CareerScribe

I heard a discussion recently that really made me think (and I do everything I can to avoid that!). It was like having two good friends angry at each other, both with valid points. So it left me feeling torn...

The discussion was about social media, progressive thought, and professional representation. One party thought content ruled the day, and that the occasional word omission, misspelling, and "make up a word if you need to" line of thinking is progressive and powerful - and people who feel grammatical astuteness and spelling perfection are a must are archaic.

The other party feels writing as though you didn't pass 8th grade english is childish, ignorant, and misplaced in the professional world. And arguably, it depends on what professional world you are in. But the parties involved feel in most cases, they are right. Maybe they are both wrong. 

See, I was an English major. No misspelling, word omission, or punctuation error gets by me. I don't always take the time to correct them, but I always notice them, particularly in professional documents. But I get that not all people find those areas important, that sometimes the content and the attitude of the material far outweighs the need for proper comma usage. So who's right? Do you form impressions of people/products based on their command of the English language? Would you forgive word omissions and other errors when evaluating candidates if their content was great, or would you dismiss even the best candidate if you saw mistakes in their career portfolio? I think the real deal breaker is who is READING the content, not who is writing it. And by the way, those were not rhetorical questions...I'd love to hear your thoughts. 

So my point today is that even if you don't place a high level of value on grammatical perfection, the person who reads your professional portfolio through CS might, so take a moment to proofread.  Class dismissed.