To scrawl all over letters from school in a red pen & give them 2/10?

[spiderslegs]

DS started school today & came home with a Large Brown Envelope with the word URGENT scrawled across the front.

He was very concerned that I opened & read it. Upon doing so, it contained a wad of 'official' forms that I had already signed & returned in September and the grammar & syntax had NOT improved since the last time I signed them.

Not one apostrophe, tautologies, pluralised singles (wellie anyone?) & garbled, barely legible syntax.

So AIBU to return them signed (again) with corrections in red?

The school is rated outstanding by OFSTED & all letters carried the teacher's or Headmistress' name.

Fuck knows ElaineReese

Please say it ain't so.

Oh no, mark the letters in Greek, far more artistic and satisfying. A carefully considered gamma +? is more subtle and wounding than a crude 2/10. And explain exactly why you could not bring yourself to award a gamma ++. ("This is not the first time that I have had to explain the correct use of the subjunctive to you.")

No: no more than I think you are genuinely the legs of the spider I mercilessly flushed down the plug hole once.
Just a user name!

Oh no, mark the letters in Greek, far more artistic and satisfying. A carefully considered gamma +? is more subtle and wounding than a crude 2/10. And explain exactly why you could not bring yourself to award a gamma ++. ("This is not the first time that I have had to explain the correct use of the subjunctive to you.")

Yes OP I think you ought to do something about it. It is not acceptable for the school to be slapdash about things like this.

To me tink?

Oh piss, double post. I would be sorry but it is the fault of DP's new computer.

Phew - Praise the Lord - I was just about to come out all eight legs flying ElaineReese

DH is a copy editors son. He has been known to alter school letters

All running about all quickly and stuff?

Anyway - I do sympathise, and I have felt the same, especially in the first few years of my children being at school: on the whole though I think that sending letters back or whatever is very unlikely to achieve anything very positive, and just looks a bit bit nasty. I'm fairly glad I resisted similar urges.

Oh God, illiterate letters from school are one of my bugbears too. The letters from the Head have taken a turn for the better in the last year or so and mostly have reasonable syntax and spelling. But the letters the teachers write and send directly... God help the poor children!

I've managed to get a degree, a good job ( numerous times) without good grammar. Spell check is my help

Being able to love people despite their failings is not only a way of getting a job, but a way of getting through life happily without living in judgy pants. Spring fellows has nothing to do with love, lust perhaps?

Pointy things, thank you for not mentioning it. But do you really think written grammar is that important at nursery? Getting the spelling of the children's name is far more important IMO

Yanbu

The notes I get from dd's nursery are hysterically badly written. Calpaul and Norophen are given to my child if she has a temperature and her file of activities is full of bad grammar and really bad spelling. If it continues I might pluck up the courage to have a word.

Surely a school could also use spellcheck, then? Mine are past that stage, but it used to infuriate me too.

But Angelswings I'm hoping assuming you weren't being paid to teach. That's the difference between you muddling through your career with bad grammar and a teacher doing the same. It's fine teachers encouraging children to have the lovely qualities you mention, as long as they are also doing the job they are paid for, ie giving children correct information.

What Pixel said.

And I'm at the concept of getting a good degree without having a good grasp of grammar and spelling. When I did my degree, I sat many, many papers counting towards different aspects of the degree - all in the form of handwritten three-hour exams. No spell check, no dictionary and yes, we did lose marks for poor spelling, grammar and presentation. Quite right too IMO.

I'm stunned at the number of people who dismiss spelling and grammar as not important, frankly. As a foreign national, I feel very strongly that I have English 'on loan' as a language and that I therefore have to take great care to use it well. Every time I find I've left a typo in a MN post, I cringe when I read it. That's possibly obsessive of me, but I think language is so important that it has to be treated with respect.

"free gift" my DH reliably informs me is a pleonasm, not a strict tautology. For all those that care it means, the use of an unnecessary word that is implicit in the word it describes. Please don't flame me, it is enough that I live with the pompous ass. My pleonasm/not strict tautology = "pedantic husband". I will not be reading out any more AIBU posts to him!

OP - yes it would bother me, and does happen with the letters etc... from my DS school but I'm too much of a wuss to do anything, also I would sound like my pompous ass DH ; )

It is wrong that the teacher training colleges are not correcting the grammar of the badly educated students who enrol, study and graduate from them. We tend to complain about schools but the real problem is in the teacher training colleges. Until that is addressed a vicious cycle will be perpetuated.
Letters all to Mr Gove would be a good idea. Mumsnet campaign anyone.

I'm not sure if they are pleonasms or tautologies (some of you are much more educated than me) but my bugbears have always been:

real leather and new baby. Any one ever seen an old baby?

op and marriedinwhite it's quite unlikely this letter was written by the teacher. It's more likely that the school office staff composed it- as this is more usual practice in schools. Even on the odd occasion when teachers do compose letters, they will almost certainly be typed up by office staff. I have even had instances where my letters have been incorrectly typed up. Still think you should say something but don't go in guns blazing assuming it's the teacher's mistake!

Tautologous is one of my favourite preferred words.

My first thought that was that anyone in a school who has the responsibility for sending out written communications should, at the very least, use a spelling and grammar checker.

Then I remembered when I was working on a long-term temporary assignment and using someone else's computer that some of my typos were not flagged as errors. I checked the dictionary file and found a number of misspellings had been added to the dictionary - perhaps because the other person thought that Word was underlining a perfectly correct British spelling when Word was set to use US English.

Unfortunately, if someone has added incorrectly what they think is the correct spelling to the dictionary, that misspelling won't get flagged unless the dictionary file is pruned.

It's always possible to believe that what's been typed is correct, no matter what Word says, and I'm sure even the most pedantic of us have been caught out by that. But that doesn't account for the number of spelling and grammatical errors in letters from schools that get mentioned here. Perhaps it's time to add scrutiny of school letters to Ofsted inspections.

I received a Christmas email from a translation company. A company I had employed on several occasions to translate and proofread client copy into a dozen or so languages.
It contained several grammatical errors signing off with regards from 'you're managment team'. I'm unlikely to use them again as I have lost all faith in their quality control procedures.
Grammar does matter and it starts in schools.

What did the school say? Have been tempted to do the same in the past, esp with the prospectus of one dd's potential primary schools, which was awful.