech writer position. one of them was a former english teacher with a whole lot of experience -- but she didn't have the technical skills we were looking for, and she also had a couple of egregious mistakes on her resume, one of which appeared on the fourth line as follows:
“Test, analyze, and debug current, and new applications.”
the same error also appears six lines further down. in the next section, she has an incomplete sentence:
"Hypertext, HTML, interactive Help systems, for an Internet promotions company."
i gave her a pass on the incorrect capitalization of "help," which in this context does not require a capital H, but she's missing an "and" before "interactive Help systems" and the comma after it doesn't belong there.
this morning she called two of the other people who interviewed her, and just now she called me, wanting to know what the problem was. apparently HR told her we had some issues with her grammar. when i spoke to her she sounded breathless and semi-hysterical, and when i pointed out the comma error she argued with me. she cited her teaching experience and insisted the comma after "current" was a serial comma and therefore correct. it was an excruciatingly uncomfortable conversation in which she repeatedly assured me that she didn't want to put me on the spot. which, of course, is exactly what she was doing. i think i handled it with a fair degree of professionalism and aplomb, but i still feel crappy about it.
nevertheless, per Strunk and White, 3rd ed., "In a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term except the last.” now, i know this rule, and i don’t follow it in informal writing because i, too, appreciate the serial comma. this rule does not actually explain her error. she’s treating “current” as a continuation of the “test, analyze, and debug” series, when in fact it is the beginning of a new series, “current and new.” thus she is WRONG WRONG WRONGITY WRONG WRONG.
but i still feel crappy.
addendum: the other writer here just appointed me "Grammar Jedi." grammar skills mad i have, oh yes.
