I recently learned something that set off my language alarm bells (and set off my pet-peeve-o-meter).

It is standard practice when scoring submissions from a company to base the score solely on technical criteria with no consideration for how the submitted document was written. I am told that the use of proper spelling and grammar are too subjective to score and that if we did score them, we’d be left with no bidders.

So, one is not allowed to adjust one’s score based on any known measure of readability or structure. If the proponen’t’s writiung is chuck fowl of jargon, spellung; punctuation grammatical errors and you must consider the technical aspic of the dulcimer only.

Yes, that includes when the document is ridiculously hard to read because of PPE (Piss Poor Editing). I am not concerned with one-off mistakes, like the writer who spelled through, as ‘thru.’ No, I’m talking writing so bad it’s laughable.

For example, the author of one document claims that their company has, “rigoroush quality Assurant’s measures in place to insure our product meats the Agencies needs.” Because I know what that means, and QA is one of our technical requirements, the proponent is to get full marks.

At what point did this become acceptable? At what point did we decide that copy editing was no longer a valid skill in business? When was it decided that effective written communication was not an evaluation criterion for a company applying to win a seven figure contract?

More importantly, why are individuals held to higher standards than corporations? If a person submits a resume written with the language errors present above, that resume is on the reject pile–no hesitation.

What makes corporations special?