[temphn]

The spelling and grammatical errors tell you within 5 seconds that this person is not very intelligent.

  For obvious security reasons, we can’t discuss our 
  technology's detection capability in detail, however TSA 
  conducts extensive testing of all screening technologies 
  in the laboratory and at airports prior to rolling them 
  out to the entire field.

This is a run-on sentence.

  Imaging technology has been extremely effective in the 
  field and has found things artfully concealed on 
  passengers as large as a gun or nonmetallic weapons, on 
  down to a tiny pill or tiny baggies of drugs. 

"on down" is faulty parallelism.

  It’s one of the best tools available to detect metallic 
  and non-metallic items, such as… you know… things that go   
  BOOM.

Two ellipses in one sentence? Leave aside the "BOOM".

  With all that said, it is one layer of our 20 layers of 
  security (Behavior Detection, Explosives Detection 
  Canines, Federal Air Marshals, , etc.) 

Extra comma and the capitalization feels bizarre.

  and is not a machine that has all the tools we need in one 
  handy device. We’ve never claimed it’s the end all be all.

The phrase is "the be all and end all" or "the be-all and end-all". One can go on, but almost every sentence here displays this person's low level of intelligence. Leaving aside the content, it's just poorly written.

The punchline is that the TSA's budget is double that of Facebook's $3.7 billion in revenue. $8.1 billion in tax dollars for a gang of complete morons.

[nollidge]

> This is a run-on sentence.

No, it's not. A run-on is when two or more independent clauses are joined without a conjunction or the like. So "I went the store I bought bread" is run-on. In your example, "however" functions as the conjunction. It may be overly long and unwieldy and could perhaps do with a few more commas, but those are style issues.

> "on down" is faulty parallelism.

"As large as...on down to..." Not sure how that's faulty, sounds fine to my ears. If anything, this sentence should be criticized for seemingly talking about "passengers as large as a gun" at first parse. Not strictly grammatically wrong, but it's painful to make sense of.

> Two ellipses in one sentence?

Also not a grammatical error.

> The phrase is "the be all and end all" or "the be-all and end-all".

Says who, the great deity of idioms? I've heard and read it as "end all be all", although I'd prefer it was rendered as something like "end-all, be-all" or "end-all/be-all".

> Leaving aside the content, it's just poorly written.

Agree 1000%: it's unbecoming, tone-deaf, and totally off-putting. But those are stylistic criticisms, not grammatical ones.

[alanh]

nollidge,

I’m not sure your parent was actually incorrect. Even you agree that his point stands, so your post is not constructive.

[nollidge]

A conclusion reached through faulty reasoning is nothing to be relied on, even if it's coincidentally correct.

It may not have been constructive, but it was deconstructive, and I think that's valuable too.

(did not downvote you, btw)

[corin_]

Thinking that you can judge someone's intelligence by their spelling and grammar is so incredibly wrong. And I don't mean wrong in a moral "don't be that guy" way (though that too), I mean wrong as in technically inaccurate.

[maqr]

"too" ;)

I think there actually is something to be said for PR people having good spelling and grammar.

The way this blog post is written might give the impression that the TSA is not a professional organization. It reflects poorly on the agency. It might lead one to the conclusion that if the public face of the TSA can't communicate effectively, the organization might have other problems as well.

edit: I just looked at the blogger's bio (http://blog.tsa.gov/2008/01/meet-our-bloggers_29.html), here's the interesting bit for context:

> I started with the TSA in September 2002. I worked at the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG) for 5 years and am currently residing at TSA headquarters. I started as a Transportation Security Officer (TSO), and have since been promoted to a Social Media Analyst with the Office of Strategic Communications and Public Affairs to manage and write for the Blog.

[corin_]

> "too" ;)

ARGHH. Despite what I said I fucking hate typos, to the extent that most of my friends now correct their own when texting/IMing just so I don't do it for them.

To the rest of your comment: I completely agree that it reflects badly on the TSA, just not that it means the individual is stupid. Much the same as a company that has a website that looks like it was designed literally by a 6 year old in MS paint has clearly done something moronic, but the fact that they aren't artistic doesn't mean the person who made it is not intelligent.

[tankenmate]

It is a reasonably good hedge, a sufficiently intelligent / shrewd person wouldn't allow themselves to be put in such a situation. It is better to be thought of as a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

[ktizo]

I will make a reasonable bet here that the TSA is the sort of bureaucracy that is likely to see media as something of a joke department that is useful for promoting people sideways into if they are rubbish at doing security theatre.

[mikeash]

PR people should have good spelling and grammar precisely because people will judge intelligence and competence by spelling and grammar. That doesn't mean that judgment is correct, but since it exists, you have to deal with it.

[temphn]

No.

Speaking intuitively, if you can't judge someone's intelligence by their writing ability, what possible measure could you use? Grammatical deficiencies are symptoms of conceptual deficiencies.

Speaking technically, vocabulary tests are some of the most highly g-loaded batteries around:

  Different tests in a test battery may correlate with (or 
  "load onto") the g factor of the battery to different 
  degrees. These correlations are known as g loadings. An 
  individual test taker's g factor score can be estimated 
  using the loadings. Full-scale IQ scores from a test 
  battery will usually be highly correlated with g factor 
  scores. For example, the correlations between g factor 
  scores and full-scale IQ scores from Wechsler's tests 
  have been found to be greater than .95. The g loadings of 
  mental tests are always positive and range from slightly 
  greater than zero to slightly less than unity. Raven's 
  Progressive Matrices is among the tests with the highest 
  g loadings, around .80. Tests of vocabulary and general 
  information are also typically found to have high g 
  loadings.[10]

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_%28psychometrics%29

It's unclear to me what your underlying premises are. We will likely go in circles about whether you believe intelligence can be measured, whether it is meaningful, whether g is a measure of intelligence, whether it differs between individuals and groups, and so on. So let's agree to disagree.

Yet whatever your definition of intelligence, I believe it is hard to deny that the TSA is run by morons.

[dlss]

Grammatical deficiencies can be symptoms of conceptual deficiencies. They can also be symptomatic of getting overly excited, or of discussing very conceptually or emotionally difficult topics. They can be symptomatic of lying. They can also signify which social group you belong to, bro.

To give a more specific critique: vocabulary tests are done in a controlled environment, and hence can not be used to judge the correlation of vocabulary with IQ (or g, etc) in any other environment (unless of course someone has studied this problem and published results).

For example, many otherwise intelligent people exhibit vocabulary deficits, working memory deficits, and many other correlates with stupidity when talking to attractive members of the opposite gender. This doesn't mean that they have a low IQ or g-factor.

In this case, since this was a blog post written at what must have been a very difficult time in this poor TSA blogger's career, I don't think we can really say that their vocabulary is highly indicative of intelligence or g-factor.

That said, I do agree that the TSA is run by morons :p

[CWuestefeld]

Your explanation would suggest that the writer's cognitive abilities (whatever they might be) don't carry over into chaotic or stressful situations (i.e., he falls apart under pressure).

I would submit that this in itself ought to disqualify him from an important position in an agency as putatively critical as the TSA. People working there, especially those in positions of responsibility, ought to be able to work effectively under pressure.

[mikeash]

Why would a TSA blogger need to be able to work effectively under pressure?

[CWuestefeld]

I think the fact that we're all dissecting his work in order to criticize the Agency goes a long way to demonstrating that.

[dlss]

This. Also, anyone that thinks they don't fall apart under pressure is strongly encouraged to look up choking in the psychology literature and/or talk to attractive members of the opposite gender :p

[jorgeleo]

"I speak with an accent, I don't think with an accent" (bonus points for knowing the movie reference).

Grammatically correct phrases are proof of mastering the language, not of IQ. Specially if English is not your mother tongue.

[amirmc]

You're trying to equate doing a vocabulary test with writing for a public audience (and then using that writing as a proxy for judging the individual's intelligence).

Vocab tests and writing skills are not the same.

[ThomPete]

"if you can't judge someone's intelligence by their writing ability, what possible measure could you use?"

Who says you can judge it by their ability to write? That's assuming the conclusion and not very intelligent where I come from.

Also there are many people who write great but have nothing intelligent to say.

[tankenmate]

write well, even...

[derleth]

Grammatical deficiencies are symptoms of conceptual deficiencies.

Assuming you actually know what grammar is as distinct from usage, and don't try to claim someone is less intelligent just because they have a different style of usage from you.

For example, using a split infinitive is not indicative of anything other than the style that person prefers. Same with the passive voice more often than not (assuming the person doing the marking actually knows what the passive voice is, as most of the people who get aggrieved over it do not).

And, of course, if you think someone who speaks a dialect distinct from the prestige dialect must be less intelligent, that says terrible things about your own intellect.

[jonnathanson]

There's at least some correlation. How strong that correlation may be is debatable, and there are always exceptions and extenuating circumstances. But writing is an expression of thought, and as such, its elegance -- or lack thereof -- often reveals quite a bit about the mind of its author.

[onemoreact]

Correlation's don't have to be linear. The correlation could easily be negative at the high end of the IQ scale and positive at the low end of the IQ scale. Great writers don't expose their minds they shape the readers mind though both elegance and fnord.

[jonnathanson]

"Correlation's don't have to be linear."

True.

"The correlation could easily be negative at the high end of the IQ scale and positive at the low end of the IQ scale."

This is conjecture, though. And, while entirely possible, it doesn't necessarily seem to be borne out by available evidence.

"Great writers don't expose their minds they shape the readers mind..."

This is a false dichotomy. "Exposing" one's mind, and influencing someone else's, are not mutually exclusive activities. Furthermore, shaping a reader's mind is not the sole province of the "great" writer. Terrible writers are often capable of influencing people. While I would agree that stronger writers are probably more capable of influence, influence itself is an after-effect of writing and an observational artifact. It is not intrinsic to the written product.

My point is that, since writing is necessarily an act of expression, the strength of one's expression reveals something about the strength of what one is trying to express. It's hard to cleanly separate the two.

Now, I'll readily concede that intelligence is probably not the most important variable in the quality of one's writing. Things like training, education, practice, exposure to other writing (via reading), etc., are far more important. But intelligence is in the equation. Exactly how significant it is is up for debate.

[onemoreact]

the strength of one's expression reveals something about the strength of what one is trying to express

My point is simply that someone like mark twain is able to bend otherwise poor grammar to fit a number of ends. Because the English language so redundant and people are used to imperfect prose you can convey some types of subtext though gibberish more cleanly than you can with perfect prose.

There are plenty of hacks that confuse the issue, but don't confuse pretense with actual mastery.

[jonnathanson]

"My point is simply that someone like mark twain is able to bend otherwise poor grammar to fit a number of ends."

Mark Twain was a master of the English language. We shouldn't confuse his characters' "poor grammar" with his. Huck Finn talks like a redneck because Huck Finn is a redneck. That's not Mark Twain's voice; that's his character's voice.

By contrast, read an essay by Mark Twain. The language and style are markedly different from those of his novels. Sure, there are some allowances for colloquialisms. But those are stylistic choices, not failings to grasp the mechanics of grammar or syntax.

"you can convey some types of subtext though gibberish more cleanly than you can with perfect prose."

It's not about perfect prose; it's about clarity and economy of communication. There's no such thing as "perfect" prose, anyhow. But there are such things as clumsy prose and clear prose, or correct syntax and incorrect syntax. Generally speaking, it's preferable to be on the latter end of those spectra unless writing for particular effect.

[crusso]

I tend to judge people poorly when they use bad grammar. Then again, one of the most brilliant guys I know regularly sends out email messages that are barely decipherable -- much less grammatically correct.

In general, bad grammar makes a bad first impression. I allow them to prove otherwise with the content of what they're saying.

[Sthorpe]

I personally struggle when writing. However, when I write something important, I make sure to have someone proof read it. The message shouldn't be lost by simple grammar errors. And so,...I would say its a intelligence problem.

[c1sc0]

Can you elaborate on how this is technically inaccurate? Is there something like a Flesch-Kincaid test for intelligence?

[corin_]

The simplest answer I can give is that spelling and grammar are basically learned facts, sometimes they are single facts (how to spell a single word), sometimes they are rules ("i" before "e"... which ironically is a mostly incorrect rule, but hey it's just an example). As such, why is Person A considered less intelligent for not knowing how to spell "there" vs. "their" than Person B who doesn't know the date on which Hitler shot himself? Or Person C who doesn't know the triple point of water? Or Person D who never learned what the whole P vs. NP thing is about?

The second reason is, in my opinion, the most important: even if you simplify people down to two categories, "people who have fully grasped all spelling/grammar" and "people who have done their best but still fail to get it right", the only way to say that the second group is less intelligent than the first is to massively simplify intelligence, the same way IQ tests do.

If you're a mathematical genius but have terrible spelling, poor social skills, and basically no skills in anything outside maths, are you intelligent? What about if you're a literary giant whose best-sellers are praised by snobby critics and working class teenagers alike, but who couldn't square 15 without a calculator, are you intelligent?

Here's a quote I like:

"But there has always been something opaque about I.Q. In the first place, there’s no consensus about what intelligence is. Some people think intelligence is the ability to adapt to an environment, others that capacity to think abstractly, and so on."

That's taken from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/14/opinion/14brooks.html?_r=1 which follows nicely on from what I'm saying.

I think I've probably rambled on quite enough, but will just finish on a subjective note. I score high on IQ tests, I'm quick with numbers, I (until getting bored and dropping out of school) got high marks on exams without studying, yet I can think of many people I consider more intelligent than myself who couldn't say what I have just said about myself. Think about it yourself - I think it's unlikely (though possible of course) that you're the most intelligent person you know, even by your own judgement, and of those you rank above yourself, I doubt they all excel in every single area that could be used to judge intelligence.

[cbr]

> "i" before "e"... which ironically is a mostly incorrect rule

Really?

     $ cat /usr/share/dict/words | grep -c ie
     3953
     $ cat /usr/share/dict/words | grep -c ei
     2650

[corin_]

Sorry, it's the "except after 'c'" bit (which I left out) that's mostly incorrect:

  # cat /usr/share/dict/british-english-insane | grep -c cie
  1375
  # cat /usr/share/dict/british-english-insane | grep -c cei
  352

So that works only ~20% of the time.

With the general "i before e"... Is being more often true than false enough to make it a valid "rule"? Using your numbers it's correct ~60% of the time, with my dictionary it's correct ~76% of the time:

  # cat /usr/share/dict/british-english-insane | grep -c ie
  25961
  # cat /usr/share/dict/british-english-insane | grep -c ei
  8255

But even at 3/4, not sure you can call that a good "rule", if it's wrong that often. But of course, that could be swung subjectively if the most used words follow the rule and the least used words break it... which I imagine is the case, since people do still use this rule, but I'm not sure of an easy way to argue the point.

Edit:

I suppose one way would be to assume that british-english-small (with 50083 words compared to insane's 638286) is comprised of the five thousand most used words (which I assume is roughly the logic?)...

Small shows that "i before e" is correct 88% of the time, and "cei not cie" is correct ~27%.

So in fact, limiting to most common words does make both percentages go up, the "except after c" is still much more often wrong than right, and the general "i before e" is... perhaps now high enough to call a good rule? Not sure.

[DanBC]

See the number of people on HN who use it's when they mean its.

See also the people using English as a second language.

I agree that the blog was awful and reflects really poorly on TSA. There is a big difference between simple English or plain English and bad English.

[bane]

Grammar and vocabulary is a learned social construct with peculiarities associated with the social group the grammar is derived from. What is correct in one social group may be wrong in another. For example, my first sentence is incorrect in some social milieus as it finishes with a preposition.

Demonstrating "correct" grammar merely demonstrates memorization of expected social norms ('communicate as the group does') for the group that one is a member of -- or wishes to be a member of. "Incorrect" grammar is not a global quality as all grammar and vocabulary is local with respect to group membership, geography, language exposure, temporal presence, and other factors. In addition there are certain idioms and informal speech present in specific social groups that may not conform to even that own group's peculiar grammar and lexicon!

Grammar and vocabulary are often a type of shibboleth used to demonstrate group membership or to discern group membership of an individual you are evaluating. Quite often pedantic demonstrations of grammarian prescriptivism is merely attempted to assert their social norm on another person of a different social group membership and are often uninformed as to the derivations of the rules they are attempting to impose. In other words, outside of pedagogic concerns, it's a dominance demonstration typical of primates and should generally be considered as nothing more.

[matthew-wegner]

The entire blog post is meant to be as colloquial as possible. What makes you think they wouldn't deliberately include spelling/grammar errors to support this?

[jlujan]

Writing and grammar aside, I think the buddy-buddy way in which the TSA blog is written is condescending. There is a difference between trying to put a friendly face on the TSA and addressing the public in a tone of familiar conversation with pre-teens (no-offense to the youth as they probably see through this BS too). It is arguably worse than the McCarthyisms spewed by Napolitano, Pistole and countless Senators in defense of the tactics.

[kzrdude]

Uneducated. "That's, like, uniquely american!" -G. W. Bush.