I don't care how people write - grammatically or otherwise - on a social forum like Mudcat. (What they write is a different matter).

In a different environment - before I retired from the day job - I was responsible for a great deal of staff recruitment and, over the course of many years, read thousands of application forms from prospective employees. I didn't do this on my own but always involved the person who would be the line manager of the person in the post, plus another senior member of staff from a different section. All in the interests of fairness, and all part of the recruitment policy.

One thing that caused regular comment and discussion, and occasional disagreement, was the presentation of the application form and the quality of the spelling, grammar, syntax, etc. My contention was that a well presented, neat and correctly spelled application - setting out what the person could bring to the job and why they wanted it, etc., etc. - was one indicator of their potential approach to work. Others felt - also quite rightly - that the content of the application was paramount, and that sloppy grammar and spelling could be discounted to a certain extent.

And, to a certain extent, we were all right! All indicators had to be taken into consideration, and it was, in the end, perfectly feasible to forgive some presentation errors if other and more important qualities shone through.

To put all that into context - just to show that we were weren't a bunch of nitpicking bores - I should point out that, for a single post advertised, we usually had between 100-150 applications. We had to try to bring this down to a shortlist of a maximum of 6-8 people - any more than this number was often difficult to manage - and we had to be able to justify our choices should any of the unselected applicants feel like phoning up and asking why they hadn't been shortlisted.

It was sometimes heartbreaking to have to reject good (and often desperate) people, but there was just one post available. Tougher than the judgement of Solomon - at least he only had to choose between two possibilities!