Style, Grammar, and Moral Conviction
Today, for the first time in years, I felt stupid because I didn't graduate from college. It's a bad bad feeling.
I only went to university for three or four quarters (that's a year and a third, approximately, to those of you who went to universities that adhere to what I presume is the more common semester system). That I can't remember exactly how many quarters I attened should be indicitave of my level of committment to my failed education at Ohio State University. Eventually, however, I did graduate from a highly respected and competetive cooking school, and I very strongly feel that it was one of the best life choices I've made.
Even so, the school does not make the woman. I have plenty of peers who went to college and, today, have very little in tems of career skills to show for it...whereas I can at least cook pretty well.I've always been proud of myself for realizing early on that college is a sham: lots of stupid people graduate from expensive universities, and lots of smart people never even attend one. If I am ever a parent, I will encourage my kids to seek a trade--be electricians or something tangible and honest like that. Electricians have to be pretty smart, right?
So I learned many useful things in cooking school, but I did lose out on formalized intellectualism. And I kind of like that stuff. Typically I get my fill of critical snobbery from browsing through reference books, an enriching habit I (and my good friend Bryan, http://www.benlid.blogspot.com) was able to pursue greatly at a former job: shelving assloads of hefty nonfiction books at a library full of homeless people.
I often run across words that I don't know the meaning of. This happens aurally as well, because I listen to a lot of NPR and hear words I can't quite define out of context. So there are words I don't know how to spell, words I don't know how to say, and words I don't know how to use--e.g. "aurally."
Let's blame this on my refusal to study SAT vocabulary words. When else in life do you encounter new vocabulary words--and I mean real words, not silly, invented media words like "blog" and "crunk." How do people with huge vocabularies get huge vocabularies? Are they born that way? Have they spent secret lifetimes thumbing through dictionaries every time they encountered a word of question?
I like dictionaries, and I've been known open them looking for one word only to put the book down fifteen minutes later because some entry like "retort" (as in a noun, as in a glass vessel used to distill things, probably familiar to you from "M*A*S*H") had a cool illustration that was next to an even cooler, totally different entry for some other word. And so on.
But I don't study dictionaries, and I don't plan on it. The reason all of this is on my mind at 11pm is not actually my limited vocabulary, but my limited command of grammar.
As stated in a previous entry or two, my new job calls for me to exhibit a strong command of style and language. Normally I feel I have those things--I'm a writer, for christ's sake, and I've had shit published in books and everything. But I've also had the benefit of an editor and a proffreader in the past, and they in turn had established formats and styles to adhere to.
At this new job, *I'm* not only the writer--I'm the editor and proofreader, sort of. What I write needs to be approved before it goes out to the public, but said approval audience isn't always the most rapt of my scribblings. They are Presidents and Principals of the Company, not copy editors. Plus there is no style sheet at this company, which means that any two figures of authority can tell me to do two very different things.
So I decided to develop a style sheet. Since there's about 8 years' worth of company products and literature to consider in formulating this sheet, I decided to distribute a very informal multiple-choice questionnaire to my co-wokers, asking them stuff like "Yes or no: do we capitalize fresh confections?" Or "Would you hypenate '5-Ounce Bittersweet Bar'?" I wanted to see what I'm up against.
A can of worms! I am up against an open can of worms! The hypen thing is going to be especially ugly, I can tell. Someone was pointing out to me that it should not be an option to not use one, because "5-Ounce Bittersweet Bar" is not correct without it. "You know that, right?" he said. "You can look it up in a book."
Well, yeah, but half of this comany's signage is totally devoid of hypens. So how did it get that way? Whose stylistic choice was that? Commas are going to be another big mess, too. I don't even want to get into it now.
I guess what I need to do is take charge and stick to my guns. The problem is that I have no sound style rules to fall back on; when I write a certain way, I do it not because I know something is correct--it's because I'm pretty sure it's correct. I assume when they hired a girl with no marketing experience or English degree, they suspected this...but then, these are the same people who sold millions of dollars of chocolate for 8 years with no style sheet. I'm a terrible typist, a fair speller, and I can't be my own editor. Fuck. Maybe I'll call in sick tomottow.
I only went to university for three or four quarters (that's a year and a third, approximately, to those of you who went to universities that adhere to what I presume is the more common semester system). That I can't remember exactly how many quarters I attened should be indicitave of my level of committment to my failed education at Ohio State University. Eventually, however, I did graduate from a highly respected and competetive cooking school, and I very strongly feel that it was one of the best life choices I've made.
Even so, the school does not make the woman. I have plenty of peers who went to college and, today, have very little in tems of career skills to show for it...whereas I can at least cook pretty well.I've always been proud of myself for realizing early on that college is a sham: lots of stupid people graduate from expensive universities, and lots of smart people never even attend one. If I am ever a parent, I will encourage my kids to seek a trade--be electricians or something tangible and honest like that. Electricians have to be pretty smart, right?
So I learned many useful things in cooking school, but I did lose out on formalized intellectualism. And I kind of like that stuff. Typically I get my fill of critical snobbery from browsing through reference books, an enriching habit I (and my good friend Bryan, http://www.benlid.blogspot.com) was able to pursue greatly at a former job: shelving assloads of hefty nonfiction books at a library full of homeless people.
I often run across words that I don't know the meaning of. This happens aurally as well, because I listen to a lot of NPR and hear words I can't quite define out of context. So there are words I don't know how to spell, words I don't know how to say, and words I don't know how to use--e.g. "aurally."
Let's blame this on my refusal to study SAT vocabulary words. When else in life do you encounter new vocabulary words--and I mean real words, not silly, invented media words like "blog" and "crunk." How do people with huge vocabularies get huge vocabularies? Are they born that way? Have they spent secret lifetimes thumbing through dictionaries every time they encountered a word of question?
I like dictionaries, and I've been known open them looking for one word only to put the book down fifteen minutes later because some entry like "retort" (as in a noun, as in a glass vessel used to distill things, probably familiar to you from "M*A*S*H") had a cool illustration that was next to an even cooler, totally different entry for some other word. And so on.
But I don't study dictionaries, and I don't plan on it. The reason all of this is on my mind at 11pm is not actually my limited vocabulary, but my limited command of grammar.
As stated in a previous entry or two, my new job calls for me to exhibit a strong command of style and language. Normally I feel I have those things--I'm a writer, for christ's sake, and I've had shit published in books and everything. But I've also had the benefit of an editor and a proffreader in the past, and they in turn had established formats and styles to adhere to.
At this new job, *I'm* not only the writer--I'm the editor and proofreader, sort of. What I write needs to be approved before it goes out to the public, but said approval audience isn't always the most rapt of my scribblings. They are Presidents and Principals of the Company, not copy editors. Plus there is no style sheet at this company, which means that any two figures of authority can tell me to do two very different things.
So I decided to develop a style sheet. Since there's about 8 years' worth of company products and literature to consider in formulating this sheet, I decided to distribute a very informal multiple-choice questionnaire to my co-wokers, asking them stuff like "Yes or no: do we capitalize fresh confections?" Or "Would you hypenate '5-Ounce Bittersweet Bar'?" I wanted to see what I'm up against.
A can of worms! I am up against an open can of worms! The hypen thing is going to be especially ugly, I can tell. Someone was pointing out to me that it should not be an option to not use one, because "5-Ounce Bittersweet Bar" is not correct without it. "You know that, right?" he said. "You can look it up in a book."
Well, yeah, but half of this comany's signage is totally devoid of hypens. So how did it get that way? Whose stylistic choice was that? Commas are going to be another big mess, too. I don't even want to get into it now.
I guess what I need to do is take charge and stick to my guns. The problem is that I have no sound style rules to fall back on; when I write a certain way, I do it not because I know something is correct--it's because I'm pretty sure it's correct. I assume when they hired a girl with no marketing experience or English degree, they suspected this...but then, these are the same people who sold millions of dollars of chocolate for 8 years with no style sheet. I'm a terrible typist, a fair speller, and I can't be my own editor. Fuck. Maybe I'll call in sick tomottow.
posted by Lefty at 10:14 PM
2 Comments:
Oh, they love you, and I love you.
I agree with you completely, I think college is a scam. It's a deal where you try to get through years of junk to come out at the end of it with a slip of paper that says you know something- and you also get a huge financial debt that looms over your head like the sword of Damocles. No guarantee a high paying job will be there as the reward for all your trouble, either.
I've known lots of people who have gone away to college and come back with four year degrees and still can't ever seem to get a good job. One guy I knew left town for school and he worked in gas stations. When he came back years later he ended up working in gas stations. Just running the register. Another guy I knew went to Cal Poly and graduated with a double major in math and statistics. The guy is brilliant. He ended up being a substitute teacher. And one girl I knew was a waitress, she came back with a degree in Tennis. I didn't even know one could get a degree in Tennis. Anyway, she's a waitress again.
Trade schools and vocational programs sometimes really are the way to go. I've known a number of people who have graduated from a pretty good culinary academy here in the SF bay area. They've come here from all over the country, graduated from that school and gone on to do really well. Most have become chefs at high end restaurants and hotels. They make incredibly good money.
So yeah. College is a rip off and it sux bad. I just started back at it last week and I already hate it...
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