To point out that the word is 'being' not 'been'

[Thisvehicleisreversing]

I've read a number of posts over the last few days where a poster has used 'been' when they've meant 'being'

It's annoying. So there.

I have a 'friend' on FB who often updates her status telling us how 'board' she is and how she celebrated 'Farther's Day'. She made the mistake several times so definitely not a typo. The worst part is she's a secondary school teacher.

Really, lisa?

Goodness, how can the idiot hold her head up, and a secondary school teacher too.

I'm referring, of course, to the fact she keeps someone who sneers at her as a friend.

Duckworth..er, no. Half my friends are a generation older, we don't seem to have any problem communicating.

LRD - I'm not a literacy teacher and I never said I was!

I said I REFUSED TO PENALISE STUDENTS FOREIGN STUDENTS FOR POOR ENGLISH!!

Thanks for pointing out my mistakes, I'd appreciate it if you'd correct them rather than just telling me I'm wrong.

They probably just have better manners that you, and hence wouldn't dream of raising it as an issue with you.

Language does change, though. I agree a generation might be overstating things, but certainly if you went back two generations, your granny when she was your age would have spoken very differently from you. It's normal.

*than

And yes, typos, I know.

I refused to unfairly mark some students down for poor English and not others. Please explain to me why you think that means I judged them? I stuck up for them!!

lala - I did correct you. I quoted the posts. Do you actually need me to go explain why the word in bold is not correct?

I'd thank you to read mine properly. You said you penalized students for slang. Yes? Or have you changed your mind about what you did?

You said you'd taught. You described marking students for literacy. I referred to that. Please, do feel free to explain why it was somehow wrong of me to describe this as teaching literacy? Or do you mean, you're somehow entitled to teach badly if it's not your specialism?

Your errors (other than the ones I've pointed out) are mostly missing punctuation, which makes your grammar hard to follow.

'Whilst marking academic essays my superior told me to mark foreign students down for poor English but not those who had perfectly good English skills, yet chose to write in slang. I refused and marked them all according to academic guidelines. Some had quite obviously just submitted awful work and then not even bothered with spell checking. I'm not sure how that can be excused if someone professes to be serious about their education.'

This is your post, right here.

Exactly. I marked them all according to guidelines. Unless you think it would have been wise to let someone who'd not bothered to read their own work submit a thesis that had the word 'circumcision' instead of 'circumstance' throughout, without pulling them up on it.

I can't see bold type on my phone by the way. If you mean 'mathematical', that's clearly a typo.

LaLa's post reads, to me, that her supervisor told her to mark students down for using slang and that she refused. I really can't see where she says she marked students down for using slang.

Now, I don't profess to always use perfect grammar or punctuation but, to my mind, LRD's post criticisng LaLa's punctuation has some rather dubious punctuation itself. I say "to my mind" since the correct use of punctuation is, to some extent, subjective.

I thought you said your superior told you how to mark them. And you did differently.

I correct my students for that sort of mistake.

What I don't do is to judge them more harshly than students making other kinds of mistake, because I can recognize that some students struggle in one way, and some in another. Is it possible your superior knew that too?

Something may look like laziness to you - but for that student, it might be that they genuinely found it difficult to proof-read, and they didn't see the mistake as easily as you. As your own posts indicate, it's quite easy to overlook your own mistakes. I don't follow why you think it's ok to decide which students where allowed marks and which weren't on arbitrary criteria.

perm - my posts are full of errors. The difference being, I've spent this whole thread trying to explain as best I can why it's not great to judge people for such things. I'm not being a hypocrite. I'm not setting myself up as an authority on trivia when I can't manage myself.

Okay, I take my first paragraph back. I've re-read LaLa's post (again) and have changed my mind. :)

No, you're right, it's ambiguous, I'm not sure what she meant to say either.

Marking and teaching are not the same. There are many who mark exams but do not teach the subjects. All academic work has an element of literacy assessment.

This is the error some people make that drives me insane. Always the same posters/people. Def not typos. I don't know why it annoys me so much more than other errors but it really really does. 'I seen' instead of 'I saw' and 'lend me' instead of borrow just doesn't irk me in the same way.

Of course, this is true.

Quite why you wrote 'I've taught' and are now taking issue with the distinction between teaching and marking, I am however unsure ...

Pedants corner >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Now do be a dear.

YAbeenU

You might be better educated than some people who do this, it may not be their fault.
It is a small thing to be bothered about. Try pedants corner.

I think failing to make a bit of an effort to write correctly is basic bad manners, and also bad policy. It's bad manners because in effect you are telling people that you can't be bothered to try to write clearly for them and you expect them to go out of their way to try to understand you. It's bad policy because, if you want to make a point, you will fail; if I am reading a post and suddenly come up against "been" instead of "being" or "could of", it instantly brings me up short and distracts me, so that I lose the thread of the comment completely.

It's particularly unacceptable in teachers. I remember going into my ds' school and seeing a large poster with the words "Standing on the shoulder's of giant's". Hundreds of children were going to be filing past that every day, thinking that that usage of apostrophes must be correct. It seems to me to be incredibly irresponsible to let that sort of thing stay on display.

I agree with that, nenny.

But I'm not sure how anyone can tell who makes an effort and who doesn't?

I really don't get this "perhaps you've had a better education than others"

We live in a country with free education for all. English is taught at schools as standard. If you don't get taught well at school then are these things called books which you can take out of free libraries.

You don't need to go to Eton to know that 'been' instead of 'being' or 'of' instead of 'have' is wrong.