The grammar detective

It was the missing “S” that aroused my first suspicions. Not so much missing, as supplanted by that exotic and feral “Z”. I wondered what self-respecting Australian entity would spell its name American-style - organiZation - rather than with the “s” that is the proud remnant of this country’s British origins.

Recently, I’ve had some casual work marking assignments for a tertiary-level professional writing course. Students were asked to find a suitable scholarship to apply for, and to complete and hand up the result. It was a “real world” task.

Some of the students had located a scholarship program that required applicants to write only a short essay on a general topic. They had written their essays and e-mailed them in, but without any accompanying information. Thinking the assignments were incomplete, I went to my old friend Google and keyed in the name of the scholarship granting body.

I was lucky. There it was, first hit. The site itself was a vision of loveliness in shades of green with gold and white text. The home page was illustrated by a large photograph conjuring up the ideal university lifestyle. A couple of student types with backpacks in the foreground were headed for the front entrance of a stately red brick Georgian-style building. Engraved above the entrance was the building’s name: “BAKER”.

What campus might this be, I wondered. Reading on, I winced. “Hundreds of scholarships have been awarded to date. You Can Be Next”. This promiscuous use of upper case is painful to the trained eye.

On and on it babbled. “We will be giving out $42,000 in scholarships to Australian residents to study in Australia or outside Australia - our largest sum of scholarship awards to date!”

Now, exclamation marks should be used with restraint. This example was bad form, I thought. As for “largest sum of scholarship awards”, it just didn’t sound right. Was “sum” the collective noun for awards? Application essays could be submitted by “postal mail”. I shuddered at the tautology.

Then I clicked on the “Essays” link. Another page adorned with images of students - this time all gowned up and celebrating their graduation.

“Write an essay of 500 words minimum, and 1000 maximum using one of the three subject choices below. Discuss your viewpoints, and give examples as applicable.”

“As applicable”… ugly.

“We are looking for a student's ability to be creative, analytical, and original; there is no right or wrong response.”

Surprisingly loose criteria, these.

Essay option 3 was: “Write an essay addressing the question ‘If you could change one law, or one piece of legislation, what would it be and why.’”

Note to self: no question mark.

Curiouser and curiouser. What academic would frame an essay question in that way, I asked myself. Sounded more like a quiz show.

Changing tack, I went back to Google and into Google Images. Where did these images come from? The key words “Baker”, and “college” led me to the answer: all the images were identical to those on the website of Dartmouth College in the US.

No wonder they didn’t look dinki-di! (Yes, very occasionally exclamation marks are the right punctuation choice.)

The website colour schemes and layout were also dead ringers for Dartmouth’s.

After emailing Dartmouth College to alert them to this odd coincidence, I went to the scholarship site’s “Rules” section, fetchingly illustrated with a feather headdress. The internal logic of this section was pitiful: “If either of the six (6) winners …” when there are six options, the word is “any”, not “either”.

Consistency was lacking, too. “The odds of winning depend on the total number of entries received at the conclusion of the contest.” Contest? Hang on …

If this were a true scholarship granting program, I decided, I would eat my thesaurus.

Something more sinister may be closer to the truth. The organiZation may be after the $16 processing fee demanded. There were two payment options for this fee: a money order sent c/o a Sydney law firm or, alternatively, credit card details could be submitted to a “secure” website.

Investigating further, I have discovered that “scholarship scams” are big business in the US. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission website says about 10 per cent of Internet traffic may be fraudulent and lists the telltale signs. Among them: exclamation marks, CAPITAL LETTERS, poor spelling and badly phrased sentences.

About ten Australian university websites were linked to this dubious scholarship program. It’s easy to be taken in. Just remember, if the grammar stinks, something may well be rotten.