English sleuthing—a new game for students and parents     030

Traditionally schoolteachers have placed a heavy focus on grammar and punctuation but now in the curriculum there seems to be less time for this type of teaching. The NAPLAN program does include attention to these important aspects of English but overall it seems that in both schools and general society there is less attention. One might suppose that written language becomes confusing, and people have more trouble trying to get their point across.

While in some types of language situation this is true, in general the majority of students, parents and workers alike seem quite happy to take a rather careless approach. The wonderful flexibility of the English language makes it possible to communicate with only a few grunts placed on the page more or less in the right order. And that in general is how things proceed.

Does it matter, and does it matter for your child? Yes, it does but not in the way that you think. Now in English examinations at school, and for that matter in other subjects, no-one is particularly concerned about punctuation as long as the general meaning is communicated. Within the NAPLAN writing test punctuation is included among the marking criteria, but it is just one aspect out of nine or ten, and not worth many marks.  For practical purposes then punctuation could be expected to make little difference in your child’s NAPLAN writing result.

Out in the real world however things can be different, devastatingly different. Let’s suppose your child applies for a position at Google and this means an online application to start with. Google is of course an extremely attractive company and each year receives about three to four million job applications. Approximately only one in every 700 candidates is hired! Google can afford to be very fussy. The recruitment policy of the People Operations section is that any resume with even one spelling mistake or typo is automatically rejected. Surprisingly some 58 per cent of resumes have these types of errors, and that’s millions of applications rejected immediately. One of the qualities that Google wants in applicants is accurate attention to detail, and this is not easy to achieve for most people.

I see many mistakes on school reports, and on school websites. The most common are errors such as using a hyphen instead of a dash, confusing its and it’s, and even your and you’re. Beyond school and on many signs and documents the problems continue.  So encourage your child to be careful in this means taking care over a long period of time, in other words checking, rechecking and getting someone else to check.

Playing the English sleuthing game which means looking for errors. The opportunities for this are endless. Suppose you go to a restaurant, as a family. After placing your order check the menu for errors. Very rarely do I ever find a restaurant menu free of mistakes. It is almost disheartening because the restaurant owners may have taken great deal of care to design the layout of the restaurant, the furnishings, table settings and of course the food. But they don’t give this level of care to what is written in the menu.

How important is all this?  Clearly the majority of young people and adults get through life with almost no attention to accurate English. But in today’s hypercompetitive job market I think you would like your child to have every possible advantage. Carefully written, accurate and correctly punctuated English will make your child’s work or application stand out immediately. Isn’t that what you want?—well you know what to do.

All content copyright—Mark Thackray—Australian Educational Services