This is not a tagline, just an incredible simulation…
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English Majors: Job OpeningDecember 5, 2005 - 10:04pm
Yeah, okay, just kidding; you still have a worthless degree. But apparently that’s because you don’t need to know the English language to get a job in an industry that relies on it. We get a decent amount of PR-style mail at MG, like other Mac sites, because people are of the odd impression that we actually care that someone’s released a product. (MG is not a news site.) What amazes me about this is that, beyond not understanding where they should send PR releases, a great number of them quite impressively destroy the English language … in the actual release. As an unwilling example, I present one received today. The commentary around the two-paragraph release was the culprit; whoever wrote the actual release went for the real high school diploma and not the GED (yes, child, the comment form is below, have fun).
I mean … just … wow. I’m willing to give in to a few errors as I’m not above reproach, myself. At the point that I stop, back up, and re-read a phrase three times, however, I’m just going to call it bad English. I don’t feel like an ass when I say there’s no excuse for it, because there isn’t. I was a freakin C-student myself and here I am with a rather decent control over basic English. I can write well-composed letters and hold my own in a professional conversation over any medium. Yet, somehow, a large number of people completely failed to grasp something as simple as transposing speech to the written word in over a decade of schooling.
No, this isn’t the well-written part, in the case that you actually had to be told. This is the PR’s epilogue. How do I know? I read straight through the PR and it was very simply written, but clean and clear. When I had to backtrack again to understand what was being said, I knew I was back to the original writer. How the hell do you get a job writing this stuff if you can’t even write it? “People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad . . . The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable . . . It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob . . . It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to avoid them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.” — Orthodoxy, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1908, 100-101 – G. K. Chesterton  |
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Interesting posting – I totally agree. I write all of the press releases and handle all other PR matters for MacZealots.com. First, let me say how hard it is to always get the right email address. Some people change the address they want things sent to, while others ask that it be sent to press email addresses and then those can end up being wrong, too. But there is no excuse for bad writing. If you can’t do it, then find someone who can. I’m not saying that everything I send out is perfect – when the guys finish writing a piece at 2 a.m. that needs to be posted by 2:05, it can be hard to give it all the time I would like – but I certainly try to maintain a decent reputation for the company.
I think that a lot of people in this industry are so focused on making great applications or writing good code that they forget the importance of things like press releases. That’s why there will always be jobs available for English majors. My guess is that this guy wasn’t hired based on his English skills; at least I hope not. So don’t go bashing the entire field. As you’ve just pointed out, it’s very important.
I’m not after the entire field, I’m just after the people that can’t be bothered to learn how to take their spoken English and put it down into the written word in some understandable form. Doesn’t have to be PR, though it does surprise me that someone made it into that job with this level of “talent” at hand.