Candidate for a Pullet Surprise
"Candidate for a Pullet Surprise" is a poem by Jerrold H. Zar, based on an earlier short poem by Mark Eckman. It was first published in 1994 in the humour magazine Journal of Irreproducible Results. The poem uses homophones to illustrate the problem of relying on a spell checker. It was widely circulated as a viral email, often in altered form without attribution, and has been reproduced in numerous works on writing, editing, and publishing ethics. Composition Use of electronic mail rapidly increased in the early 1990s. Mark Eckman was working for AT&T, where division had formed over whether a spelling checker should be included in the company's email client. This had devolved into an argument about whether people who couldn't spell should use email. In hopes of inspiring fresh discussion, Eckman wrote a two-verse poem which appeared in AT&T Today, the company's e-mail news digest, in 1991. According to Eckman, the poem had the opposite effect and further polarized the debate, though he soon received "pages of additional verses" by email. Jerrold H. Zar, then the Dean of the Graduate School of Northern Illinois University, was inspired by Eckman's poem and wrote "Candidate for a Pullet Surprise" in 1992.