Nobody is perfect. Everyone makes mistakes when writing—typos, grammatical errors, silly misspellings, not noticing that auto correct has “fixed” your nephew’s name (Dex, with a "D" auto correct!) until after you’ve sent the text. I myself am absolutely terrible at putting commas after prepositional phrases at the beginning of a sentence while I am typing, (most of the time it’s because I rewrite the sentence 8 times, combine with four other sentences and then move it to the opening paragraph because that’s where that idea really should be anyway) but that’s what editing is for: to catch, and fix, mistakes before it’s too late.
I don’t care about informal writing. If it tickles your fancy in informal writing to throw in numerals, or drop vowels, or only write every third letter that’s fine by me—with the one giant caveat that you get your point across with a minimum of fuss for your intended audience. Because communication is the point of writing. Which brings me to my point. WHY CAN’T PEOPLE WRITE? I'm not talking about small children, these are college and graduate school educated people. In my day, a missing Oxford comma was grounds for Comment (yes, with a capital C!) from the professor, and ridicule from classmate. Then again, I was educated in Scotland where we had undergraduate gowns, and ran into the north sea at dawn on May 1, and they whacked us on the head with a bit of leather at graduation. Perhaps an American education is less strict about punctuation.
For most of the last two years I have been working a variety of temp jobs, I’ve been in HR in offices and universities, I’ve worked in law school admissions, and I’ve worked with college students seeking employment. In nearly all the positions I’ve worked in the last two years, cover letters and resumes have crossed my desk on their way to hiring managers, and admissions officers. With that many cover letters crossing my desk, I expect to see the occasional mistake, the key word there being OCCASIONAL. The number of times I have seen the sentence “my interest was peaked…” is no longer a statistically probable typo, it’s a choice people are making. While it is entirely possible all of those people did, in fact, mean that their interest had either reached a summit or was sickly looking, I feel the more likely scenario is that they simply don’t know the difference between “peaked” and “piqued”. I always have a nasty little urge to write to them saying “While enjoying a delicious piquéd1 chicken sandwich at lunch, I peeked2 at your cover letter; my interest was piqued3 by your use of “peaked”4, is it possible you picked the wrong homophone?.” I always imaging a confused look followed by their head exploding.
1 adj. of meat, flavored with strips of bacon, larded.
2 v. to glance at, to pry (among many other meanings)
3 adj. characterized by an arousal of a feeling, esp. curiosity or interest (among many other meanings, none synonymous with “peaked”)
4 adj. (1) having reached a peak or point, (2) sickly looking
