I work in the field of Civil Engineering and I absolutely hate math. I was never any good at it and back in my day, you could graduate high school by only passing pre-algebra. I barely eeked through that and it was possibly due to the sympathy of my teacher, Mr. Colgan, that I passed at all.

Later, in college, I avoided all required math classes by substituting two years of a foreign language instead. Yep, I would rather spend two years conjugating verbs rather than one term in a loathsome math class.

As irony would have it, my career path wound around and around over the years until I found myself working in a Civil Engineering firm as an administrative/purchaser/contract go-to person. That means that I work with six men who design-build bridges and roads and I process all the necessary paperwork to complete the jobs. It’s a perfect fit for me.

For you see, engineers can’t write. Rather, they can’t write well. I am constantly editing their correspondence, memos, grants, etc. Their minds are full of technical jumbles of equations and measurements and they neither have the time nor the patience to spend on the written word. My mind is full of grammar rules, spelling tricks, subject-verb agreement and the lofty dreams of indentations.

So it’s no surprise that their first draft of anything winds up on my desk for editing. I have to take their evil calculations and embed them in the warm comfort of proper business English. The dark side of me loves to point out their writing weaknesses to them but only because they have such superior math skills. They, in turn, gave me a gag gift of a gigantic calculator to help me add 2 + 2.

Here’s where I get mine. After editing a particularly long and heinous grant application, I was cranky, tired, brain-drained and in need of dumping my frustrations out on my guys. Of course, their calculations were all in order but as far as sentence structure – NONE! I reminded them that they were lucky to have me as their personal editor and look what they put me through, yadda yadda yadda (all tongue-in-cheek, mind you). And that’s when the crushing blow was delivered by Mike.

“Did you send out this grant already?” he asked.

“Yep. It was due a half hour ago. I sent it electronically to the agency’s contact,” I replied.

“Hmmm. Did you look it over before you sent it out?”

“That’s what I do, Mike, jeez.”

“Hmmm. Jim, did you see this before it went out?” asked Mike turning towards Jim.

“Nope. That’s Mia’s thing,” said Jim.

My attention piqued, I grabbed the copy of the grant application from Mike’s hands. Scanning quickly, I tried to find out to what problem he was referring.

And there it was. I gasped upon seeing the flagrant spelling violation of the worst kind. I didn’t catch it. Spell check didn’t catch it. But I knew that the panel reviewing the grant applications would catch it.

“Well, Mrs. Grammar Pants, I’m sure our app will stand out from all of the others now!” laughed Mike.

For right there on the page, I had typed “public” without the “L”. Since it still makes a real word, it didn’t get called out in red. Here’s the sentence:

… We are confident that the proposed trail construction will curb the overgrowth of invasive vegetation and make this a pub(l)ic place that everyone can enjoy.

END.

Disclaimer: Any grammatical or spelling error made in the above xombyte is unintentional. I am too embarrassed right now to have it pointed out to me, so please be kind when you read this. Sincerely, Mia.

TIP: To avoid spelling mistakes like mine, or just to refresh your grammar skills, you must bookmark this web-site called Grammar Girl at:

http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/

It’s an invaluable site that can be quite helpful no matter what type of writing you do.

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