I never liked French poetry, either
I guess that BJ and I might ever stand accused of schadenfreude, as we delight occasionally in others’ mistakes in various documents. But I couldn’t help but note the recent article in the Times about an annual ‘exam howlers’ competition.
Here are but a few examples:
- the politics student at Bristol who remarked that the US had the most advanced fighting forces in the world, possessing “highly developed and powerful marital equipment”
- the biology student at Staffordshire University, who submitted a paper on “The Science of Gnomes” – when the topic was supposed to have been “The Science of Genomes”
- the final-year student’s commentary on a medieval French poem, which observed “that all of the sentences end in a coma”.
I’m sure we’ve all had similarly dismal content contributed for our proposals in the past! Do share any examples in the Comments section…
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In a recent proposal, one of my esteemed colleagues had penned the following: “Our company is one of the largest firms in the Untied States.” Note: Our company designs maps.
Not exactly howlers but I’ll never forget the eight-page section of text that was once submitted else to me as a list of bullet points and nothing else.
There was also the other fellow who wrote several chapters of a bid using an ampersand instead of the word “and”. When queried he said he wasn’t aware that the ampersand wasn’t a “proper” word…
Funny…I had someone tell me the other day that they didn’t capitalize something because “it wasn’t a proper word.” : )