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Roommate Tales
Jul. 9th, 2006 10:35 pmI've had a "Roommate Wanted" ad up on Craigslist for the past week or so. Today I got a couple of interesting responses.
The first was a guy who asked if I was open to having a gay male roommate (my ad had specified I female roommate). I politely told him no, I was more comfortable living with a female roommate because that's what I'm used to. Which is true; I went to a women's college and lived in all-female dorms, after all. The thing is - and I did not, of course, say this - there is a reasonable chance that, at one time or another, I will accidentally walk in on my roommate while they are less than fully clothed, or vice versa. Such accidents would be far less embarassing if we were both of the same gender. My other reason for not wanting a male roommate of any orientation is that it would be one more thing for my mother to pester me about.
The other response I got was from a young woman who seems quite nice, but writes quite badly. Her spelling was all right, but she rarely capitalized anything, used a lot of run-on sentences and seemed to have forgotten the existence of the apostrophe. It was as if she'd written her e-mail in a stream-of-consciousness format, or dashed it off very quickly. I haven't responded to her yet, and I'm considering not responding to her at all.
Bad writing just gets on my nerves in a terrible way. In part, I think, it's because I find reading and writing so easy, and I can't quite internalize the fact that most other people don't. But there's more to it than that. A lot of the bad writing I encounter is the product of sheer laziness. If you're a good typist, it isn't that hard to type "you" instead of "u." Don't give me that "it saves time to write in text-message speak" crap. It really isn't hard to learn how to tell the difference between a posessive and a contraction (your/you're, its/it's) or a plural and a contraction. These are simple, basic things that everyone learns in elementary school. And if people know the rules but don't care, it's even worse.[1] Yes, English is a crazy language as these things go, but literacy is not rocket science, people. Not if it's your native language, anyway.
A lot of folks think I'm picky and wonder why I even care. Well, here's why: when I write something, I do everything I can to make it presentable. Writing well gives the impression that you are intelligent and conscientious, and that you have at least some respect for whoever you are addressing. If you want them to even consider your message, let alone understand it, you must make it clear by writing it correctly. In some cases, you must even make it aesthetically pleasing. The upshot of this is that, when I see bad writing, I think that the author is stupid, sloppy and has no respect for the people who will be reading his writing - or even for the writing itself. I can't believe that literate people with a decent education make only a half-assed attempt at writing properly, or that it is generally acceptable for them to do so.
This is why I'm particularly irritated by that e-mail. You'd think that someone who is asking me to consider them as a potential roommate would try to make a good first impression. And this person didn't do that.
[1] There are a number of grammatical rules that one can legitimately break, but you have to know the rules to break them the right way.
The first was a guy who asked if I was open to having a gay male roommate (my ad had specified I female roommate). I politely told him no, I was more comfortable living with a female roommate because that's what I'm used to. Which is true; I went to a women's college and lived in all-female dorms, after all. The thing is - and I did not, of course, say this - there is a reasonable chance that, at one time or another, I will accidentally walk in on my roommate while they are less than fully clothed, or vice versa. Such accidents would be far less embarassing if we were both of the same gender. My other reason for not wanting a male roommate of any orientation is that it would be one more thing for my mother to pester me about.
The other response I got was from a young woman who seems quite nice, but writes quite badly. Her spelling was all right, but she rarely capitalized anything, used a lot of run-on sentences and seemed to have forgotten the existence of the apostrophe. It was as if she'd written her e-mail in a stream-of-consciousness format, or dashed it off very quickly. I haven't responded to her yet, and I'm considering not responding to her at all.
Bad writing just gets on my nerves in a terrible way. In part, I think, it's because I find reading and writing so easy, and I can't quite internalize the fact that most other people don't. But there's more to it than that. A lot of the bad writing I encounter is the product of sheer laziness. If you're a good typist, it isn't that hard to type "you" instead of "u." Don't give me that "it saves time to write in text-message speak" crap. It really isn't hard to learn how to tell the difference between a posessive and a contraction (your/you're, its/it's) or a plural and a contraction. These are simple, basic things that everyone learns in elementary school. And if people know the rules but don't care, it's even worse.[1] Yes, English is a crazy language as these things go, but literacy is not rocket science, people. Not if it's your native language, anyway.
A lot of folks think I'm picky and wonder why I even care. Well, here's why: when I write something, I do everything I can to make it presentable. Writing well gives the impression that you are intelligent and conscientious, and that you have at least some respect for whoever you are addressing. If you want them to even consider your message, let alone understand it, you must make it clear by writing it correctly. In some cases, you must even make it aesthetically pleasing. The upshot of this is that, when I see bad writing, I think that the author is stupid, sloppy and has no respect for the people who will be reading his writing - or even for the writing itself. I can't believe that literate people with a decent education make only a half-assed attempt at writing properly, or that it is generally acceptable for them to do so.
This is why I'm particularly irritated by that e-mail. You'd think that someone who is asking me to consider them as a potential roommate would try to make a good first impression. And this person didn't do that.
[1] There are a number of grammatical rules that one can legitimately break, but you have to know the rules to break them the right way.
