Hi Donna,
If you have to ask who would put a grub on a griddle, I suspect that you were insulated from the world of young boys camping in the great outdoors.
As for your secretary's reluctance to observe proper punctuation, it's worth pointing out again that if read aloud her efforts would sound the same-- no one listening can hear the two beautifully placed apostrophes in this sentence.
Along the same lines, Bert has mentioned his dislike of alot instead of a lot and vomitting spelled with the extra -t-. Again, no one can hear the difference when the words are read aloud.
Andrew Jackson — 'It is a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word.'
***
However, if you truly wish to for the fly-specks to be properly placed by your secretary, the Munich Taxi study comes to mind.
A Munich taxi company grew tired of its drivers damaging the fleet.
Hoping for a solution, they engaged a university to study the results of adding anti-lock brake systems.
Half the fleet was given ABS systems and stickers proudly stating so.
Unknown to the drivers, measuring devices were installed in all the cars, and their data was supplemented by university observers pretending to be ordinary fares.
The result was a classic illustration of risk homeostasis, the behavior of adjusting risks, real or perceived, to the same level that we are comfortable with.
Both instruments and observers showed that drivers seeing the ABS stickers drove faster, followed other cars more closely, braked harder, swerved more abruptly, and so on--they felt protected by their ABS and therefore increased their risks.
The same thing was shown on a much larger scale when ABS first came out and insurance companies offered reduced premiums for the wonderful new technology that improved braking in emergencies.
The insurance companies quickly stopped offering lower premiums because they found that the ABS made no difference in actual crashes, partly because many crashes happen so quickly that no one even hits the brakes, partly because the improved braking only meant that that the car hit something at 25 mph instead of 27 mph, and mostly because people increased their risky driving because they felt comfortable behind the shield of an ABS sticker.
How does the Munich taxi study apply to your secretary's reluctance to improve her punctuation?
The company gave up trying to solve the problem through technology and simply made the drivers pay for damage to the taxis, an obvious trick that led to more taxis being in service instead of in the repair shop.
You could, of course, threaten to fire your secretary over punctuation, but that seems like overkill.
If she has to put a quarter into a jar for each mistake that you catch, she might improve with surprising speed, particularly if she thinks that the proceeds go to some worthy cause instead of flowing back to her.
If she does improve, you can always give her the jar of quarters back and tell her that she's the worthy cause.
I should warn you that this approach looks good in fiction, but in real life it can be the straw that breaks the camel's back and loses you an otherwise excellent secretary.
