I understand where Kyle Wiens was coming from in his essay “I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here’s Why” but his points and his style of writing still made me feel quite sad. Wiens’ point was that he will not hire anyone who uses improper grammar or spelling because that means that they are not meticulous or detail-oriented enough for his standards. While this does make sense on a surface level, it is also kind of an objective dick move. A lot of people struggle with grammar for reasons like being a second-language learner or having a learning disability (which Wiens does mention as being taken into consideration) but even beyond that some people just naturally have a hard time with it. It does not make someone less valuable as a human being to have poor grammar, and to fully pass over what could be essential employees because of a small error like that seems downright harsh.
One must also take into consideration how those who are not intimately familiar with English from birth must feel about people like Wiens’ standards. Carmen Bugan, a Romanian immigrant and writer, discussed her issues with people holding the English language to these standards in her essay “Being an immigrant writer in America today” She specifically brings up how immigrants have the capacity to bring something fresh to the English language that native speakers can not. Carmen’s main point though is that English has stagnated and allowing immigrants to introduce their own quirks and flourishes from their native languages would allow English to grow and change.
I read Wiens’ article first. I then read Bugan’s article. After finishing Bugan’s I went back and read Wiens’ again. Upon reading Wiens’ article for a second time, I realized that many of the things he was saying felt inherently xenophobic. To think that his own personal brand of English (which happens to be shared by the upper-class white sect of America) is superior to all others is deeply disrespectful. In fact, it was the very same sort of rhetoric used by The Nazi Party in the 1930s that allowed them to manipulate people and oppress those who they deemed “Inferior” to them. Some may say that I am making a mountain out of a molehill, but this casual prejudice can easily snowball into sweeping real-world events like The Holocaust. America was founded on the idea that people could express themselves however they wanted, and attempting to limit that with “Grammar Tests” is not only unhelpful, but also unamerican.
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