The written word craves attention: An interview with a writing professor

As an English major, language greatly affects your level of success. I interviewed Professor A, a writing professor, about how language affects her.

She drew a distinction between verbal and written language. Verbal mistakes, she says, are easier to overlook because they are more casual. English professors can occasionally be laid back in conversation, she insists. Professor A said that it bothers her when people “monitor their language” outside of a classroom setting just because she’s an English professor. The written word, however, “demands more attention” because it is visual.

Even so, she says, “I can forgive typos.” What do concern her are consistent errors. Even then, a person may have been taught improperly. “The longer I’ve been in teaching,” she says, “the more [mistakes] float off me.”

Mistakes in a student’s work, whether written or verbal, are forgivable because as a student, we’re here to learn to fix these things. She mentioned that she finds mistakes more shocking when they happen in a business setting. However, she did give an example of a student who emailed her to argue their low grade on a paper. The email had a misspelling or punctuation error in every line. That upset her, and didn’t earn the student a better grade.

The most common error she sees as a writer? Punctuation on the wrong side of quotation marks in dialogue. “I spend so much time switching those around,” she says.
-Samantha Hudson