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All is fair in love and war. (See body for part 2)
(mander.xyz)
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Geospatical, utalized, insistanting, ...
Dyslexia or fake.
Not uncommon for stem majors to have poor English. My freshman brochure for my engineering college had "enlish 20". Which I found ironic they misspelled the spelling class lmao
I have Grammarly installed on everything I can for a reason lmao.
I'm aware but I don't care too much lol. It's helped me quite a bit and you don't want to see the alternative. I have enough trouble expressing myself, I'll take the help as I can get it.
I run languagetool locally, and it's actually really good, but the browser extension is closed source even though I can point it at a local server, I don't know if it's logging what I type.
But libreoffice has built in support, which is great.
But why is uncommon for stem majors to proofread and use spell check?
You'd think these science-technology types would be all over that.
My late partner studied English as an undergrad and when he applied for his MA his email said "Please find attached my application for the MA in Creative Writning" and it makes me sad he's no longer around for me to relentlessly mock him about it.
Insistanting, reguardless, reguarding, better then, differnet
I quite enjoy resting a thought upon the pronunciation of a misspelt word. Not to mock the occurrence of the mistake but to enjoy the novelty of the familiarly unfamiliar. Geospatically speaking it provides a moment's grammatical geospatical sabbatical.
This is in a similar lexical vein to the recent Lemmy post about enjoying nich names.
I don't know why I'm about to submit this reply as it's utter nonsense...
Spelling is a poor indicator of competence.
While that may be true, it’s a reasonable indicator of a person’s capacity to hear new information and then incorporate that into practice. If they’ve been told that they’re spelling a word wrong but then either can’t integrate that new knowledge or actively choose not to follow it, you’ve got someone who is either wilfully ignorant or lacks some capacity to integrate new information. Either that, or dyslexia.
Also, it genuinely depends on the work you do. My role has me writing up anywhere between 5-10,000 words worth of reports per day - proper spelling and grammar is key for competence in this role. I’ve seen reports where seemingly innocuous spelling mistakes completely change the meaning of text. Writing ‘can’ instead of ‘can’t’ and vice versa is an immediate example that comes to mind. I know this is an engineering grad, but clear communication is important in every role that includes managers, teams or other stakeholders.
Dyslexia is pretty common. Written language wasn't common among the human population till a few hundred years ago, using that as your measure of intelligence is a very poor fit. No it doesn't say anything about their ability to incorporate new information. Judging people based on spelling is just not a good indicator for anything except for the very narrow task of spelling and doesn't say anything meaningful about their intelligence in other areas. Using it as a way to discriminate in the workplace is especially bad as your are just being needlessly discriminatory to neurodivergent individuals. Neurodivergent people are constantly gatekept from promotions by neurotypicals for shallow surface indicators that actually have no bearing on their ability to perform in the role. It's just ableism.
I never stated nor implied that spelling and grammar are a marker of intelligence - just a marker of being able to retain and use simple information. This was absolutely directed towards neurotypical people, and I probably should have mentioned dyslexia as an example of where this logic doesn’t follow.
It needs to be used to discriminate in fields that require abundantly clear communication urgently. I’m a child protection caseworker who does nothing but write up reports all day; if I had dyslexia I’d need serious accommodations to be able to perform the role at the level expected by the taxpayer who pays my salary. It absolutely can be done, but they’d likely need to hire a whole other person just to scribe. Have a look through my comment history; I’m well aware of dyslexia and its effects as I used to scribe for a friend in uni.
The thing is, all these words were used correctly. This isn't a dumb person pretending to be in science, it's just someone who can't spell.