Teacher schools Trump on letter-writing etiquette

Teacher schools Trump on letter-writing etiquette

A teacher from Atlanta was not happy with the quality of a letter she received from the White House, and she decided to take action. 

yvonne mason letter
Facebook/Yvonne Mason

When you interact with the government, you expect a certain level of propriety. Even if responses are not prompt, you do expect them to have an official tone that puts your mind at ease. 

In 2018, the year of Donald Trump as President of the United States, one woman found out the hard way that the government is decidedly not what it used to be. 

Former teacher Yvonne Mason received a letter from the White House and, to say the least, she was not impressed.

Before considering the contents of the letter (which was in response to her request for President Trump to meet with parents at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida following the school shooting that took place there), Yvonne considered its structure, and took it upon herself to correct the many glaring errors in the text. 

Once a teacher, always a teacher, it seems, as the now-retired schoolteacher took a pen and a highlighter to the official letter and pointed out "redundancies, faulty capitalisation, and lack of clarity and specificity" among other errors. 

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Yvonne posted the letter to Facebook, saying that she would be sending the letter back to the White House. 

Yvonne even went as far as giving the sloppy official response a letter grade: "If it had been written in middle school, I'd give it a C or C-plus. If it had been written in high school, I'd give it a D."

It has emerged that President Trump's tweets are purposely peppered with grammatical errors by staff writers, and it is highly likely that it was not the man himself who wrote the letter.

But that will not deter Yvonne, who has been a dedicated rhetorical activist - writing letters to officials to persuade them to address serious issues - for many years. 

Yvonne will likely not receive a response to her corrections, but perhaps someone at the Oval Office will take her notes to heart. 

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