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Lisa Wright wrote:
>
>.
>
> To defend, or perhaps just give some perspective on your experience with
> people knowing their grammar, I must respond with a rhetorical question.
> *Must* I be able to explain right away every grammar rule in the book
> *during an interview?* I have to say, I find this akin to being asked to
> explain Frame's autonumbering or some such tool procedure off the top of my
> head. If I've worked with it in the last month, I can probably explain it to
> you. If I haven't, then I may need a little time (say 30 minutes or so)
> working with it before I can remember how to explain it to someone else.
> Give me a day with a grammar book to refresh my rusted memory and I'll be
> good to go.
No, Lisa, I certainly would not suggest that you _must_ be able to
explain right away every grammar rule without looking it up. But I would
say that you _must_ recognize the names of standard punctuation marks,
_must_ know that a sentence has a subject and a verb, _must_ know that a
hyphen is not a dash. And of course you _must_ be able to say, "I don't
recall the exact rule, but I know where to look it up" (always a better
answer than, "Whatever!").
> Of course, your candidates may have little knowledge, rusty or otherwise, of
> grammar. I just wanted to point out that knowledge used and knowledge
> articulated can be two different things.
True. But I'm hiring an editor, not a writer. An editor who cannot
articulate knowledge is not a particularly useful editor.
Perhaps an interview about grammar
> could cover their grammar background and whether its truly a matter of never
> learning or only that they haven't thought about the underlying rules in a
> while.
Yes, in each case I took the opportunity to have that discussion, and
several people who are still in consideration expressed an interest in
learning. Again, my disgust is not with "the quality of candidates these
days"; it is with an educational system that gets suckered by snake oil
salesmen peddling (NOT pedaling!!!) their cockamamie pananceas to
educated but fundamentally stupid school administrators.
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