Good Usage and Good Judgement Essays -- Teaching Writing Education Ess

Good Usage and Good Judgement You are in charge of hiring one person for a business and you have in front of you 1,000 applications. How do you go about choosing the right person for the job? It is impractical to call all 1,000 people in for an interview in order to get a better idea of the type of worker they might be. First things first, you look through the applications. If one of the applications has a mis-spelled word- in the circular file it goes. That's life. If you don't care enough about this job to spell things correctly, then you don't have what it takes for the job. According to some of our "experts" on good usage, this is considered lazy. That is nonsense. When confronted with this great task, efficiency is the key. You are not necessarily looking for the best person for the job. You are looking for your idea of the best person for the job. So what if it's unfair. That's life. Anyone who disagrees with this assessment already has a job. You can afford to be high and mighty when you aren't the one making the decisions or under a time crunch. We brought up the example of a person misspelling coffee on an application. The manager decided that this person was not going to be hired. The point was made that spelling has nothing to do with the ability of the applicant to serve coffee. This point may be correct in an ideal world. But imagine that you were the owner of the coffee shop and your profits depended on the competency of the people you hired. Without having prior knowledge of the caliber of the worker, are you going to hire this person? Of course not. You are going to hire someone who has presented themselves, through language, as someone worthy of the job. In the employment world, language is our appeara... ...uck. You file the thought away and wait to make that decision when your head has cleared. You've had a rough day. How can anyone come up with a clear-cut decision on good usage when you are constantly forced to change it? If you don't change your usage, you won't be conforming to the normal framework of what is appropriate in a given situation. But what is the "normal framework?" If there was only a "god of good usage" in the sky, you could consult him/her and find out what is appropriate. Maybe this god could be an English professor. You realize this would be impossible- they can't seem to agree on the issue of good usage either. You resolve to just use your best judgement considering the circumstances with which you are presented. You don't have any more time to ponder on the point anyway. You've got another stack of applications waiting for you in the morning.