Global Breaking News - Friday, May 17, 2024

Is Our Children Learning Enough Grammar to Get Hired?

“Grammar is my litmus test,” the C.E.O. of iFixit wrote recently in the Harvard Business Review. “If job hopefuls can’t distinguish between ‘to’ and ‘too,’ their applications go into the bin.” But grammar often seems to be a low priority in education. A student could pass the New York State English Regents exam by writing: “These two Charater have very different mind Sets because they are creative in away that no one would imagen just put clay together and using leaves to create Art.” Are schools undervaluing grammar, given that employers may rule out applicants with sloppy writing? Or are these employers being old-fashioned and missing out on some qualified candidates?
* litmus test = 진정한 척도; 시금석/ undervalue = 과소평가하다/ rule out = ~을 배제하다/ old-fashioned = 구식의/ miss out on ~ = ~을(기회를) 놓치다 

 형편없는 글 실력을 갖고 있는 지원자를 고용주들이 제외시킴을 고려할때, 학교들은 문법의 중요함을
과소평가하는 것인가요? 아니며 이 고용주들은 구식이고 몇몇의 자격이 있는 지원자를 빠뜨리는 것인가요?

1. It’s Not Just Rules; It’s Clear Thinking
Even a poorly constructed tweet reflects a poorly constructed thought. Without command of grammar, one can't even truly read, much less write.
 
2. Good Applicants With Bad Grammar
After we pat ourselves on the back for upholding grammar standards, can we really justify barring someone from a job because he flubbed “your” and “you’re”?
 
3. The Harm When Schools Play Down Writing
Some public schools teach that grammar is unimportant compared with “expressing yourself.” But people are judged every day on their grammar.
 
4. Consider the Candidate and the Position
For younger generations, the content of the message is far more important than the structure. Employers have to ask: Does this represent shortcomings in skills and know-how?
 
5. What Good Writing Indicates, and Doesn’t
A weak writer is not necessarily a weak reader, and the applicant whose writing seems halting may be fully fluent in other areas, like visual media or social skills.

Sample Essay

It’s Not Just Rules; It’s Clear Thinking

In a culture characterized less by the printed word than by YouTube videos, it's easy to cast off grammar as if it were a quaint vestige of some prim and proper era — a form of good manners or etiquette, like using the right fork. But without grammar, we lose the agreed-upon standards about what means what. We lose the ability to communicate when respondents are not actually in the same room speaking to one another. Without grammar, we lose the precision required to be effective and purposeful in writing.

Yes, this is important. Unlike the grunt of pleasure or pain one might express in the moment, written language endures over time. It takes the place of live human contact, and stands in for the full array of verbal and nonverbal communication passing between people who are together in real time and space. Text extends our speech into the future. Thanks to the introduction of text in the Axial Age, we were able to invent contracts, the law and even the covenant that served as the basis for the Judeo-Christian tradition. Our civilization owes its notions of ethics, progress and human rights to the durability and accountability of text. For better or for worse, a person's ability to participate in the culture of the past thousand or so years has depended on his or her ability to read and write.

In most jobs, the ability to write clearly and unambiguously remains an essential skill. It distinguishes the worker who takes direction from the boss who can leverage the power of text to write down instructions and leave them for someone else. Only the writer skilled in grammar is entrusted with representing a company in a letter or an e-mail. Only the entrepreneur who can persuasively express a new idea in writing can craft a business plan that will win the faith of partners and investors.

Language is no less exacting than math. As the book title “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” demonstrates, a single comma can change a sentence about the diet of a panda to one describing the behavior of a dine-and-dash killer. The emergence of digital technology makes precision in language even more important than before. As the grammar of standard English extends to the grammar of code, our errors find themselves embedded in programs and replicating further and more widely than previously imaginable. Even a poorly constructed tweet reflects a poorly constructed thought, while grammatically lacking e-mail messages have become the hallmark of password phishing scams. Without command of grammar, one can't even truly read, much less write.

So yes, an employee who can write properly is far more valuable and promotable than one whose ambiguous text is likely to create confusion, legal liability and embarrassment. Moreover, a thinking citizen deserves the basic skills required to make sense through language, and to parse the sense and nonsense of others.