What do you do when someone thinks that they have talent...and they don't?

Ok, so today's post is really more of a question out to all of you, but I would like to hear from you.  I'm sure that you've all been to a bar or just listened to someone in a car...attempting to sing and they're tone deaf?  Or been out dancing and there are people who think that they can dance, but they look like frogs in a blenders?

yeah...

So, this is a similar quandary.  What do you do when you have a group of people at work who think that they can write and want to "help" you out with the big writing assignment?  Specially, my boss very directly asked me to write the content for a website.  This content includes the PR-type sales write-ups of previous projects to showcase the company.  I interviewed the project managers and spent three days working on the blurbs.  It's frankly tricky to write PR/sales blurbs because you want to tease the audience with just enough information, but not give them the whole story- you want them to contact you for the rest of the story.

I know you can see this coming.  So, after the boss specifically told me to write-up all of the project histories, specifically ME, and specifically all of them for consistency, he provided "updates" to the blurbs when I told him that I had finished writing them up.  I asked for a content review and I got a style update.  And it wasn't exactly "great".  It seems to run rampant in this company that people can't spell or conjugate verbs or use punctuation correct.  I'm not talking about whether or not to use an em or en dash or ellipsis, I'm talking about "the companys IT Team", when it should be "the company's IT Team".  I'm talking about noun/verb mismatches ("I is", "we is"...you get the idea).

This must happen to other people.  I know it happens to my husband.  He has to work with clients directly and the clients often want updates that decrease the quality of the product.  I've always just told him to run with whatever the client wants because it's what they want and they're paying.  But now that I'm in the same seat, I find that advice difficult to swallow.

I find that poor writing skills are particularly prevalent here in Minnesota compared to the area of California where I grew up.  My first semester teaching college, I used to give short-answer questions.  I was always impressed with the ABSOLUTELY INDECIPHERABLE ANSWERS.  And I don't just mean the handwriting.  I mean that it understanding the wandering, groping answers was made particularly difficult by spelling and grammatical problems. The whole semester, I spent hours, HOURS trying to understand those answers and providing grammatical corrections.  They were all ignored. (Yes, I quickly embraced the Scan-tron, as well).

So, now I work in IT with this same group of people (symbolically) that I used to teach and I find that they still have not improved, but now these people wield the power and in order to keep the peace, I just have to take their "suggestions".

Well, readers?  Share the grief.