August 17, 2008 – It’s one thing for residents and bloggers and sites like Marina City Online to criticize the spelling and grammar of Marina Towers Condominium Association. We wanted to get the opinion of an expert, like an actual high school English teacher. We found Karolyn, an English teacher at a college prep high school in Chicago. We asked her to grade the most recent memo about the Air & Water Show – and comment on the infamous August 8 “Exercise Facility Survey.”

“This is a horrible memo,” she said about the survey. “Did anyone proofread this?”

MCO counted 14 errors in the one-page document. Karolyn found a 15th error, a stray comma between “Illinois” and the outdated zip code at the top of the page.

Karolyn says the August 8 memo would get an F. “Absolutely, they’d have to re-do it.”

The Air & Water Show memo showed some improvement. She gave it a C+ for content and a D for grammar and mechanics. “Organization seems off,” Karolyn writes in the margin of the memo. “Consider moving all sentences regarding security into one paragraph. Also consider using pronouns in place of the repetitive ‘guard.’”

(Click on image above to view larger version)

Areas she recommends they work on include consistency of punctuation and capitalization. For example, since Observation Deck is capitalized in the memo, Bridge Level Entries should be capitalized, too. Or, don’t capitalize either – but at least be consistent.

She recommends the author of the MTCA memos read the memo out loud to someone else. It would flush out peculiar phrasing such as a rating scale of “1 being your biggest hate to 7 being your least gripe.”

Karolyn counted 20 items in the one-page memo that are either incorrect or could stand improvement.

Presumably, MTCA memos are written by employees of Draper and Kramer, which receives from MTCA a monthly fee of $10,287 to manage the residential property at Marina City.

 MCO critiques MTCA Exercise Facility Survey