Press releases

That's really not true.

If your job is to write text that is then published, i.e. intended to be read by a large audience, then your spelling and grammar should be good, or you'll be judged by it.

But if you hire someone for such a position - then you *should* look at their english-grades (or other demonstrations of written-communications-skill). It does not make sense to say: This person is bad in physics because he'll sometimes misspell light as ligth.

Your grade in physics, should reflect your demonstrated skill in physics. Language is a nessecary component of that, because it's what you use to demonstrate skill. But other than that, it should not matter.

Consider the case of the foreign student.

Should I get a poorer grade in *every* subject I take in a US-university, merely as a result of my english being worse than the average of natives ?

If my english is poor - give me a poor grade in *english*. Let employers who care about english-skills, judge me on that basis. (maybe that's most of them, maybe not - it depends on many things, such as where I apply for a job!)

But don't tell them: "this guy sucks in math", when that isn't true.

Language is location-dependant anyway. If I apply for a job in USA, my english would be rated as sub-average. If I apply for a job here in Norway, my english is considered substantially better than average.

I have rather less mixed feelings on this topic than you, since I predated by only a few years the mandatory use of computers for written work production in secondary school. Of course computer use was forbidden: handwriting or nothing. If handwriting is slow and painful (I could manage 4wpm on a good day), why then you get marked down in absolutely everything and routinely castigated not just for bad handwriting but for excessive brevity and bad structure, because moving things around required writing them down again, so the first draft is the last draft. (Also a lot of teachers liked forcing us to take dictation, which meant I missed out 80% of what they were saying because I couldn't keep up, though since I couldn't read my own handwriting this was little loss).

When forced to an answer, the people imposing these rules said that good handwriting would always be essential, and that if your handwriting was not good nobody would ever read what you wrote, so it was reasonable to mark you down for every subject if your handwriting was poor. This is, you'll note, exactly the same argument as you're using here, in a slightly different domain, and it is plain that it is absolute nonsense. I never handwrite anything, nor have I in all my working life, and I have never suffered in the least for it. These days, people who handwrite are considered somewhere between eccentric and annoying, and certainly unnecessarily hard to read.

Now English spelling and grammar are harder to automate than typesetting, but it is likely that in a few years or a few decades we'll get there, and then your argument will seem as quaint and plainly flawed as my old teachers' do now.

My rough estimate of the effect of bad handwriting on my percentage-based scores in secondary school was that it halved them. A -> D, right away.

I considered this somewhat unfair at the time. I'd consider similar penalties for bad English to be somewhat unfair.