A fun new game

We have a Fulbright-Berlin listserve, and I received an email the other day that I wanted to share with you:


Hey Name,

whats up? is ben harper coming to berlin? if so, where is this at? id be interested.

thanks,
firstname surname
fulbright english teaching assistant, berlin 0´6-07


Now let's play "Count the Grammatical Errors."

Including capitalization and punctuation, I count a whopping 18 errors. (In my generosity, I didn't count his failure to capitalize his own name as a mistake; I also assumed the misplaced apostrophe in "0'6-07" was a typo and counted only one error, since it should be '06-'07, as I'm sure you all knew.) Eighteen errors in 28 words! That's a "Fehler-Quotient" of 64! That's really bad!

Let's step back and think about this for a minute. If you look at the competition statistics you will see that there were more than 200 applications for the 80 TAships to Germany. If the author of the atrocious awful embarrassing email above was selected as an English teacher, I shudder to think what the other 133 applicants were like.