The London Telegraph reports on England's schools minister--whose blog is a striking record of his own inattention to spelling and editing:

The Labour MP's website was also found to contain typing errors and grammatical oversights.

The mispellings of Mr Knight, who was educated at Cambridge University, include "maintainence", "convicned", "curently", "similiar", "foce", "pernsioners", "reccess" and "archeaological".

Mr Knight, who is responsible for raising education standards, also clearly has problems with the "i before e, except after c" spelling rule taught to primary school pupils.

He spelled "achieving" and "received" incorrectly.

Mr Knight, 43, gives his opinions on local and national issues regularly on his website, which reveals he attended the fee-paying Eltham College, in Mottingham, south east London.

He went on to study geography, and social and political sciences at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, from 1984 to 1987.

Mr Knight, MP for Dorset South, said: "When I was at school the teachers told me to always check my work. While my spelling is generally pretty good, I need to focus more on checking."

Rob Wilson, the Conservative education spokesman, said: "He will be disappointed with his efforts in class but I'm sure he'll make every effort to improve now teacher has noticed he's falling behind."

Words the education minister got wrong:

maintainence (maintenance)
convicned (convinced)
curently (currently)
similiar (similar)
foce (force)
pernsioners (pensioners)
reccess (recess)
archeaological (archeological)
acheiving (achieving)
receieved (received)

In one entry, Mr Knight talks of his pride at steering through Parliament the legislation raising the education or training age to 18.
He says: "This is something that Winston Churchill first proposed 100 years when he put forward the idea of raising the age to 17, then another attempt to raise the leaving age after the First and Second World Wars."

Later he writes: "While there has been a lot going on with respect to problems regarding the Educational Maintainence Allowance and tidying up after the problems with the SATs, there is also a lot of positive things going on in our schools."

"The new diplomas are being taught very successful ...".

[...]

The heading of Mr Knight's blog includes the verb "to feedback".

Corrections were being made to old blog entries on the website on Thursday morning.

There's not being able to spell, punctuate, edit -- and there's not caring whether your spelling, grammar, and typing are correct. They are two things, but they overlap quite a bit, not least because if you are a crap speller (or a crap punctuator, or a crap crafter of syntax), you won't be able to see your own mistakes, and you won't necessarily appreciate the difference between what you write and what's correct.

It's hard to get people who don't take language seriously to start doing it. And it doesn't help that students aren't reliably held to account by their teachers. There is one thing that I found works quite well, though, to help students grasp the nature of the embarrassment and judgment they can unwittingly incur if they don't attend to those details. They pretty much get it if you say that not being able to tell if you are producing correct prose is the linguistic equivalent of walking around with your fly down--and not having the capacity to identify or correct the problem.

Aside: at the boarding school where I spent the 2004-05 year, the head of school was quite blunt about why they did nothing to try to improve students' grammar and spelling, arguing (erroneously) that such things just turn kids off reading and school. He was surprised--and I think perhaps a bit offended--when my colleague and I introduced grammar lessons into our English and writing courses. The students loved it, and asked for more. Then we introduced SAT verbal prep classes on Wednesday nights--which also included plenty of grammar study, along with vocabulary lessons. The kids brought snacks, they filled the room, they learned a lot, and we all had a blast, especially when it came to the vocabulary flash cards. I kid you not. Kids are fun. And so is learning. So ... good times were had by all.

Via University Diaries.