5) Send me a rough draft. While I reserve the right to not look over a paper because of time constraints (i.e., you send it the night before), I generally will try to block out time to read your work and make suggestions.

Writing is not a hard exercise, but it must be constantly done; and there are rewards. Take it from someone who used to work as management in the "real world"--if I (or my colleagues) received an application with grammatical errors or misspelled words, those applications immediately went into "file 13." They were trashed. Is this fair? Absolutely. From an employer's perspective, if an applicant cannot take the time to make sure their application presents them in the best light possible, then they likely will not make a good employee. The same is true for professional jobs where a cover letter and resume are required with a job application. Typos, misspellings, and unclear sentences are easily the difference between two qualified candidates.

Thus, learn how to find and fix these errors now. It could be the difference between employment at a job paying $60,000 a year with nice benefits or working at Sonic for the next 10 years of your life! It could also be the difference between a nice kind koala as a pet for your kids and a homicidal bear who will eat all of your food and then kill you!

koala example from Lynne Truss' Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, Gotham Books, 2004.