Comment Rejected Because It Did Not Meet 3rd Grade Standards

On p. 16 of the Projects Instruction Manual you will find this listed as point #3:

All comments must be proofread and free of spelling and grammatical errors. Have you read Some of You Won’t Make It Through 3rd Grade ? If not, do so now. I do NOT want to find out that your comments have been rejected by a teacher (3rd grade or not) because of spelling or grammatical errors. For heavens sake! You are planning to be a teacher, correct?

If not, do so now made bold and italicized for this post.

I also told this story in every class during one of the first mandatory classes.

Sunday (September 23, 2012) I got this email from Anthony Capps, my very first Lab Professional and now a 3rd grade teacher (just like Mrs. Yollis) at Gulf Shore Elementary:

If you can't read the text in the image, here is what Anthony wrote:

Hi Dr. Strange,

I can't publish this comment because BBBBBBBB BBBBBBBBBB didn't capitalize her letters appropriately, and she included more than one run-on sentence. We just got finished discussing the importance of capitalization and punctuation last week, and I don't want this comment to undermine our progress.

In contrast, Daniel Morgan's post was very helpful! We just began learning how sentence variety makes writing more interesting, and his use of questioning was exemplary.

Thank you,

Anthony

OH MY! Four times she used i instead of I. One time she made poll plural by adding an apostrophe s. She had one run-on sentence. In addition, data is always plural. The singular form is datum. Using data as a singular noun is incorrect. Unfortunately, many people treat it as a singular noun as did this student. The misuse of data as a singlar noun apparently played no role in the rejection of her comment. I would have rejected it for that reason, however.

Students:
You must proofread your comments.
You are not texting when you leave a comment.
Please do not let this happen again.