We all know its a tight job market out their.\u00a0 So you got to make sure you set yourself a part from other applicants.\u00a0 One way to do this is to spend alot of time working threw ur resume and cover letter making sure they say what you want them to say and so that they convey the rite image of you.<\/p>\n
And if your cover letter or email to an employer looks or sounds anything like the above paragraph, you can be assured you won\u2019t get an interview, much less get hired, especially at Kyle Wiens\u2019 business.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Wiens won\u2019t hire anyone who doesn\u2019t care about grammar.<\/p>\n
According to the Huffington Post<\/a>, Wiens is the chief executive officer of iFixit<\/a>, an online repair community based in California. No matter how qualified a candidate for a position at iFixit, that person must pass a grammar test to be hired.<\/p>\n Sound schoolmarmish?\u00a0 Maybe.\u00a0 But Wiens has a valid point.<\/p>\n Correct grammar is critical regardless of industry, according to Wiens. “Every company that is dealing with professional clients should have a modicum of professionalism in their communications,” he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The proliferation of email, texting, and social media has produced a generation of what I would call lazy writers. Due to the need (or is it desire?) for a rapid response and occasionally because of space limitations (140 characters on Twitter, for example), people are short-handing\u2014and short-changing\u2014their writing.\u00a0 We certainly can communicate and do so much faster than ever before, but we\u2019re also doing so in a much sloppier way.\u00a0 As the drink coaster I once picked up from a local restaurant proclaims, \u201c2 much txting mks u 1 bad splr.\u201d\u00a0 But spelling is not the only problem.\u00a0 The proper use of punctuation (as something other than emoticons<\/a>), making proper word choices (along with knowing the difference between words that look or sound similar but have different meanings), and in general caring about how a message looks and sounds seem to have fallen away with the handwritten letter.<\/p>\n Lawyers are wordsmiths.\u00a0 As Professors Moliterno and Lederer say<\/a>, \u201cThe legal profession lives and breathes through the written word. . . .\u201d\u00a0 As such, we of all people must be particularly careful with how we use our words and cognizant of the impression we make when we use them. Whether we are writing a memo to a partner, a brief to the court, or an email to a colleague or client, what we say and how we say it matters.\u00a0 Now, this is not to say that we are never allowed to make mistakes.\u00a0 We all do. It would be arrogant of me (and wrong) if I claimed to never make any.\u00a0 (I\u2019m thinking now of the time I was grading a student\u2019s paper during the very early hours of the morning. I meant to write, \u201cI\u2019m impressed!\u201d but ending up writing (and sending to the student), \u201cI\u2019m impressive!\u201d\u00a0 Yeah, that one was embarrassing.)<\/p>\n This year, all of Marquette University Law School\u2019s legal writing professors have begun using in their 1L courses a relatively new online self-instructional learning tool called Core Grammar for Lawyers<\/a>.\u00a0 The program provides students an opportunity to test their initial grammar knowledge through a 90-minute pre-test.\u00a0 Depending on a student\u2019s results on the pre-test, a student may \u201ctest out\u201d of lessons on any one of six topics.\u00a0 Whether the student tests out or not, the student can work through each of the 24 lessons on the site.\u00a0 The six broad topic areas are: sentence structure; quotations; lists; verbs and agreement; citation manual eccentricities; and clarity. When the student has finished all of the lessons, she may take a post-test to gauge her progress. One of the reasons I like this program is that it is geared specifically toward law students (and lawyers), covering the conventions that are particular to our field.<\/p>\n Of course, there is a time and place for everything, and when in Rome, one must do as the Romans do.\u00a0 Thus, in email or texts to friends and family, it\u2019s fine to turn down (but not off) your inner grammarian.\u00a0 Go ahead and use emoticons, incomplete sentences, misspelled words, whatever.\u00a0 Your family and friends will still love you, even though you wrote \u201cover\u201d when you should have written \u201cmore than\u201d or when you LOL and :-D.\u00a0 As well, Twitter does limit you to 140 characters, so you do need to choose those characters (and your overall message) wisely.<\/p>\n