Sunday, April 5, 2009

"There's no mistakes on our site"

Today, I was ambushed by Nick Gower (Students First vice presidential candidate) and his attack dog, Deborah Bloom. Gower had approached me earlier in the week wanting 'a minute' from me, then left before I could chat with him. They both ran into me as I was leaving the EMU.

Bloom: "We don't have any grammatical mistakes on our website."
Me: "How many words is 'press release?'
Bloom: "Oh, we fixed that..." (But not before I pointed it out on this blog)

Anyway, Gower and Bloom kept arguing with me that they didn't have any grammatical mistakes on their Facebook page.

I should have just left it at that. 

I should have just smiled, walked away and said "have a nice day." It would have been more entertaining for me (I wonder how much time they spent pouring through their page and searching for other errors) and it would have upset them more. 

But being the nice guy that I am, I informed them that they used an ellipsis in their poster incorrectly (none of them knew what an ellipsis was until I explained that it was that "dot dot dot" thing). And they even argued about that. 

More importantly, they were arguing with me about grammar. Grammar is important in that it needs to be used correctly in order to be taken seriously (will students take a candidate seriously who cannot spell "press release" correctly?), but it is not important enough that candidates need to seek out people who call them out on their mistakes and vent their frustrations. It would  be much more productive to sift through the page, make any  corrections that need to be made and move on. 

But of course (contrary to the feelings of ASUO executive hopeful Michelle Haley), campaigning brings out the worst in people. 

I hope the rest of the ASUO hopefuls don't take offense when someone notices a grammatical mistake on some of their campaign material.
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4 comments:

  1. UnknownApril 5, 2009 at 2:09 PM

    Wait, did anyone actually say "there's no mistakes?" That would be rather hilarious!

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  2. BryanApril 5, 2009 at 9:13 PM

    They did, but I should clarify that it was in conversation and not in writing. I think we can afford them more leniency in that situation.

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  3. UnknownApril 11, 2009 at 12:48 PM

    Bryan, I never actually said campaigning brings out the best in students. Tomchak created that statement as a lead into my quote. The context was actually that students are willing to skip class, work, and hours of sleep to outreach to students for three weeks, then they forget about greater campus for the rest of the year. If we had a fraction of that will year round students might feel more included in the decisions of the ASUO.

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  4. BryanApril 12, 2009 at 11:38 AM

    "The context was actually that students are willing to skip class, work, and hours of sleep to outreach to students for three weeks, then they forget about greater campus for the rest of the year."

    Ok, so what does that have to do with bringing out the best in student government? And if that's not what you said, how did Tomchak get that wrong? (I know you can't answer that with any certainty, but if you have any ideas...)

    And I should clarify that it has you down as saying 'best in student government' instead of people.

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