A retired English teacher in the United States lately received a letter from the White House on behalf of US President Donald Trump and was amazed to see a plethora of grammatical mistakes in it.
A veteran pedagogue in English sent the letter back to the White House after crisscrossing it with scores of corrections.
Yvonne Mason retired last year after teaching English for more than 17 years at schools. She said had it been written by a high-school student, he wouldn’t have passed.
Mason identified incorrect upper case letters in words like “president”, “state” and “federal”. Posting the photo of the corrected version on Facebook, she wrote, “Got a letter from Mr. Trump. Will be returning it tomorrow.” She said, “Federal is capitalised only when used as part of proper noun.” The post quickly garnered a lot of attention and social media users trolled the US president.
The teacher has admitted that the letter might not have been written by Trump himself but still you don’t expect so many blunders in one go. “When you get letters from the highest level of government, you expect them to be at least mechanically correct,” she told Greenville News.
When asked about what grade the letter would get given multiple “silly mistakes”, she said, “If it had been written in middle school, I’d give it a C or C-plus,” she said. “If it had been written in high school, I’d give it a D.”
Not just grammatical errors, Mason said, the letter actually doesn’t even respond to her letter to Trump that she had written in the wake of Florida school’s gun violence. She had written to the president asking him to meet personally with the family members of the victims of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Whereas in response, he only talked about school safety surrounding gun violence.
According to the report, Mason was not happy with the profound use of “I” in the letter either and dubbed it as “stylistically appalling”.
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