Smoked Human!

I love smoked salmon! Let me loose in a 5-star-hotel’s restaurant and that’s where I will be headed first! The smell and taste of smoked salmon is heavenly.

How about Smoked Human?

“Huh?”, you are bound to say.

Let me explain.

For the last couple of weeks, I have been marking the CFCS (Community and Family Case Study) reports prepared by students. I did not know what I was in for when I agreed to mark (and later take up the viva exam) these reports.

Marking them takes great patience and fortitude of the soul and body.

Consider this statement I read in one of the report:

“He has been smoked for 40 years using 14 sticks of cigarettes in 36 hours”.

I should charge these students for the rape and abuse of the English Language.

I tried correcting the many spelling and grammar mistakes but after a while, I gave up. There are just too many of them. Now I just concentrate on trying to understand what they are trying to say.

In this day and age of super-fast personal computers loaded with excellent software like ‘MICROSOFT WORD’ (or whatever the Apple equivalent is), I cannot understand how a person can just go on typing and ignore the green or red jagged lines that appear under words or statements that are deemed by the software to be either misspelled or grammatically wrong! To say “I don’t know” or “my English is bad” is unacceptable. Right click the mouse and a list of possible correct spellings appear.

Those days when I prepared my report, I used the type-writer. There was no fancy spell-check. I have in one hand an Oxford Dictionary and on the other, a Liquid Paper; the former to check my spellings and the latter to correct them.

To me, these badly written reports tells me the writer has one attitude and that of pure APATHY. The Malay word for it is ‘tidak apa’. There is no pride in finishing a report that one can be proud of.

I don’t claim to be an English Language expert. I was not born with a perfect-English-gene in me. Whatever English I know and write now, I learned it the hard way ~ work, work, work.

Maybe I am too harsh.

I’m sorry if I am.

I have another 10+ reports to go through.

Sigh….

And yes, I will never ever say yes to another CFCS marking assignment.

Fri, 020508 @ 0700