An e-mail announcement was sent earlier this morning to everyone here at my home institution, signed by our Chancellor, announcing the retirement reception of a distinguished member of our administration. About a half hour later, virtually the same message was re-sent with the title of this post as an explanation. I was curious about what the "grammatical errors" might be, so I read the two messages a little more closely. There indeed was one grammatical error, duly corrected, but there were a number of other corrections of a completely different sort.
First, the sentence with the grammatical error. (Here and throughout, the original message text is in red, the corrected message text is in blue, and the specific corrected bits are highlighed in boldface in both.)
He has developed and implemented the faculty mentor program and has worked with Career Services to ensure that our programs meet the needs of all students and encourages them to apply to graduate and professional schools.
He has developed and implemented the Faculty Mentor program and has worked with Career Services to ensure that our programs meet the needs of all students and encourage them to apply to graduate and professional schools.
The grammatical error is one of subject-verb agreement: our programs ... encourage, not our programs ... encourages. An understandable error given the complex form of this sentence, and one that is surely not worth flooding everybody's inboxes with a new version of the exact same message. But the good folks in the Chancellor's office made a number of other "corrections" to the original message while they were at it.
You can see one of those in the first part of the sentence above: faculty mentor program in the original is capitalized to Faculty Mentor program in the corrected version. This isn't a question of grammar, at least not in the technical sense used by linguists; it's a question of orthographic convention: names, titles, and other such things tend to be capitalized. (Please ignore the fact that it's supposed to be Faculty Mentor Program, with all three words capitalized.)
Another correction has me wondering:
The reception will be held from 3 to 5 up.me.
The reception will be held from 3 to 5 p.m.
I'm guessing that the original error was due to the Cupertino Effect, but I haven't been able to replicate it (try as I might) with the spelling-and-grammar checker of my word processor (Microsoft® Word X for Mac® Service Release 1) -- if anyone out there is successful, or has an alternative hypothesis, please follow the comment link below.
Another correction is extremely curious:
Dr. Watson's 11-year service as the founding Provost of Third College, now Thurgood Marshall College
Dr. Watson's 11-year service as Provost of Third College, now Thurgood Marshall College
According to this recent UCSD press release, Dr. Watson was indeed the founding Provost of the relevant college (he served as Provost from 1970 to 1981, and the college was founded in 1970). Why the "correction"?
The remaining corrections involved changing some perfectly good commas (in a list of Dr. Watson's many accomplishments) into semi-colons, removing a space from the name of our campus web portal, and adding a hyphen after the area code in the phone number that folks can call with questions about the retirement reception. All completely unnecessary, if you ask me (though, of course, nobody did or is).
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Posted by Eric Bakovic at May 21, 2007 11:14 PM