I'm OK, your not OK

A friend pointed this out to me in an email: Our fine, proud, local community college, the College of Southern Nevada, has this banner across its web site home page: "While your [sic] focused on learning, we're focused on you."

I guess if you attend school there and have to do a term paper, you can be pretty sure that bad spelling and punctuation won't be counted against you.

Addendum

I was looking over the list of top administration in order to find somebody to whom I could send a taunting email about this gaffe. In the process, I came across this paragraph describing the functions of one Larry Mason, "Interim Director of Diversity & Inclusion":

Provide leadership, guidance, and coordination for the college’s diversity
efforts. The Office of Equity & Inclusion was established to
address diversity and multiculturalism related issues. Those issues include
access, equity, retention, and recruitment for faculty and students.
Additionally CSN will facilitate professional development for diversity as it
pertains to Culture, Race, Gender and Religion and their impact in the classroom
and campus. As CSN and the Nevada increases it’s population of international
students and diverse students, we will work diligently to prepare our future
workforce to compete in a global marketplace and to establish bridges between
CSN and K-12

Wow. Let's proofread that together, shall we?

First sentence: This is actually a sentence fragment, not a sentence, as it has no subject.

Second sentence: "[M]ulticulturalism related" should be hyphenated.

Fourth sentence: This needs a comma after "Additionally." It is silly and pretentious to capitalize any of the four nouns used. There is no serial comma used after "Gender," though one was used in the previous sentence after "retention." One can argue for or against that function for the comma, but at least be consistent, and either use it every time or omit it every time.

Fifth sentence: "The Nevada"? What is that, a river or something? Since when do states get referred to as "the"? ("I'm going down to the Florida to see Disney World!") "[I]ncreases": you've got a double subject in this sentence ("CSN and the Nevada"); assuming that the intention is to speak about the increase in the population of both of them, this should read "increase," rather than "increases." "[I]t’s population": Ugh. Who had the bright idea of sticking an apostrophe in there? The possessive pronoun should be "their," anyway, since we're dealing with the same double subject. Finally, there is no period at the end of the sentence.

Maybe I should be cautious about pointing out all of these problems. They'll probably go running to the legislature saying we need a tax increase so that they can hire a proofreader.

When I worked in an office job in about 1982, typewriters with memory functions were still not common. Our office didn't have one, and I was given the task of researching the available equipment so that our office could purchase one. I remember receiving in the mail a letter advertising one model, bragging about how easy the machine would make production of perfect documents. I even remember the manufacturer: it was the ill-fated "Qwip" division of Exxon. But the letter containing these boasts was chock-full of misspellings and other typographical errors. I found maybe 20 of them, then mailed it on to my father for his amusement. He found several more than I had overlooked. He gave it to his secretary, who found one or two more that we had both missed.

You might guess: We did not buy a Qwip system. We bought an IBM. Poor mechanics of writing give a terrible impression of a business, especially one trying to sell word-processing equipment. Bad writing similarly gives a horrible impression of an alleged institution of higher learning. If you come out of CSN with a diploma, but unable to write a competent sentence in English, was your tuition money really well spent?

In putting this kind of crap on its web site, CSN is basically announcing to the world that as an institution it doesn't give a damn about the basics of English usage. One might wonder why that is, but I sure as hell don't have an answer.