Yvonne Mason is a retired English teacher who has spent a rather sizable chunk of her life correcting people’s writing.
Recently, however, she found her correction work going viral when she posted her marked-up version of a letter from the White House, signed by President Donald Trump himself.
“If it had been written in middle school, I’d give it a C or C-plus,” she said in an interview with The Greenville. “If it had been written in high school, I’d give it a D.”
The teacher, who recently retired after 17 years working in South Carolina schools, received the letter in response to one she’d sent with her concerns about school safety following the shooting at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
In her Facebook post with the photo of the letter, Yvonne wrote, “Got a letter from Mr. Trump. Will be returning it tomorrow.”
Photo Credit: Yvonne Mason
Here’s a slightly more enlarged version for those of you who are really curious:
Photo Credit: Yvonne Mason
Among the issues she had with the letter were things like redundancies, improper capitalization, and a general lack of specificity. She says she was very tempted to put a grade on it, but decided to hold back.
“When you get letters from the highest level of government, you expect them to be at least mechanically correct,” she says. Although she acknowledges that the letter was likely written by a staffer, it still doesn’t reflect well on the government as a whole.
Interestingly, a recent report claims that staffers assigned to write various correspondences (including Twitter) on behalf of the President deliberately insert errors into their writing to make it seem like it was composed by the President himself.
