Journal #8

So, we just got done watching "The The Impotence of Proofreading," also known as "The Importance of Proofreading." I thought it was pretty funny and creative. Basically, this guy, Taylor Mall, was doing this three minute and thirty second speech about the dumb mistakes we make while typing papers or essays or whatever. For his entire three minutes and thirty seconds, he acted as if he was reading off of a paper with someone who really sucked at grammar; for example, most of his words were not right. He used "pices" instead of "pieces" and things like that. One thing that I thought was funny is that at the end, he meant to say, "The red pen is your friend," meaning that when spellcheck does the little red underline thing it is there to help you. Since he was trying to show examples of how our stupid mistakes affect what we are trying to say, he instead said, "The red penis your friend." This obviously gives a completely different impression than the one he was trying to make. What struck me as funny, though, is that my friend Alexander Olivero has a brother named Anthony who is a few years older than us. Anthony tells the story of his seventh grade year, when one of his teachers was trying to write on the board, "The pen is red" as a grammar exercise or something. She instead accidentally put the words "pen" and "is" a tad bit too close together, and I think you can figure out what the board read instead. Granted, since these kids were in seventh grade, they all thought this was the most hysterical thing they had ever seen and to this day still laugh about it. This just goes to show how simple spelling or grammar errors can completely change the overall point you were trying to make. I think this guy did a really good job of portraying it in his speech; that would be one difficult thing to memorize. Overall, I thought it was an interesting lesson.