Utopia Means Nowhere

I just finished taking an online grammar test for a company called Talentopia. Evidently, I failed. Within 5 minutes of submitting it, I received an email that said, “After very careful consideration of your knowledge, skills, and abilities, we are unfortunately unable to move you forward to the next step in our selection process.” Obviously, this was a completely automated reply. If it wasn’t, then God help us all. But whether I was rejected by human or machine, I suppose I should be somewhat grateful that a corporation that replaces the “U” in “utopia” with “talent” doesn’t want me. After all, that you means “no.”

I could not resist, however, responding to their email. The line I cited practically begged me to do so. In no way could their consideration have been careful. There is not a chance that my knowledge, skills, and abilities put me in a remedial category. They gave me a dozen sentences, and I edited them. This is an exercise I used to do with my first year writing classes every other week. I would take sentences from student papers that could use a little help and compile them onto a sheet of paper (without attribution, of course), and, as a class, we would work collectively on editing them for grammar, clarity, and style. I often pointed out that many sentences can use more than a revision of comma placement. Virtually every sentence U-talent-topia gave me needed much more than minor tweak, so I went ahead and actually revised them, an act that good writers or editors would actually take as a sacred mission. Too bad for me. Now my resume is on file. If I get a response to my follow up email to the Talentopia Team, I’ll happily let you know all about it. I’m not hopeful, however.

After all, I did spend the better part of 30 years wrangling writing in some of the higher echelons of academia. I have also spent a number of years working with the functionally illiterate on a daily basis. I guess the topos that the corporation seeks is some sweet spot in the middle of the two. Whatever algorithm they used to evaluate me (and please let it me an algorithm and not a former student; how shameful would that be for me?) probably, I’m guessing, thought I took things too far. I mean, I do make a distinction, fussy as it may be to most people, between “since” and “because.” I’m sensitive to misplaced modifiers that make me laugh. I have a thing about the subject of a sentence being displaced behind too many dependent clauses and prepositional phrases. I have always, and will forever, have a bias against grammar checking algorithms in word processing programs; they are fine if you have struggle with stringing together a complex sentence, but they don’t actually produce “good” writing, only the mass produced prose of mediocrity. If I had let Grammarly respond to my students’ writing, my life would have been so much easier. I simply could have claimed that I was placing them in the top 2% of the talent pool without having to work at putting them into that elite. All those evenings and Sundays spent under the crush of editing exceptionally ordinary writing could have been transformed to pure leisure. Talk about Utopia! On the other hand, if we were to rely on Grammarly to do something like that, there would have been no need to employ me in the first place. Apparently, we are at that stage now.

When people write to me, I’m actually very good at reserving judgment about their prose styles. We all have our own ways to expression, or at least we used to, and that is was makes (made?) expression beautiful and valuable. If you ask me to edit and rewrite, however, that’s exactly what I’m going to do in a substantive way. That’s where knowledge, skills, and abilities really make a difference, unless you don’t actually want to stand out or don’t really want to make an effort seriously to evaluate what you have. Just as post-prison, government-provided “therapy” simply presumes you are a antisocial personality type as diagnosed by the DSM 5 (what used to be called a “sociopath”), writing “talent” seems to imply that you should fix the comma but accept the rest of the gibberish you are given. The norms of normal are powerful and reductive things. Nowhere is that more clear than here.