A stitch in time ...
Gomer, the older I get, the more interested I am in discovering why very smart people sometimes make very obvious and simple mistakes (and I don't mean errors in the cockpit).
Some years back I was appalled at the quality of written English from my UK subsidiary company. I did some research and then tried some remedial actions.
The research showed (in my subsidiary company only) that my employees who are smart but couldn't write or spell properly tend to:
1. Come from a background of attending public (GOVT funded) schools.
2. Have parents who are blue collared or see little value in excelling in education in general.
3. Not read widely themselves.
So, with the help of an English educator, we introduced evening classes, made available wonderful books that taught people how to "Write to the Point" and we provided cash incentives for tertiary schooling.
The result? Well, I found the writing and spelling standards did improve, but not remarkably. Verbosity, repetition, etc all surfaced again and again.
The conclusion I drew from all this is that if you do not educate properly right from Kindergarten to say, the 10th year of schooling the foundation to learn how to write and spell properly is generally lost forever. Of course, all this applies only to my emperical findings and no more. I don't pretend to be an expert on the subject.
Great forum on the subject of resumes versus actual personality!