AR Cadre

Making grammatical mistakes can harm your credibility. (A good lesson for students to learn.) There are people who will publicly embarrass you when you make grammatical mistakes. (They were angry that he did this to me, but I told them that because I have put myself out there and am writing for  a larger audience, the expectations are higher for me. Although I certainly have excuses, I will make none. The mistake was mine and mine alone and I DO know better. I have to continue to try to be better.) When you talk about someone on a social network like Facebook or Google plus that it is BAD MANNERS to not tag them in the post. We discussed what would have happened if I hadn't been online at just the moment Stephen wrote this and WHY that made me angry. Sometimes when something is new even experts make mistakes. I pointed out to them that Stephen Downes is someone that I respect a lot and learn a lot from his blog. I consider him an expert in the field of educational technology. I also think that from now on he will double check his tagging of people in Google plus as I will also work harder to do a better job of proofreading. One mistake does not write his expertise off in my book - hopefully one grammatical mistake will not write someone off in the books of my readers. If it does, then so be it. I feel like people deserve the benefit of the doubt. A typo should not discredit someone's entire statement especially when written by a single author. When Stephen says the following statement, he misspells my name (I guess he didn't proofread either) - does that mean he doesn't know what he is talking about either? Of course not, he made a typo. "Why does this bother me? Because failure to align subject and verb demonstrates that the writer quite literally does not know what he or she is talking about. Vicking is talking about" Making social netiquette gaffes can also harm your credibility. The standards you use for others will come back to you eventually. In this case, in the same post. He publicly called me on grammar and as he did, he made a social media gaffe, so the public timeline also was told about his gaffe because he had made the conversation public in the first place. I hate it was public but it is OK in retrospect as there are a lot of teachable moments here. You should always fix your mistakes if you can. Mistakes are human but not fixing your mistakes is unprofessional. Fix your mistakes, try to make things right.