Just venting

Ok, I have to get this off my chest; if you’re going to enroll in college, perhaps you should first master elementary language arts. I have to admit that since going back to school two years ago, I have been dismayed by the lack of basic grammar and spelling skills of so many of my classmates. I mean, come on, this is college! My son was writing better than this when he was a third grader.

I would like to share an example of what I’m talking about. The following is an actual post from one of my classmates in my Total Quality Management course’s online discussion thread. I have not altered this post in any way; I simply copied and pasted the actual text into this blog.

The topic presented was: “Teams are something we talk a lot about when it comes to TQM. Why are teams instrumental to TQM, or are they? What kinds of teams exist in a TQM operation?”

My classmate’s response: “They are instrumental because they can pick people that are the so-call expert in there job filed to make the team to help solve business problem in that company. I think they do exist in company you just not might here it as an employ because it is on a need to know classifgation.”

Huh???

Let me remind everyone that this is a college student! And this type of incoherent, misspelled, grammatically incorrect rambling is NOT uncommon in my weekly discussion threads! Here’s another one from my TQM course.

The topic: “Just what is employee involvement? Is it always good? What key elements are necessary to keep it going? Are there different kinds of involvement?”

The response: “We have said that for some people it does take motiveion to keep them happy, other say it belonging to something in the company. The will last as long as it wantes to last if all there "warm fuzzies" are meet. If they are not meet it could only last intell the project is done or they get a better job offer somewhere.”

I have a couple of suggestions for these people. First, there’s a spell checker on the discussion board, please locate the button and use it. Also, go back and read what you’ve written before hitting the submit button; proof reading will not only spare you the humiliation of looking like an illiterate moron, it will also save me a lot of time trying to decode and translate your comments into comprehensible English.