Spelling Test
In what ultimately amounts to a resounding denunciation of any sort of skills that I may have acquired in all my years of schooling, I have to say that my English skills have failed me in a way that I hadn't thought possible. It all occurred during a testing session that was supposed to assess my skills in various areas, including spelling and proofreading, for a temp agency. Sentences would appear with a highlighted word that was either spelled incorrectly or correctly, and your task is to decide which. Hell, they even point the words out to you! That's half the battle right there, right? Wrong. Words I always misspell were kept popping up: guarantee, convenience, and who knows what else. Had I missed only one or two, I would most likely chock that up to nervousness or just utter lack of knowledge on how to spell the damn words. However, I had to have missed more than two, most likely no more than four. Not much you might say, but I'm supposed to have a degree in English.

Obviously, as any reader of this page knows, I've had difficulties with grammar before, as a somewhat helpful reader pointed out to me. I'm troubled by this, though. On top of everything else, it appears that I'll need to brush up on grammar and spelling. Not to fault my teachers in the past, but grammar and English were never my strong suits in school, and I believe they weren't because they were never taught to me. I hardly had any training in grammar that I can remember in all my years at school. I had spelling tests, but I don't remember any grammar being taught. No diagramming sentences. No learning the proper forms of punctuation. No clauses, phrases, conjunctions, etc. None of this, or at least so little that I have no recollection of ever having seen it prior to some of my later college courses. It's now when I look back at this noticeable lack of prior knowledge that I realize that my struggles with Spanish were only compounded by my inability to recognize parts of speech that are common in English.

I think it's because of this that I appreciate well written works moreso than anything else. I'm not using this as a sole justification of my hatred towards poorly written books, blogs, etc., but I can't help but feel that the amateurish nature of this type of writing is just making things worse instead of better when it comes to writing. Things don't have to be densely constructed diatribes, but I'll admit that those are the books I like the most. I do think that if we don't start demanding more of our writers then we're just allowing them to perpetuate this type of juvenile writing that appears in multiple formats and influences far too many people. I admit that it's going to be hard to do because it's become ingrained in our culture that misspellings and bad grammar are okay and acceptable on a daily basis. This is wrong no matter how you look at it. Maybe we should create a "Good Grammar Day" that celebrates the properly constructed sentence. If not, let's not allow writers who feel the need to write poorly get away with it. There's some art in writing in a way the is "beneath" the writer's ability to construct sentences, but I'm growing more and more frustrated with this notion, and I feel that it's something that should change, somehow some way.