

A simple mistake may make a difference between being called for an interview and ending in the reject file. Did you notice that weird character in the middle of the page before you sent it? Was it spaced evenly, bringing the eye to the most pertinent points? Were all the apostrophes in the right places? Did you use brackets where you should have used parentheses? A short dash where there should be a long one? A circumflex where a tilde should be? Do you even know what a circumflex or a tilde is? You may not know the difference, but your future boss might. You're prepping your resume, cutting and pasting from old ones to get it just right for that perfect job. It can mean the difference between understanding what is on the page and the writer being, well, wrong. How good are you at those Facebook quizzes that test your editor's eye? Most people read right past an extra 'the' or a missing word. Or tabs that are just slightly out of alignment that throw off the look of the entire page. Take 'smart quotes' for instance, those little straight quotes that don't match the rest of the text's familiar curly quotes. If you lead the hectic life most students and instructors do, you simply don't have time to check every little detail. Cleaning it up is incredibly tedious, takes too much valuable time and attention, and the average eye may skip over vital mistakes. However, that process also brings forward computerized code, extra lines, ellipses gone wild, missing or garbled characters, and a rash of errors that need to be corrected. In the workplace and in the classroom, copying pounds of data is a common and frequently essential practice. It interrupts the flow of thought and may even give rise to questioning the veracity of the entire paper because of a smattering of distracting mistakes. For the reader, poor formatting, punctuation, and grammar are stoppers. Masters' theses and doctoral dissertations must have proper grammar, punctuation, and precise formatting, or they will be rejected. In turn, students have to be able to interpret that information, formulate their own ideas, and write about it in a manner that is not only proper but holds the reader's interest. In scholastic circles professors have to express themselves clearly to pass on lessons to their students. Yet the need to write in the appropriate format, spelling and grammar correct, punctuation in the right place, are still an imperative.
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At a local elementary school I was appalled to discover children were learning how to interpret IMs and write their own in place of lessons on how to properly construct a sentence or paragraph. In our contemporary culture of instant messaging with limited space, abbreviations and an utter lack of punctuation and even proper spelling has taken over. We rely heavily on our word processing programs to correct us because of the importance of being accurate, especially if they are words we are putting out into the world with our name on it. Yet what was done with typewriters is still done today - writing, creating conceptually new information, leaving a little piece of history, putting forth ideas to see where they take us. Being able to write on a computer has become part of our educational system from kinder on up. They've become tools of the past, replaced by dedicated word processing equipment, then personal computers.
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After all, a blank space takes up just as much room as a letter, so let's fill it up.Īre you old enough to have learned how to type on a manual or electric typewriter? Probably not. APA, MLA, and other research formats no longer require it, accepting the more commonly used single space that has taken over vernacular writing and publishing. The steadfast rule of two spaces after a period is rapidly disappearing. A good text replacement tool is essential to A-student, proofreader, and writer.įormatting has changed in recent years.A good text: replacement tool is essential to a student, proofreader, and writer.How punctuation can change the meaning of a sentence is seen in a non-classic pairing, Punctuation replaces vocal inflection and body language of speech when we translate it to the page.

Consider the old standby, "Let's eat, Grandma!" without the comma. Ah, the lowly comma, so abused, so misunderstood, yet a critical component to our language. A misplaced or missing comma can change the entire meaning of a sentence. While rules regarding grammar, punctuation, and proper sentence structure have changed somewhat over the years, they still matter tremendously. The capacity to express oneself well in writing is a critically important skill used throughout life in myriad circumstances. Remove Publication / Reference Years from Text
