Friday, November 04, 2005

Spacing Really Does Matter

As children learn to read and write you teach them that for words to make sense to the reader, it’s important to put spaces between the words. However, when you teach anything above first grade, you don’t really think much about the spaces between the words.

I was walking down the hall when I saw a comical reminder that spacing really does matter.

Halloween is a big deal at my school. We have a costume parade complete with teachers in costume and parents lining the halls taking pictures and videos of the big event. It really is big deal. We also have a hallway decoration contest between the classrooms, and while there isn’t any actual prize, winning is a big deal to the students.

The winning Intermediate class had an elaborate wall decorated with bats and spiders hanging from a spooky looking tree and floating ghosts that had scary messages written on them.

I walked by this board 10 times or more a day for a full week, but after my initial inspection of the work they had done, I really never paid much attention to it.

As I walked by yesterday, I was casually reading and rereading some of the ghosts’ messages when one message grabbed my attention. See if you can fix the spacing errors and decipher this ghost’s message.

"Go shits a ghost!"

Yep, spacing really does matter!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Missing punctuation is at least as much to blame and the spacing there.