10th December 2011, 01:57 PM
Martin Locock Wrote:I think spelling and grammar is not a valid reason to request a contractor to amend a report.
Oh, I completely agree that the curator probably wouldn't be justified in refusing a report simply on the basis of poor spelling or grammar. However, I would expect them to mention it, to give the contractor the opportunity to amend it. Similarly, I'd expect the contractor to want any report going out under their name to be as good as possible, and correcting spelling and grammar is a very simple fix.
Like Dinosaur, I've seen a lot of grey lit reports that appear to either have been written by people with a fairly sketchy grasp of the English language, or who simply didn't care enough about it to bother proof-reading the thing before it was sent. Whenever I read one of these, I cringe that the contractor was prepared to put their name to such a poorly-written piece of work - I sometimes think that the curator probably passed it on the basis that if the contractor was happy to supply a document that made them look a bit stupid and careless, there's no reason to bother asking them to correct these errors as the only benefit would be to make the contractor look better.
The detail of the report may be clear, but a report that's riddled with basic mistakes gives such a poor impression of general standards of literacy in the archaeological profession. If I was a developer and had paid for a report that was badly written and full of basic spelling mistakes, I'm not sure how happy I'd be at such an apparently slipshod production. I don't expect every report to be a beautifully-crafted example of literary genius, but in an age where almost all reports will be composed on a word-processing package, there's very little excuse for basic spelling mistakes.
I do appreciate that this makes me sound like a right miserable old git! I don't know, kids today, blah, blah, blah
You know Marcus. He once got lost in his own museum