3rd Year Script Editing Guideline

3rd Year Script Editing Guideline

1. Please sign up at least 24 hours BEFORE your group needs help and editing from the foreign English professors.

2. If your group cannot come to your appointment—please call the professor and let them know.

***Text message the professor if there is no answer, please.

3. Please use “Spell and Grammar” check on your computer before you show us your script!!! Hangul program’s spelling and grammar check is not good for English. Please use MS Word English version, or if you don’t have that on your computer, please use the Korean version of MS Word.

4. There are ***** foreign English professors at ****: ************************. Please go to their offices and look at their doors for the sign up sheet.

5. Please do not use naver.co.kr, or daum, to search for English content.

There are too many errors in the content, and Konglish is often a problem.

Please use Google for all English searches for your lessons.

Please try to follow the guidelines above. They will help all of us achieve the goal of improving your scripts.

Thank you.

_____________________________________________________________

Every semester the foreign English professors where I work have to edit 3rd year student English teaching demonstration scripts. Each group of students that comes to my office seems to be oblivious to the fact that they should use the Spell and Grammar Check before giving a document to a professor for editing . . . sigh.

So, me being the proactive (most of the time, hehe) individual that I am, I made a handout . . .

Unfortunately, the cynical side of me wonders if it will make any difference in the phenomenon that is the 'Collective Student Consciousness in Korea.' This generally tends to be characterized by the following,

1. Extreme exhaustion.

2. Over-worked, over-studied, over-everything.

3. Apathy to anything and everything that isn't worth a test point within the next 24 hours (or less).

All of these things result in students having problems like this,

I decided to go and check what the Hangul word processing program is capable of doing. I typed out a couple of ENGLISH (as opposed to Hangul, the language it was designed for) sentences with missing capitals, some very basic spelling errors, and a few extremely basic grammar errors. I then tried to use the checking/editing function in the program--nothing. So, I asked a student to help me. After trying to do it I realized that there is only a spelling checking feature--there is NO ENGLISH GRAMMAR checking function . . . it can only check KOREAN grammar--imagine my surprise . . .

I cannot take students to task for not knowing the limitations of a program that most if not all Koreans use for word processing. I also cannot criticize them for using the program when they have not been explicitly instructed to use the MS Word English version for writing texts, and editing them.

Some people would tell me to give up and resign myself to the fact that this is the way of things in Korea. I disagree.

If enough people in Korea change their English writing methods, and begin to use the MS Word English, or even just the MS Word Korean version (though there seem to be some bugs in that too) then a critical mass could be achieved in order to cause a 'microcosmic' paradigm shift in the arena of English writing in Korea.

Think about it.

Or maybe I'll just call upon the NEMESIS OF NEGLECT . . .

Cartoon, with poem, "Punch, or The London Charivai" published September 29, 1888.

Caption & poem lyrics:

THE NEMESIS OF NEGLECT.

"There floats a phantom on the slum's foul air,

Shaping, to eyes which have the gift of seeing,

Into the Spectre of that loathly lair.

Face it--for vain is fleeing!

Red-handed, ruthless, furtive, unerect,

'Tis murderous Crime--the Nemesis of Neglect! "

J