Beason's article Ethos and Errors goes beyond looking at the errors that a writer makes, and instead focus' on how the errors that a writer makes impacts the reader. While there is no doubt that grammatical mistakes within an article, poem, or novel are (or at least can be) distracting to the reader, I think the bigger problem lies within the fact that if you hand 100 college students of varying majors the same article with multiple grammar mistakes; most students would not be able to identify a good portion of the mistakes!
Mistakes are (as Beason points out) often the product of a careless/hasty writer who just refuses to proofread his or her work. However, that hurts only them. Yes, it is annoying to the reader who has to stumble through the piece but it does not reflect anything about the reader or whether or not the reader gets the point. The only person it negatively impacts is the writer who comes off with a tarnished reputations. Again, the emphasis should go back to identifying the mistakes, and I do not just mean the reader should identify them, the writer is the one who should have identified them but it is important that the reader know HOW to identify the mistakes. In my opinion (and I know this review/summary is supposed to be objective) the more prevalent of the issues is being able to identify grammatical mistakes...beyond that, how one feels about those mistakes is irrelavent. Unless you're writing an article about how people feel about grammatical mistakes, in which case it is relavent and you are trying to show how little people in today's society care about grammar (which I think is Beason's point).
2 comments:
I don't think Beason's point is "how little people in today's society care about grammar." I think the opposite is true. I think Beason's point is that teachers are not the only one who care about grammatical errors; please in "society" (the business world, for example) care, too.
I would have to disagree because if teacher's cared then we wouldn't have the current "crisis" that Wallace and Pinker are talking about. Yes, teacher's care (to a certain degree) or they are just now starting to care again. And the business world cares, but the majority of society does not. I understand that he is trying to show that your grammar affects the way that you are viewed within the business world, but the entire article seems (to me at least) that he is telling people that they NEED to care.
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