Kids Improve Writing Online

aelfric35 writes "Ben Franklin advised his son not to allow schooling to interfere with his education. Even though many have disparaged the effects of IM on schoolchildrens' prose, some kids are actually becoming better writers by participating in online communities. Henry Jenkins writes in MIT's Technology Review about how some kids are gaining writing and editorial experience far beyond what their schools can offer by participating in Harry Potter fan fiction forums (sorry about the alliteration)."

Comments

not for me

[joejg]

"...alliteration"? I guess the better writing and vocabulary doesn't apply to me.

Re:not for me

[Nasarius]

Huh?

Go expand your vocabulary.

Y3aH It'S Tru3

[nil5]

I LeArN3d 4ll mah SkillZ OnliNe. it iz teh b3sT wAy d00d!!!

Re:Y3aH It'S Tru3

[ctishman]

C0|_||\|73|257|21|3 6|24/\/\/\/\471(4|_ 4(4|)3/\/\'/

(|_455 0' 2|1

Re: Y3aH It'S Tru3

[Black Parrot]

You misspelled 'y344', looser.

Re: Y3aH It'S Tru3

[cafeman]

"Looser"?

And this on Slashdot. With this article.

Oh, the irony ...

Re:Y3aH It'S Tru3

[Kelerain]

For those than don't speak 1337:

counterstrike grammatical academy

class of 2001

C 0 |_| |\| 7 3 |2 5 7 |2 1 | 3
c o u n t e r s t r i k e

6 |2 4 /\/\ /\/\ 4 7 1 ( 4 |_
g r a m m a t i c a l

4 ( 4 |)3 /\/\ '/
a c a d e m y

( |_ 4 5 5 0' 2 | 1
c l a s s of (o') 2 00 1

Note the K in counterstrike is only a | . I would guess it was intented to be a |

It took me around 10 seconds to read that. I'm not sure if I should be proud or hang myself.

This lesson in leet speak brought to you by the letter 3.

Re:Y3aH It'S Tru3

[rixstep]

I'm not sure if I should be proud or hang myself

Pride is not an honourable alternative.

Hang yourself - just don't make a mess of it. People will have to clean up afterwards.

Re:Y3aH It'S Tru3

[chrismear]

You should hang yourself, man. I mean, c'mon, ten seconds!? You must be getting old.

Re:Y3aH It'S Tru3

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried to read it, I thought "if those damn incompetent kids can read and write this shit, i sure as hell can". However, I thought it said something about Colin Powell and I gave up at about that point.

Re:Y3aH It'S Tru3

[tres]

Note the K in counterstrike is only a | . I would guess it was intented to be a |

When speaking HTML, use a &lt for |337 5p3a|<

or else you will loose your bracket!!!!!1!!11!!!!!!!

Re:Y3aH It'S Tru3

[lisany]

Loose = what Bill Clinton lists as job requirements for interns. Lose = what GWB does at elections.

Subtle difference.

Re:Y3aH It'S Tru3

[tres]

Subtle... now that's irony.

I guess my humor was a little too subtle.

Re:Y3aH It'S Tru3

[Anonymous Coward]

GWB has won every recent major election he has run for.

What's your beef?

Re:Y3aH It'S Tru3

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh, no he hasn't. He tried to run for a texas congressional seat and lost. And don't try and tell me 'he didn't try' or 'that was the old middle-aged drunkard george bush..' bs.

Writing better?

[derrith]

I'm a senior in high school at the moment, and I see a lot of kids who have become disgusted with misspellings and abbreviations. They make it a point to be sure that correct grammar and spelling is utilised, whether online or in the real world. There is a backlash against IM idiocy. However, grammar is still poor, as most kids are not taught the rules of the english language, I'm learning more about sentence construction in my German class than I have in English over the past 13 years.

Re:Writing better?

[MightyPez]

I can't agree more with what you said. I dabbled in Spanish and German in high school. Both classes made me appreciate the intricacies and nuances of language. I had a better appreciation for not only other languages, but my own as well.

And I am most definitely a part of that backlash. When I see "loose" being used in place of "lose", my blood starts boiling.

Of course, none of this excuses my notoriously poor typing skills. Typo-s aplenty!

Re:Writing better?

[Dlugar]

However, grammar is still poor, as most kids are not taught the rules of the english language, I'm learning more about sentence construction in my German class than I have in English over the past 13 years.

I went to a lecture by John Searle a couple of weeks ago, and he made the statement that "You never really learn grammar until you study a foreign language." I think that's very true--I honestly don't think "English grammar" should be taught in schools--teach them Latin, or German, or any other language for that matter--and you'll end up teaching them more about English grammar than they ever would have otherwise learned.

Dlugar

Re:Writing better?

[tommertron]

I tend to think of myself as a fairly good writer, in terms of being able to put a concise sentence together and obey most grammatical rules...

But when I'm messaging... it's like a whole different grammar structure, which I think should be accepted within that context. I don't capitalize in messaging. I rarely use punctuation. Why should I be chastised for that? Messaging is more like speaking verbally, I find, and having done transcription work for a fair number of years, I can tell you that people almost never speak in grammatically correct sentences.

(I do get props for my proper use of HTML though, right?)

Re:Writing better?

[forevermore]

I can definitely agree with this. Though I grew up bilingual in English and Spanish (I had the fortune of growing up for at least a few years of my childhood outside of the US, immersed in South American culture), I learned more about English grammar and linguistics in the 2-3 years of German I took before/after college (long story short, the "after" was pretty much just for fun).

In college, and a good one at that, many of my professors were amazed that more than half of students still didn't understand the differences between "its" and "it's", "their," "they're" and "there," or "your" and "you're". I even ran across the occasional student in grad school who had this problem. It's a sad day when students at some of the top schools in the country don't even understand their own language.

Re: Writing better?

[Black Parrot]

> When I see "loose" being used in place of "lose", my blood starts boiling.

Me to.

Re:Writing better?

[forevermore]

Of course, let it not speak too badly of me that I made several typos with regard to quotation marks and punctuation marks in my previous post. That just proves that I've forgotten how to proofread what I write (it's so much easier when the interpreter/compiler tells me my mistakes).

Re:Writing better?

[Ray Radlein]

Grammar is largely the outward manifestation of orderly thought in a given language. You don't notice English Grammar for the same reason that a fish doesn't notice the water. You've had all your life to slowly absorb the lesson that some ways of arranging words in English sentences just don't work.

Re:Writing better?

[yintercept]

I'm learning more about sentence construction in my German class than I have in English over the past 13 years.

The only way to learn your language is to study another. This is especially true for English which is weird because it is a mix of many different tongues.

To make matters worse, the new style grammars that have been place for the last half century rejected teaching sentence structure. For important philosophical reasons, you are not supposed to know about the predicate and object in a sentence. Me, I learned about helper words and action words, and am clueless about real English grammar.

Re: Writing better?

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like you loost an "o".

Re:Writing better?

[Skidge]

Instant messaging definitely should have more lenient grammatical rules, if the person you are talking with doesn't mind. Since it's such a personal type of conversation (typically only one member of your audience), you generally have a good feel of what kind of grammatical hangups your audience has. However, the problem occurs when people allow the lax instant messaging grammar to overflow into their other writings. If you want the maximum number of people to listen to what you are saying, you should probably follow standard grammar rules. Few people will fault you for good grammar, while many will take poor grammar as a sign of at best that you don't care about what you are saying and at worst that you an idiot.

Parent poster, none of that was directed personally at you. :)

Re:Writing better?

[jkujawa]

You need the contrast. It's a very common experience that a person doesn't really learn grammar until s/he's studied a second language, but you need the basis in grammar in the first language before you have something to compare against.

Re: Writing better?

[watertester]

Me to. Ahaha... teh funny.

Re:Writing better?

[g-doo]

I'm sure that learning a Latin-based foreign language might help, but there are plenty of people like me (and many of my colleagues) who have a grasp of English grammar from the teaching of English and years of writing and reading alone.

Re:Writing better?

[Clay Pigeon -TPF-VS-]

I'm glad that my parents paid for my high school education. I actually learned grammar. I still see mistakes in top rate papers like the WSJ & NYT, and it reminds me of that damn project that I had to do in 10th grade. Finding 30 grammatical errors in the articles of major papers and correcting them was a royal pain in the ass.

Re:Writing better?

[g-doo]

The only way to learn your language is to study another. This is especially true for English which is weird because it is a mix of many different tongues.

I'm sure that's not the only way to learn your language. I know plenty of people have had a good grasp of the English language long before they learned any foreign language.

Also, I think that you mean to say that, if you're learning English, learning a Latin-based foreign language would help. Learning Arabic or Japanese or Mandarin probably wouldn't help as much.

As for "real English grammar", English is a manmade entity. Its main purpose is communication, and the language gradually morphs through the years. Who knows what "real grammar" will be like 300 years from now.

Re: Writing better?

[Michael Hunt]

Teh 'k' is implied

Re:Writing better?

[g-doo]

"and it reminds me of that damn project that I had to do in 10th grade"

...that I had to do in "the" 10th grade

I'm fairly sure of that.

Re:Writing better?

[Anonymous Coward]

"that correct grammar and spelling is utilised"

Use = to employ something for its original purpose (use an umbrella to avoid getting wet in the rain)

Utilise = to employ something for a purpose other that its original one (utilise an umbrella as a baseball bat)

Utilising spelling and grammar for a purpose other that the original one? What would that be?

Re:Writing better?

[CAIMLAS]

I'll agree with you completely. Public schools in general put the lowest priority on grammar; in reality, it's probably one of the most important things you could learn in high school (at least as a scholastic skill that can be quantified).

I attended a private school my sophmore year of HS. That was an incredibly difficult year for me, as the english class was quite intense in teaching the nuances of the english language (at least compared to anything I'd seen prior, or have seen since).

For basic grammar, we used Abekka books. They had the basic "underline this part of speech, circle that" problems, but in addition, there was a huge amount of space dedicated to things such as common mistakes that most people make (your|you're, its|it's, who|whom, nauseated|nauseous, etc. etc. - I've forgotten most of the specifics by now, but I have the feeling I'm still aware of most of them through basic osmosis)).

Additionally, we had latin roots, prefixes and suffixes (probably 20 or so a week combined) as well as 20 or so 3-sylabilic+ words and at least 1 book a week from the library (which didn't have shit rags like Hardy Boys in it). It was quite the course load.

Re:Writing better?

[ee_moss]

you'll end up teaching them more about English grammar than they ever would have otherwise learned.

I think the exception to this is my high school spanish teacher. She didn't know English and she didn't know Spanish. We argued for 3 weeks whether the word "Spanish" in the sentence "We are in la clase de la Spanish" (yes, that's how she said it) was an adjective or a verb. She argued in favor of the verb. Ah, public education.

One funny thing to note is she once gave out referrals (passes to go see the principal) to 2 students for "sending psychic messages during a test." The kids were staring at their papers very intensely and, to her, were apparently communicating answers psychically. Another one of her students jumped out of her second story window while she was teaching class, and she didn't know until he came back upstairs through the door.

Re:Writing better?

[Clay Pigeon -TPF-VS-]

The use of "the" in that instance is stylistic, and not required by grammatical rules.

Re:Writing better?

[Anonymous Coward]

utilize
v 1: put into service; make work or employ (something) for a
particular purpose or for its inherent or natural
purpose;

Re:Writing better?

[pipingguy]

I'm a senior in high school at the moment, and I see a lot of kids who have become disgusted with misspellings and abbreviations.

He mentions that he also studies German. That's a good thing, as kids learn the differences and similarities with/between words and tend to become curious why that is. Learning is good, and an idiot in [insert language here] (just as an example, no culture-bashing) is just as stupid as an idiot in English. I speak broken Francais, myself, but I've learned a lot about how people communicate in the process. Even speaking a "broken" form of a language to native speakers can teach you a lot about them (and why their words mean what they do) and they generally don't shit on you for trying. In fact, you tend to be welcomed. After they make fun of your accent first, eh. If your ego can make it past that stage, there are other cultures to explore.

Re:Writing better?

[g-doo]

Hmm, I suppose it's possible that it's a style issue. Still, I find it disturbing that it might be acceptable to write "in tenth grade" instead of "in the tenth grade". For example, if the adjective "tenth" was not there, the phrase would be "when I was in grade" as opposed to "when I was in the grade". Once the adjective is gone, the awkwardness of a missing "the" is more obvious.

Re:Writing better?

[teamhasnoi]

Can *anyone* agree more with what he said?

Is that like being 'more pregnant'? My wife will be glad to hear.

Re: Writing better?

[Anonymous Coward]

I swear, goddmaned funny. Wish I had mod points. Not that this post needs them.

Re:Writing better?

[ongeboren]

Well, the most frustrating error is to write "there" instead of "their".

How do you call it? Grammar or phonetic error? It might certainly be due to what they hear or think of having heard.

English is my fifth languare and still I speak it better than some native speakers hohoho.

Re:Writing better?

[zsau]

This is especially true for English which is weird because it is a mix of many different tongues.

Actually, that's simplified it to a degree. No genders, no case inflexions, adjectives don't agree with nouns...

And you can't be grammatically incorrect speaking your native language, either.

Re:Writing better?

[jesser]

nauseated|nauseous

You mean nauseous|nauseating, right? ;)

I love my American Heritage Dictionary of English Usage. It gives histories of the controveries and actual usage patterns, and its editors have found a good balance between not disagreeing with traditional usage commentators and practicality.

Re:Writing better?

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't teachers' unions just grand?

Re:Writing better?

[bkhl]

Everybody understand and know their own language perfectly. It may or may not coincide with standard English, or whatever the preferred variety of their native language is, but that's beside the point.

Re:Writing better?

[hhnerkopfabbeisser]

It's not always true. Being German, I had to learn German grammar in school, and it's quite difficult even for native speakers (or at least was until much of it was watered down a few years ago). Strangely enough, I was one of the few who just got it, without the need for a foreign language, but there are many who say that they didn't really get it until they learned Latin, a language with an even more complex grammar, from scratch.

English on the other hand doesn't seem to have much of a grammar (I mean, a language almost without declension and conjugation?), so there is not much to be taught.
Or maybe I just didn't notice, because most of the few grammar rules which are there are quite similar to German rules.

Then again, if there isn't much to be taught, it should't be difficult to teach it well...

Re:Writing better?

[tunah]

I don't think it's grammatically correct, but it's certainly in common American usage. In NZ we don't call the years grades so it sounds like an error due to the missing article, whereas "in third form" sounds fine, although it's got exactly the same problem. Meh, I'll stick with "in grade 10".

Re:Writing better?

[tunah]

You mean nauseous|nauseating, right? ;)

I don't think so, ignoring any grammatical errors, "I'm feeling nauseous" means the same as "I'm feeling nauseated".

Re:Writing better?

[FePe]

A study has been made concerning how electronic messages like SMS improves childrens' writing skills. All the abbreviation make people think about exactly what they write, i.e. the exact spelling of a particular word.

It says something of the importance of learning other languages and methods for writing. I write English as a second language, not so well, but I have learned a lot about writing and my own language (Danish) that way which is useful to many aspects of reading and writing.

Re:Writing better?

[jesser]

That's my point, sort of. The parent to my post seemed to be agreeing with many usage commentators (but disagreeing with most Americans) that "naseous" is supposed to mean "nauseating" rather than "nauseated".

Re:Writing better?

[JaredOfEuropa]

The only way to learn your language is to study another. This is especially true for English which is weird because it is a mix of many different tongues.

I disagree. The study of another language will draw attention to the difference between that language and your own, and it may help you appreciate the structure of your own language. But to understand that structure, you have to study the language itself. It seems like people who have studied other languages generally do better with their own, but I think that is because they have an interest in languages or an aptitude for learning them, not because of their study of foreign languages.

English isn't that weird. It has its irregularities, especially in pronunciation, but it has a structure that can be learned. I had 6 years of English in high school, including grammar. If English class in English-speaking countries is anything like Dutch class in the Netherlands, then I can understand why my English co-workers ask me to correct their documents (written in English). These classes are more about literature than grammar.

Re:Writing better?

[Anonymous Coward]

>I'm a senior in high school at the moment...

Sucks to be you. When I was in high school it was all about when the next kegger was going to be, and how many drunk sluts we could get to join us. I don't think I knew a single person who gave a shit about learning.

Re:Writing better?

[0x0d0a]

IIRC, except for comparisons and a few other specific exceptions, numeric representations of numbers should not be used in English text.

The tidbit "...in 10th grade." would then be "...in tenth grade", and "Finding 30 grammatical errors..." would be "Finding thirty grammatical errors..."

In addition, the subject if your third sentence is "mistakes". The subject is plural, and hence "it" in the second clause of that sentence should be "they".

Of course, all this really goes to show is that it's very difficult to write correct English.

Re:Writing better?

[rixstep]

This is all very welcome. There was a time when the worst perps were the people writing off US ISPs. That this is changing cannot be but great.

Language is culture, and culture is heritage, and it's always something to be proud of. Good use and respect for one's language implies respect for oneself. It can't be but a winner.

Re:Writing better?

[BuilderBob]

There is a simple enough reason for this.

English is taught (at least in English speaking countries) as a language for everyday use. In England I guess it would be something like Estuary English. It's a language where words are slurred together (in a general sense, I'm not implying the English are drunk all the time :), 'slow' letter-groups are lost (what==w'ot, what's up==wass'up, hmm...). What is really being said is obtained mostly from the context and slang is used often.

Foreign languages, in your case, German (I'm assuming here that your first language is English) ,are taught using sentence construction, proper tense usage and correct verb gender. You're taught how to write the sentence before you learn the nouns which are being used.

The only way to correct this (IMHO) would be to have two English subjects, the first is "English as an everyday language"(EEL), the second "English as a foreign language"(EFL). In the EFL class you would English grammer as any non-english speaker would, tense, irregular verbs, pronoun order. The EEL class would be essays, imagination, poetry, discussion, etc.

I doubt it will happen any time soon, nobody wants 3 different English classes (+literature..).

There are also changes that have happened to the English language which didn't happen to the other European languages (German, French, Welsh..). Some of the grammatical constructions are dropped or optional. German has die/der/das/dem, French has le/la/les/l'... to mean 'the'. In English you can often drop the 'the' (e.g. the man's hat='the hat of the man' in [German,French,Welsh,Spanish]). Silly things like not beginning a sentence with 'And' or 'But' and split infinitives also add to the confusion.

Regarding the writing online improving children's English (I just reread the story title, my brain said "the kids have improved, now they are writing online", instead of "...because they are writing"). I think it has something to do with the ability to change sentences as you change your thoughts, on paper you have to form the sentence first, on a computer you can type what you think of first (which is what you see in IRC/IM chat). If you then want to change the structure, you don't have to throw away the entire page. This paragraph has been changed at least 4 times.

BB

Re:Writing better?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you can.... -many- native speakers make major grammatical mistakes.

Re:Writing better?

[Brown Line]

I'm 51, but unlike Derrith, I had the good fortune to have teachers in grammar school who taught us the intricasies of English grammar. One in particular, Mother Mary Henry (R.I.P) was a gifted teacher who actually made grammar enjoyable. So when I later studied Latin and German, I already had the blueprint in my head - for Indo-European languages, at any rate.

It is a shame that this knowledge is denied to our young people. Standard English is as close to a universal language as the world has ever known; if one can use it within its rules, one can be understood by people around the world. Pace Steven Pinker, but learning "the rules" can be liberating, not oppressive.

Re:Writing better?

[rixstep]

For important philosophical reasons

I'd love to know what these 'important philosophical reasons' were. Better yet, who were the idiots who actually cited them.

Tar and feathering still has its place in an honourable society.

Re:Writing better?

[monkeyfinger]

As for "real English grammar", English is a manmade entity. Its main purpose is communication, and the language gradually morphs through the years. Who knows what "real grammar" will be like 300 years from now.

I think the phrase "real English grammar" is a strange one, it implies there is only one grammatical structure. Even in England there are many different dialects with different grammatical structures. Who is to say which is the correct one.

American English and English English are similar but they do have different grammatical structure. A good example is the phrase "in back of", the english never say this even though we do say "in front of". I had an American friend who was taught at school that this was proper english grammar. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, American English has enriched our language in many ways, but it would be false to assume that there is such a thing as "real english grammar".

Re:Writing better?

[monkeyfinger]

I write English as a second language, not so well, but I have learned a lot about writing and my own language (Danish) that way which is useful to many aspects of reading and writing.

May I complement you on your grasp of the English language. You use it better than some native speakers that I have met.

Re:Writing better?

[mariox19]

See if you can sit in on an education class at your local college -- you'll see where the madness starts. If you can't be bothered (and I don't blame you), pick up a syllabus from one or two, and see if you can check out one of the assigned readings from the library.

Re:Writing better?

[Ossadagowah]

Yeh omg plz chk yr spellin kthnx.

Re:Writing better?

[Anonymous Coward]

I said the same thing when I was in high school 30 years ago. The more things change...

Re:Writing better?

[Metasquares]

I never learned what the subjunctive tense was until I took Spanish in high school. Considering how common substituting a past tense verb where a subjunctive should be used (was/were, for example) is, they should be teaching this as early as possible.

Re:Writing better?

[lvdrproject]

Huh. Wish my school was like yours. Mine is the kind of school you hear Web articles talking about, where kids use 'IM speak' in their reports and things. All that 'ur' and 'b4' rubbish. I don't think i know (or know of) anybody that actually semi-cares about grammar or spelling. The desire to write above a fourth-grade level is apparently something that only nerds have. :(

Re:Writing better?

[Angus Prune]

But there are times when you need a precision to the language and people simply don't have the ability to write/understand it.

One recent example was in a public exam when the question they asked (grammatically) wasn't the question the meant to ask.
I don't have the question to hand, but it consisted of a section of background and then a question on the situation.
The question asked why "this" situation was the case.

The question was so badly worded that the "this" was not clearly defined. It was possibe to interperate the question in atleast two different ways becasue of that.

Also I cannot remember his name, but there is an english conman that works on grammer. He will insert a comma into a promise which changes its meaning completely but isn't noticed by the people who send him money.

Re:Writing better?

[Heisenbug]

I would argue that you don't learn about English grammar because it's not relevant. Your first language is different from every following language, because you learned it using the jello-brain of a baby instead of the educated-brain of an adult. Brilliant writers aren't the ones who know better grammar than the rest of us -- they're the ones who have absorbed a gift for language by listening, speaking, and reading.

Why do we say "the big, fat, lazy dog" instead of "the lazy, fat, big dog"? It turns out there are grammatical reasons ... but I don't care what they are, and it doesn't impact my writing.

Re:Writing better?

[LX.onesizebigger]

Another one of her students jumped out of her second story window while she was teaching class, and she didn't know until he came back upstairs through the door.

That happened to the Spanish teacher at the U.S. high school I went to as an exchange student a few years ago as well. Either you also attended IHS or this is a common thing in American schools. I'm not sure which scenario would be the most shocking.

Re:Writing better?

[nomadic]

Probably you didn't notice. English (and I'm guessing German) have very strict word order rules, and the only place that Latin seems to beat English is (in my opinion) in future verb forms. Our future verbs tend to be kludges (I will have had, I will have been, he will have had had)

Re:Writing better?

[MikeXpop]

Sounds like my Spanish 1 teacher. The worst part is when we learnt about families and she got pocessives all wrong.

"Okay class, how you say 'jour hermano's padre' in espanol?"
"Padre?"
"No. Es is tio"
*under breath*"Maybe in your hillbilly family"

We all failed the test for putting down the correct answers. One other fun thing to note is when one girl in our class showed another what happens when you spray hairspray on a cigarette lighter. She was told to "quiet down".

Re:Writing better?

[sketerpot]

When you hear someone talk about loosing, don't you sometimes want to go berserk?

Re:Writing better?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you think a (comparatively) handful of superficial differences makes the grammars vastly different? Bollocks. That's just trivial surface variation; local shade of the same colour. The underlying syntactic structures and mechanics of AmE and BrE are practically identical.

You could learn some more what you speak of... (And yes, an English major with a Linguistics minor quite makes me the expert.)

Re:Writing better?

[hhnerkopfabbeisser]

I will have had, I will have been

Exactly the same in German... but in German, you also have to conjugate.
The almost complete absense of conjugation and declension in the English language makes it quite simple to grasp, at least for those who already speak a related language, and most european languages are related, to some degree anyway.

Re:Writing better?

[canajin56]

Hehe, sounds about as competent as my grade 7 science teacher. First, he taught us that women have more ribs than men. I tried to correct him but he asked to talk to me after class...where he explained that he knows that, but he can't teach that or the religious parents will get mad.

Next, he taught us that babies' skulls have a gap in them so that their brain can grow. I said "But it fuses within a few months. Yet an adult's head is quite a bit larger than an infants. Obviously, your skull can grow even if it is fused solid." He wouldn't listen.

Oh, I also got in trouble when I left a floppy in one of the computers, and they found a GAME on it. They were like "We are really choked. You know the policy on games in school" and I said "Read the credits, you'll see that I wrote the game myself. You can also read the source code. I've been teaching myself programming, since all we do in computer class is Mavis Beacon and Logo Writer."

Teachers teaching faulty information, that's the one thing I can't stand. Fine, the point of elementry school isn't to teach important facts, but to teach how to learn. (Or so they tell me), but teaching stuff that is just plain wrong?

Oh, and on the note of the "psychic messages", our Chem 12 teacher accused two students of cheating on a test because one was a C student, but she got a 45/50, which was the same mark as the A student sitting across from her. But the thing is, while they each got 5 questions wrong, they only had one wrong answer in common. My friend, the A student, said "Well if having the same mark 'proves' we cheated, why don't we have the same questions wrong?" "That doesn't matter to me. 90% isn't exactly a typical mark for Lisa" "So she is being punished for studying?" "No, studying can't make you THAT much better. You must have been cheating"

Re:Writing better?

[Anonymous Coward]

Abekka is great for a thorough curriculum. I went from public to private school starting in Grade 6. The private school accepted me the preceeding spring after testing, but only on the condition that I spend the summer going through the Grade 5 Math and English textbooks from Abekka, doing all the excercises, etc.

It was a bit of a gruelling summer, but I got through it, and it was a definite help.

Re:Writing better?

[efflux]

In college, and a good one [whitman.edu] at that, many of my professors were amazed that more than half of students still didn't understand the differences between "its" and "it's", "their," "they're" and "there," or "your" and "you're". I even ran across the occasional student in grad school [uchicago.edu] who had this problem..

This statement is just plain ridiculous. If someone makes such a mistake with two homophonous words, it doesn't indicate that they don't know the difference between them. It only indicates that they were not careful with their spelling. It's a mistake I occasionally make myself, but I guarantee I know the difference. It pisses me off to no end (just now I damn near wrote know end, perhaps because I had just used the word?) when someone assumes otherwise.

Re:Writing better?

[yintercept]

In the US, schools are trying to get rid of a thing called Classical Logic that has Aristotlenian roots (Artistotle was a clown in ancient Greece who couldn't count the teeth of a horse). We are replacing it with Hegelian logic via John Dewey (John Dewey is famed for the Dewey decimal system...which is odd because the Dewey decimal system was invented by Melvil Dewey.). Having been educated in the US, I did not know about Classical Logic or Grammar until I met someone who was upset about the change...anyway, I got it wrong in my first post. Classical Grammar taught that sentences had a subject and predicate. This classical grammar fit into Classical logic in a thing called a syllogism. A syllogism has a major premise, a minor premise and a conclusion. It looks something like:

Men die. (major premise)
Socrates is a man. (minor premise)
Socrates will die. (conclusion)

People used to study the difference between a valid and invalid syllogism, which is silly.

We needed to get rid of this so that we could use the new and improved logic invented by Hegel. In Hegel's system words and sentences are always changing. One of the other replies to my post talks about how grammars are all artificial constructs, and the grammar itself and the meaning of all the words change according to political ebbs and tides. So there is no valid or invalid reasoning.

One of Hegel's greatest interest was the master slave relation. A Master/Slave reversal happens when the master grows weak and becomes dependent on the slave. The slave is now the master. Slavery might look bad at the offset, but its meaning changes, and slavery becomes freedom.

It is easy to show that freedom is slavery, because people who are free have to suffer the consequences of their actions. Slaves do not.

Classical logic was part of the failed old world order. Getting rid of the classical logic frees us from the false sense of order, allowing us to arrive at the new world order. Today, we would say that this is a paradigm shift. We now have lots of different grammars and words that change meanings. There is more room for the butterflies to flutter.

Re:Writing better?

[dandelion_wine]

you need the basis in grammar in the first language before you have something to compare against.

something with which to compare? ;)

Re:Writing better?

[Brandybuck]

I didn't take Spanish in high school, but it was obvious talking to those who did what it was like. The class taught "Spanish", as in the language from Spain. Sixty percent of our school were hispanic who spoke a pidgin "Chicana" as a native language. The never did well in Spanish class.

Re:Writing better?

[iabervon]

It's still about 50 years too early to teach students the rules of the English language, because they haven't been discovered yet. Sure, there are some preliminary ideas as to what some of them might be, but there are a number of areas of active research. Of course, kids are still taught in school a number of things about the English language which have been disproved decades ago.

Fluency in language is something that can only really be taught by example, because the exact rules (if there are even rules which are exact) are not known, and, even if they were, a speaker could not consciously apply them in any sort of timely fashion. Furthermore, students should learn a number of variations on English, because spoken and written English aren't the same (and IM is really more like transcribed spoken English), and the sentence constructions which are appropriate in an eyewitness account of an event and those which are appropriate in a love letter are quite different. For that matter, the grammar which is considered appropriate for academic papers changes about once a decade, as people trying to follow the accepted style become more and more extreme, to the point where the papers become incomprehensible and a new style is proposed to combat the flaws in the old one.

Re:Writing better?

[ToolPackinMama]

>English sentences just don't work.

If that were true then what you just said would have made no sense.

Re:Writing better?

[ee_moss]

Guess it's pretty common for students to jump out windows then. School tends to do that to people. In another scenario at my high school, a teacher didn't show up to class one day and they didn't have a sub. So the students had nothing to do with no one to supervise. They were on the 2nd story of this building, so three students opened up the windows and jumped out. The first one landed on the ground and looked up to see the rest of the class hanging out the windows giving him thumbs up. He then looked ahead of him at the first story window, and there was the entire art class lined up at the windows looking at him, shocked. Before he flew from the sky and landed in front of their windows, they were painting pictures of the landscape. Within the next 10 minutes, the majority of the class managed to jump out the 2nd story window - boys and girls. The art instructor contacted the principal, who came upstairs to see what was going on. When asked about jumping out of windows, the class kind of shrugged it off and told the principal that he should try it. He laughed, shook his head, closed the door, and never bothered calling in a sub.

Re:Writing better?

[Anonymous Coward]

We are in la clase de la Spanish >> We are in the class of Spanish.

Adjective or verb? What's funny is that you were both wrong. Prepositions (such as "of") take nouns as objects. If you meant "Spanish class," then yes, it's an adjective.

Of course, a Spanish teacher using Spanglish like that is hilarious in itself.

Re:Writing better?

[Ray Radlein]

>English sentences just don't work.

If that were true then what you just said would have made no sense.

It that were what I had said, then what you said would be true.

Re:Writing better?

[smilingirl]

I think the key to learning proper English is READING. In my experience, the kids that excel in grammar in school are the ones that read books and such for fun. They know grammar because they constantly see it and unconsciously pick up the patterns. I never was really taught grammar. I picked it up from the massive amounts of books I read as a child. I compacted out of pretty much every English test in elementary school and never once got points off for bad grammar on any essay I ever wrote. I can see how taking a foreign language would be helpful in some ways, but when I took it in high school, we didn't really learn that much at all. After 2 years of Spanish in high school, I probably could write about two paragraphs of ridiculously simple Spanish. Most of what I did learn was self-taught. I always thought that kids should learn grammar in one language before tackling others, otherwise they might get different rules confused and stuff. If you don't actually use a language, then it's harder to learn. I never was fond of memorizing rules anyway; I just do what sounds and looks right from seeing the patterns so often.

But overall, reading proper grammar being used over and over is the key to learning good grammar. My younger brother, a freshman in high school, can barely write two sentences of correct grammar. Why? He NEVER reads. Things online are full of bad grammar. If a kid is reading posts on some forum, chances are other people are not using proper grammar, whether they know how to or not. I don't think the web is the best place in the world to learn grammar, but it is better than nothing.

Re:Writing better?

[Idarubicin]

They make it a point to be sure that correct grammar and spelling is utilised...

This is a pet peeve of mine: the use (utilisation?) of the word utilise/utilize where the word 'use' would do. Though not technically incorrect, it is usually a byproduct either of a misguided desire to appear educated or of too much exposure to management-speak...or both.

Normally I'm not picky about this sort of thing on Slashdot, but in the context of this thread and this particular comment I think it appropriate to observe that grammar and spelling are (not is) utilised. Subject-verb agreement is a very important concept, and should be taught as a very early part of any grammar curriculum. If I were* a genuinely cruel copy editor, I would also note that the last sentence of the parent post is egregiously comma spliced.

I fear now that I've racked up sufficient bad karma from this little rant to ensure a spelling or grammar error will creep into this post....

*Kudos to you for studying German. I learned more about English grammer through my studies in French, Spanish, and German than I ever did in my English classes. The starred phrase above represents a correct use of the subjunctive--a concept I first saw clearly defined in Spanish 101.

Re:Writing better?

[Alphtoo]

I think this is a very interesting observation, and perhaps the best reason for teaching ebonics in our schools.

Re:Writing better?

[ElliotLee]

Grammar is descriptive, not prescriptive.

Think about it

Re:Writing better?

[CAIMLAS]

nauseous|nauseating are essentially the same in meaning. You'll note my list mentioned words that are often confused and used in the wrong situations.

So I did indeed mean neauseated|nauseous: If I'm neauseated, then I'm feeling ill; if I'm nauseous, I'm making others feel ill. :P

Re:Writing better?

[CAIMLAS]

I've found that Abekka is great up to high school for everything, but kind of drops the ball with mathematics starting at around 7th or 8th grade.

Saxon math books are much better, though they are also a lot more expensive. They're a perrenial favorite of home schoolers, both parents and students, as they cover quite a lot of ground, and by the time a student graduates high school, they'll very likely actually remember everything - and well - as nothing is disgarded, and all lessons are truely incrimental. Instead of having a 'review' section for previous lessons, there's a 5 (or so) exercise section with easy problems from that lesson, and then 30 problems from previous chapters that get cycled through - the newer stuff as a lower number, and the older stuff as a higher number. The student's recollection of the material determines how many problems they actually have to do (if you're oding things wisely, in a home setting). Quite excellent. I'll likely be using Saxon math books with my son when he's old enough.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to go through all 4 years of high school with Saxon.

Re:Writing better?

[CAIMLAS]

Most Americans will also tell you that there's no need to know a second language, that the very act of going to college itself is an important part of growing up, and that computers are tempermental.

Many of them might actually go on to tell you that the state of the stock market actually gets determined by the president ("market is up! president is good!", or "market is down, president is bad!"), or that spending massive amounts of money on road repair (something that doesn't really need to be done anyway) is a Good Thing, as it provides jobs, when large numbers of jobs are being shipped overseas, and no new jobs are being created.

Re:Writing better?

[jesser]

That's what I thought you meant. And I meant that you're wrong.

Re:Writing better?

[Razor Blades are Not]

Reading all these replies makes me very sad...

But it reminds me of something.. when I graduated high school all the smartest people went into university to study the most prestigious or best paying careers (medicine or law for example).

Where did the kids who couldn't get into those courses go ?

Teachers College.

Re:Writing better?

[Razor Blades are Not]

I'm sure that reading through someones work and picking the occaisional misspelling or mis-asignation is not what the grandparent poster was referring to.

I've read entire texts which consistently and constantly misuse these words (and "than/then" - which really annoys me, perhaps because the words aren't truly homophonous?). An entire text like this suggests the author is missing some basic instruction in the differences.

However, it may not be that the person fails to understand, but if so, it implies a lack of care. If someone doesn't care about what they write, why should the rest of us ?

My favourite

[Locky]

I have to admit I'm quite a fan of the Harry Potter / Sailor Moon / Star Trek crossovers.

Re:My favourite

[Anonymous Coward]

I think /. should start a Harry Potter subject kind of like Your Rights Online or something and the icon could be a broomstick or something.

I used to hate reading now I love the Harry Potter. Do you guys like Harry Potter?

I think Severus Snape is a vampire because he assigned the Defense Against the Dark Arts class a vampire essay when Lupin was sick and when Lupin got back he assigned them a vampire essay.

Plus, JKR is always writing things like Snape moved "bat-like" or hanging around "like an over-grown bat."

So I think Snape is a vampire.

Re:My favourite

[Anonymous Coward]

No, Snape assigned the DATDE classes a werewolf essay, becuase he was hoping the class would figure out that Lupin was a werewolf.

Besides that you may have a point. Snape is/was a Death Eater, and the vampires aligned themselves with Tom riddle

It's all coming true!

[LeninZhiv]

I can see the handwriting on the wall, soon the buggers' invasion will allow Locke and Demosthenes to obtain unprecedented political authority! Something must be done!

Re:It's all coming true!

[IchBinDasWalross]

Hey, I get that. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, a way underrated Scifi writer. Goddamn am I feeling nerdy right now.

Re:It's all coming true!

[Rallion]

Feeling nerdy? I can help! My collection of Card novels now totals... [ computing ]...eighteen!

Re:It's all coming true!

[Bahumat]

*sniffle* Bastard, I've only got... *counts* Twelve.

The Allan Maker series is even better than the Ender's Game / Ender's Shadow stuff, by the by. :)

Re:It's all coming true!

[Lehk228]

you probably have more than me lol, I got my whole family reading Card novels, the whole Ender series (including the shadow books) the Homecoming series, Alvin maker series, Worthing saga, lovelock, lost boys, and pastwatch have all been read by one of more members of my family now...

Re:It's all coming true!

[Echnin]

What, English is degenerating into a phonetically written Common language?

Re:It's all coming true!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, a way underrated Scifi writer.

You spelled "overrated" wrong.

Re:It's all coming true!

[Darken_Everseek]

Underachiever; 24. One of 'em has a co-author though ;)

Schooling interfere with education?

[Dlugar]

Ben Franklin advised his son not to allow schooling to interfere with his education.

Um, wasn't that Mark Twain?

On a more serious note, if you want some highly interesting reads on how "schooling interferes with your education," read some stuff by John Taylor Gatto. It's scary 'cos it's true.

Dlugar

Re:Schooling interfere with education?

[TheWanderingHermit]

Actually, Sam Clemens/Mark Twain said, "I never let my schoolin' interfere with my eduction."

It was a statement of his own life, not advice to his son.

Re:Schooling interfere with education?

[FreemanPatrickHenry]

Physicist-turned-economist David D. Friedman mentioned that he sends his children to a Sudbury School. You might find the concept interesting: it's an entirely de-institutionalized, student led form of schooling. Being a high school senior now, I wish I had had the opportunity to go to a place like that.

Re:Schooling interfere with education?

[NonSequor]

"Every valid combination of words in the English language has been attributed to Mark Twain at some point in time."

--Mark Twain

Re:Schooling interfere with education?

[Anonymous Coward]

Michael is just trying to polish up the deservedly screwed up rep of BFranklin. Why? Who knows. It's probably some emotional issue about his father and bed time.

Re:Schooling interfere with education?

[CGP314]

I used that in my quote section of my high school yearbook. I thought it made a nice little fuck-you goodbye to the school : )

-Colin

Re:Schooling interfere with education?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope Mark Twain (S. Clemens) dies a fucking horrible death for each stupid quote he ever made...

Oh...

Re:Schooling interfere with education?

[BenjyD]

The equivalent to a sudbury school over here (UK) is a Rudolf Steiner school. The kids make the rules, study what they want etc.

From what I hear, they produce confident, self-assured and completely uneducated children. A school inspector I talked to said the kids there were *years* behind those in mainstream schools.

Re:Schooling interfere with education?

[Just-A-Buck]

This seems to be the right time to link to The Awful German Language by Mark Twain (no copyright issues here, it's public).

Very interesting read, especially in the context of this thread where many slashdotters said they learned English grammar in German classes.

Twain, on the other hand,obviously had a hard time with German, but nevertheless learned it.

Re:Schooling interfere with education?

[monkeyfinger]

From what I hear, they produce confident, self-assured and completely uneducated children. A school inspector I talked to said the kids there were *years* behind those in mainstream schools.

My kid sister went to one of those schools. Most of the parents seemed to be hippies. The curriculum was very strong on art, dance and general creativity but they didn't sit exams. Rudolph Steiner had been heavily into occultism, theosophy and his own brand of christianity. I don't know how many of the parents there shared those beliefs, but there was a lot of new age flakiness.

Re:Schooling interfere with education?

[fermion]

First, it is common that if you do something, you will get better at it. Therefore, if you spend your time writing you will get better at it. I think this is globally true because we naturally want people to understand what we are saying, and such understanding requires that we write in a commonly understandable fashion.

As far as education is concerned, many people will learn no matter what. They will be curious. They will be inquisitive. They will get their parents to teach them everything their parents know. For many people this will be enough. For many people school will interfere with this process. Which is what school is supposed to do, and at it's best the results are great.

In the US school can even out the rough edges of a child, integrate that child into the dominant culture, and provide the uniformity the child needs to succeed. I know, the implications of some of this is scary, and I find it sort of scary, but it is probably necessary to maintain a single country.

As the most base level, if I am running a business, I need a predictable set of employees. At elite levels, these employees are obviously trained through prep school and elite colleges to meet uniform expectations. For the blue collar worker, much of this is done through the public school. These schools make sure that the worker can speak and understand the dominant dialect. These schools make sure the worker understands that his or her religious beliefs need to be mellowed in the work place. These schools make sure that the worker understands that bathroom breaks are to be few and far between. These schools make sure the worker can work with a diverse group of people.

Is there other ways to do this, sure. But if a child is getting exposure only to a limited set of opinions, a limited set of social standards, and a limited set language, then that child, unless blessed with other advantages, is going to find it hard to fit into the US as an adult.

Finally, one hope the child and parent understands that education does not necessary happen and is definitely not limited to the school. The child spends maybe 30 or so hours in school a week. There are double that number of hours left over each week, not to mention the summer. This time is there for the parent and student to use or waste.

Re:Schooling interfere with education?

[thebigmacd]

I attended a Waldorf School here in Canada in grades seven and eight. Waldorf schools are Rudolph Steiner schools.

I found that my Waldorf school produced equal numbers of polarly opposite student types. Half of my class went on to public secondary school and failed nearly every class, while my half of the class had a 90%+ secondary school average.

Although it is true that there is a huge focus on art, dance, etc, and they promoted their own brand of christianity, in grades seven and eight they put all of that aside and taught very good science, history and geography (a greater depth than in the public system).

Two years was enough for me because although I am artistic, I am a very conservative christian and very much not "artsy".

Re:Schooling interfere with education?

[JoshRoss]

Even if Franklin did say it first, he was not a very good father. Or, maybe his son was not the best of sons. Although, by many accounts, he did an admirable job raising his grandson.

Re:Schooling interfere with education?

[ffub]

"I wish I'd said that." -- Oscar Wilde.
"You will, Oscar, you will." -- James McNeill Whistler

Re:Schooling interfere with education?

[aelfric35]

Mea culpa. I should've looked it up.

Sorry...

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the fanfiction I've had the misfortune to skim has featured grammar, spelling, and punctuation that would be a disgrace even on usenet, let alone here or on any other forum where writing mechanics are expected to be more than a mockery of an effort.

It does work...

[Robotech_Master]

In my early college years, shortly after I discovered the 'net, I got involved with a number of writing communities...writing Robotech fanfic, writing alt.pub.dragons-inn and alt.pub.havens-rest series, and eventually the Superguy listserv. And it certainly did improve my writing, over time.

The secret is practice and peer review. That's the best way to build writing skill, whether the Internet is involved or not. The Internet makes it easier, that's all.

Re:this is my home

[gagy]

lOOK at me.. I've replied to my own email. The point is, the kiddie swill develop whatever language they waynt on line. This is their life. AT my school, you pick up a girl by getting on er MSN first and ten you warm up to her, and then you get her numbe. Youd on't ask for ther number up front, tha'ts too scandelous. you just go vor the email addrsss that gets her on your msn list. then you chat her up, then you ask her out. its new dem obgraphics man. Its how th ekids work these dya.s you gotta respect.

porn stories

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, I can remember it like it was yesterday... Back in the day, downloading erotic stories from BBS's, printing them on the trusty old Epson dot-matrix, and reading them before going to bed. Porn has improved my reading skills and my imagination.

Even today, I'm sure it still has the effect of improving hand-eye coordination and strengthening my forearms.

Three cheers for porn!

Re:porn stories

[Anonymous Coward]

It's spelled pr0n, damn looooser =)

I just hope they're not on Slashdot

[britneys 9th husband]

With all the spelling errors, bad grammar, dupes, karma whores, and trolling, if these kids are "improving" their writing on Slashdot, we're all doomed.

Re:this is my home

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean, you are a "looser?" Because then your comment would be an ironic and ontopic post.

Well...

[DJ Rubbie]

Hey, I see some 13 year old Slashdotter's post getting modded up to +5 Insightful... I assume that suggests something...

As a homeschooler...

[EmbeddedJanitor]

We teach our kids at home, as do thousands of families through the world. I have nothing against teachers, I think it amazing how they manage to do as well as they do, shepherding thirty kids along. However they clearly don't have opportunities to expand each kid's personal interests. The fundamental principle of homeschooling is to have, and provide, the freedom to allow each kid to retain that curiosity we're born with.

It is no suprise to me that the kids participating in online forums are doing well, when they're doing things they want to do they will put in more effort and energy. It is a given.

Re:As a homeschooler...

[asavage]

Unless they spend sometime with children their own age some other way(like with scouts), there could be some serious lacking in interpersonal skills when they grow older.

It is even worse with only children. They are seriously deprived when the are homeschooled and it can really effect their quality of life when they are older. There is a lot more to school than gaining knowledge.

Re:As a homeschooler...

[irokitt]

I get my interpersonal skills through Slashdot, you insensitive clod!

Seriously though, why do people think home schoolers get locked into basements and forgotten? They *do* meet other children, whether through things like scouts or sports or not. We aren't a bunch of recluses, you know. We don't try to stick a floppy in someone's mouth.

Re:As a homeschooler...

[DylanQuixote]

That's not quite true. Actually, I'd say it is out-right false, but I'll give you the benefit of doubt.

I am (or was, I'm graduating now) a home-schooled
child. I also do not have siblings. I haven't ever
been to a summer camp, or belonged to very many groups. I have had only a few close friends.

Yet, I do not think I'm lacking in inter-personal
skills. Actually, I seem to be more gregarious (sp?) than most other geeks that I find.

If I am deprived of anything, it is being maltreated by my peers. :)

Where have I learned interpersonal skills?
Well, from my parents, in part. Also from my friends, but to a lesser extent.

My quality of life is pretty good, I think.
I don't have problems making friends, and I never have. Now, half of my friends are of a different generation than I, but diversity is a good thing.
I get along equally well with 50 year olds and
people near my age.

You see, I am in college now. Have been since I was 17 (I'm 18 now), and I meet all sorts of people, from all ages. I'll go from discussing
reggae music with a fifty year old nurse, to talking about programming with a 20 year old EE major. I do not have any problems relating to other people, I don't think.

I am lonely, but this is mostly a problem
of being a geek in a very... geek-free area (Florida :P) than of being home-schooled.

I've become involved in numerous groups since I
entered college: a LUG, a perl mongers group, another user group, college democrats, college greens... Sometimes I'm even in charge of the LUG's
meetings. As far as I know, nobody complains .

Anyway, just because one is home-schooled and an only child doesn't mean they'll be completely
incapable of having a normal social life.
Well, normal in a geeky sense. :)

Re:As a homeschooler...

[rudib]

These people should watch South Park, episode 313.

MARK: ...public schools may be a bit lacking in education, but it's the main place where children learn all of their social skills. You can't teach a child social skills; they have to learn them themselves, and the only place to do that is on the playground, in the cafeteria, and so on...

Re:As a homeschooler...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you forced someone who doesn't fit in to go to school anyway eventually he would learn to loath the other children.

It happend to me, don't let it happen to your children.

Re:As a homeschooler...

[rixstep]

It's good education in the US is picking up, but it's amazing in such case, given that teachers are treated like shit.

They don't make any money to speak of, and they're either dedicated to the unbelievable extent that they do the job despite having to carry a second job to just get by, or they get burned out after a while with all the Michelle Pfeiffer trials and tribulations and just start not giving a damn.

Start paying the people who form the generations what they're worth, and you'll see even better results than now.

Re:As a homeschooler...

[fermion]

Which is really the point. The school has them for 6.5 to 7 hours. In that time an american school will teach them standard english, math, science, and how to effectively socialize with other kids. The rest of the time, the summers, and vacations, parents are expected to educate the child. I was lucky because I had a good public school education and good parents and a good religious community. I probably learned as much at home as at school.

The problem with school is that the school is increasingly being expect to provide all the education, which is impossible. School provide an exposure to diverse opportunities and opinions with must be expanded upon at home. The second problem is that shcool is increasingly becoming a profit center for corporations and religious entities.

At home the kid can play, which really means simulating social situations and non-threating problem solving. This, however, requires the parent to kick the kid off the TV or video game.

Re:As a homeschooler...

[Anonymous Coward]

> It is even worse with only children. They are seriously deprived when the are homeschooled and it can really effect their quality of life when they are older. There is a lot more to school than gaining knowledge.

I was home schooled, I'm an only child, I never went to camp or socialised with other children. What you say is absolutely true. I'm now 30, but despite being extremely successful in corporate life, I've yet to get my first date.

[Making darn sure that "post anonymously" is checked.]

Re:As a homeschooler...

[HeghmoH]

Yeah, because, you know, it's perfectly natural for a human being to spend 30% of his childhood in a room with 30 other human beings who are nearly exactly his same age. It's totally unnatural to spend childhood learning from one's parents. I guess everybody who grew up before the advent of modern compulsory education was horribly lacking in social skills and became seriously deprived.

Re:As a homeschooler...

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Don't worry, I beat them up, sell them drugs and teach them to say fuck. Trust me they are lacking in nothing.

Seriously, 'social interaction' is always levelled at home schooling as being a problem. However, I think perhaps the reverse is true. In schools the kids are all grouped according to age and are expected to 'play with someone your own age' and are subject to peer pressure etc. Our kids interact with people of all ages from little kids to adults - just like the real world.

Most homeschooling people belong to groups who provide sporting/social interaction, outings and extra classes like art and music. eg, our kids do art lessons with other (homeschooled) kids, they play sports with other (non homeschooled) kids .

I guess there might be some homeschooled only children who are kept isolated from society, but it is ignorant in the extreme to think this applies to most homeschooled kids.

I'm a kid in a similar situation, and I agree -

[miradu2000]

I'm 17, and senior editor of a website that is read by about? 13,000 people a day, and trust me, my writing skills have greatly improved. I write daily news and reviews, and over the last 5 years working at this site have developed a unique style.

There are two things that have contributed to my becoming a better writer: One, writing lots - my "hobby" has made me write more than I would of ever written normally at this stage of my life, and two, when you are read by 15,000 people, a couple people out of those 15000 point out every little error you make.. and I have learned from those errors.

My main focus is reviews and analysis of blah, and the experience i have gained online has shown up well in school through my commentary's and other literary analysis thatI do, my english grades are much improved over where they were several years ago, and each year get better. (If only I could make these skills blatently evident in college applications *cough* columbia's fu foundation *cough*).

School, in tandom with the web have made me a much better, and much closer to a college level writer. I think the key thing about the web is that it has removed the age barrier. I started in 7th grade, and I wrote from a kids perspective. As I grew up, my writing also grew up to the point that now only do I do the writing, I also run much of the site. I don't think that most of my readers know that I am still in highschool. I am infinitly grateful for the web to have presented me with thise opportinities. I frankly don't know where I would be without it. (I started using the web in '93... thanks to a brand new school with a brand new computer lab)

Re:I'm a kid in a similar situation, and I agree -

[jesser]

There's a typo in the link to your web page. It should be www, not ww.

Re:I'm a kid in a similar situation, and I agree -

[Anonymous Coward]

No offense but the writing you've demonstrated in your comment needs significant improvements. I understand that you may not have proofread it but here are some pointers:

s/and senior/and a senior editor/ or s/and senior/and the senior/

s/writing lots/writing a lot/

s/would of ever/would have ever/

s/15,000/13,000/ s/15000/13,000/

s/commentary's/commentaries/

s/english/English/

s/columbia/Columbia/

s/tandom/tandem/

s/kids/kid's/

s/now only/now not only/

s/infinitly/infinitely/

s/thise/these/

s/opportinities/opportunities/

Try joining your school newspaper. Simply writing for a website doesn't get you nearly the same amount of constructive criticism that the school newspaper editors and faculty advisors can provide.

Re:I'm a kid in a similar situation, and I agree -

[Anonymous Coward]

I, err, he might be drunk when he wrote this

Re:I'm a kid in a similar situation, and I agree -

[quantaman]

when you are read by 15,000 people, a couple people out of those 15000 point out every little error you make.. and I have learned from those errors.

As opposed to some people.

Re:I'm a kid in a similar situation, and I agree -

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot s/would of/would have/.

With that many errors, I think he was just trying to make a joke. Surprises me that he's been modded +5 Interesting rather than +5 Funny, but I suppose it's to be expected when dealing with slashdot mods.

Re:I'm a kid in a similar situation, and I agree -

[Anonymous Coward]

Check again. I pointed it out that error.

Re:I'm a kid in a similar situation, and I agree -

[Anonymous Coward]

I forgot one:
s/blatently/blatantly/

Re:I'm a kid in a similar situation, and I agree -

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was 17 my writing skills were a lot better than yours... How can you claim you're good when your text is replete with errors?
I am a non-English speaker, taught myself English, and write better than you...

Or is this a joke?

Re:I'm a kid in a similar situation, and I agree -

[rixstep]

becoming a better writer... more than I would of ever written

It would seem you still of a way to go.

Re:I'm a kid in a similar situation, and I agree -

[rixstep]

Geez, I hope you write better at your web site with '? 13,000' uniques a day than you do here.

You've got misspellings, typos, incorrect word usage, you name it you got it bucko, all over the place.

And 'senior editor' - doesn't that mean you have to proof read and approve whatever goes in?

I feel sorry for your '? 13,000' readers in such case. No offence, but your writing sucks.

Re:I'm a kid in a similar situation, and I agree -

[Anonymous Coward]

s/pointed it out/pointed out.

Re:I'm a kid in a similar situation, and I agree -

[crabpeople]

"senior editor of a website that is read by about? 13,000 people a day,"

um you realize that your website is just one big image with your email underneath right?

i dont think thats considered writing.

Re:I'm a kid in a similar situation, and I agree -

[Anonymous Coward]

Oops. Another example of why one should proofread even the shortest of comments.

It was going to be:
I pointed it out.

Then it was going to be:
I pointed out that error.

But it ended up as:
I pointed it out that error.

Re:I'm a kid in a similar situation, and I agree -

[Anonymous Coward]

It would seem you still of a way to go.

s/of/have/ #?

Re:this is my home

[gagy]

You know what I'm talking about. I'm more hammered than the pope. and you wknow what. I hate how americans view being hammered or under the influence as a war. Amercians war against drugs. Oh yeah.. You're such dumbasses for that. I hate how you view people who drink alcohol as below you. Your country is useless. I like sweden because they ban adverts to young kids. I'm not from that country, but I envy them for that. Their gov't doesn't give a shit. If its not good for the people, they won't let it happen,. If the whole world was like that, there'd be no war. Except the amercican war against evrything.

GASP!

[Anonymous Coward]

And the ''karma whores', incidentally, have better grammar than the 'ocassional' poster.

These studies are BA material. Move along...nothing to see here.

Keep them away from /.

[Flamingcheeze]

better writers by participating in online communities

Better keep them away from /.

Slashdot

[The Almighty Dave]

I have been out of school for a long time. I think grammar and spelling nazis around here have really helped me try to write well. I pay close attention to what I write and how I write it. I still screw up, but there has been improvement.

Re:Slashdot

[teamhasnoi]

My first sig on Slashdot, which is immortalized somewhere, was,"Cmdr. Taco checks my posts for spalling errors." heh.

Safari has helped my spelling immensely, however, I still tend to overuse commas, and really need to watch them, in particular.

Re:Slashdot

[mog007]

What exactly, does it mean, to overuse, commas?

I've never, had a, problem with it, before.

Just, you know, you have to use them, after a pause.

Re:slashdot

[WuphonsReach]

The moderation system definitely rewards humor.

If the help file is to be believed, +Funny no longer gains you karma.

That's from Jun2003 (and yes, I realize that other FAQ entries still indicate that +Funny gains you karma).

Re:how are harry potter fanfics improved writing?

[IchBinDasWalross]

Tax-exempt status for geeky endeavors is old. The Klingon Language Institute is a registered non-profit oranization.

Re:this is my home

[gagy]

uh oh.. i'm sobering up. I don't htink i should have posted that to /. ah well, shit happens. :)

Re:how are harry potter fanfics improved writing?

[CoolVibe]

THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF THE HARRY POTTER CULT! LOCK YOUR DOORS AND ARM YOUR CHILDREN!

With what? Magic wands?

*tiptoes away and mumbles something in lowercase to placate the dreaded lameness filter*

mommy, what's "MPREG"?

[dohadeer]

I think anyone who has spent a reasonable amount of time looking through the Harry Potter fanfic community would realize that this is not a place you want your children freely roaming about or practicing their writing skills. That is not to say that there aren't plenty of wonderful writers out there who write really amazing stories. Some of these stories are full of real emotion and demonstrate the skill of a number of talented, undiscovered writers. Rather, I'm simply saying that an unsupervised child in the world of Harry Potter fanfiction might wonder how exactly Severus Snape managed to get pregnant with Draco Malfoy's baby, and why exactly Ginny Weasley became so much of a harlet.

Having been exposed to both sides of the HP fanfiction, and having rejected both of them for my own reasons, I would have to say any parent that would encourage their child to join in this type of community has certainly not been exposed to it in its entirety and would be sorely mistaken to assume it is a safe place for children to roam.

Re:mommy, what's "MPREG"?

[nhaines]

But that's rediculous. You'll find slash anywhere you look. I know someone who writes extremely well, and her current project is a Lord of the Rings slash piece called "Ring Around the Merry," which asks "what if Merry was ensnared by the Ring and didn't let Frodo leave Crickhollow?" I haven't read it (I've promised to, but it's huge and it's sitting in my queue yet), but I know it's not something I would let my kid read.

Still, it's often the case that writing communities have standards and guidelines, and there is no shortage of communities that absolutely reject anything that is gory or sexual. All you have to do to avoid reading slash is to participate in one of those communities. That's hardly "roaming." A writing community also helps encourage peer review. You look foward to reading what others you know have written, and to having them read what you write.

I myself don't bother with fanfics myself, but being involved in fan fiction doesn't mean you're automatically exposed to slash. The trick is to join a non-slash community, which should be a perfectly safe place for a child to roam.

Re:mommy, what's "MPREG"?

[Maxhrk]

it is 'inevitabity' to hide those thing from your or other children. I think. YOu know i learned the bad words and among other thing like 'sex' in grade school about several years ago. it is impossible to hide those things from children anyhoo unless you put them somwhere in highly secured school from outside world. ^_^ heh.

It only matter of times when your children learn those thing from their peer group in school or somewhere else anyway.

Re:mommy, what's "MPREG"?

[daviddennis]

In our current society, is there any kid who has NOT been exposed to this sort of thing?

I don't particularly like it, but it's the way our culture works right now, and there's not a lot we can do to change it.

That being said, I read the article and loved it, because it encapsulated exactly what I hated about school. In English class, you are asked to interpret what others have written, not create your own stuff. I wanted so badly to create my own material in class, rather than reading other people's stuff and critiquing it.

In all my years of English, there was only one year of creative writing, and I think that's a darn shame. People should learn to create their own stuff, not write boring essays nobody would ever want to read again.

How does that help you do anything but write more boring essays?

The way we teach English makes it so much less interesting and absorbing than it should be. I think of this phenomenon as a way to reverse that and get people interested in writing, which I think is extremely cool.

D

Re:mommy, what's "MPREG"?

[aardvarkjoe]

In English class, you are asked to interpret what others have written, not create your own stuff. I wanted so badly to create my own material in class, rather than reading other people's stuff and critiquing it.

Well, at least when I went to school, critiquing and interpreting someone else's writing involved quite a bit of writing of my own. Too many people treat assigned writing tasks as a dead end that takes no thought, but you can actually get a lot out of them if you apply your creativity. In fact, I've kept some of my best pieces of writing over the years, and my two favorite happen to be a pair of essays about rhetorical analysis of a couple books.

That said, I do think that some classes need to inject more assignments without as many constraints. (I've seen senior English classes where every assignment was "write an essay arguing these points by using this sentence-by-sentence format.") I was fortunate enough to have a teacher that gave us a variety of different and interesting assignments.

Re:mommy, what's "MPREG"?

[PinkHeidi]

this is not a place you want your children freely roaming about or practicing their writing skills. The two sites cited in the article are basically ages-13-and-up sites. Neither us at FictionAlley.org nor the admins at Sugarquill allow people to register for the site to submit or review fics if they're under 13 years of age, and our message boards at FA are off limit to posting as well. At FA, we also have a two-page block in front of any R-rated stories, which asks people if they're underage and if they are, whether their parent/guardian is ok with them reading R-rated fics. Yes, of course, people will lie, and we're not doing this to duck responsibility - it's just a way of preventing people from randomly stumbling across a story that they're not mature enough to read. As a parent myself, I am a big fan of parents keeping an eye on their kids - especially the under-14's - when said kids are online. I don't think that ickle 8-9 year olds should be wandering the internet sans supervision, and I don't think they should be reading any of the R-rated stories on FA. Rather, I'm simply saying that an unsupervised child in the world of Harry Potter fanfiction might wonder how exactly Severus Snape managed to get pregnant with Draco Malfoy's baby, and why exactly Ginny Weasley became so much of a harlet. Because Tom Riddle is evil and left an evil residue in her mind, of course. There's a slew of Evil!Ginny fics out there, you see...

Re:mommy, what's "MPREG"?

[Queen's Gambit]

Hey, don't diss the slash. (Or, as the saying goes, "Meddle not in the affairs of slashers, for you are cute and look good with other men.") First of all, as Heidi mentioned, most fanfiction sites have age restrictions due to content in general. As for slash, not all of it is so eplicit that it needs to be restricted. in fact, most of slash isn't. I don't see why you shouldn't be exposed to slash in general. If a child is on the internet at all it is safe to assume he or she is responsible enough to handle mild slash, considering what else s/he risks discovering on the internet. As a fanficcer and one of the teenagers that have improved their grammar and spelling in every day life due to dealings in fanfiction, I can safely say that slash has bothered me not at all, even before I began reading it. In fact, being less popular than het, slash fics are actually more likely to have proper gammar and spelling, at least if you're looking at ff.net, that is. Mia

Re:how are harry potter fanfics improved writing?

[Comsn]

are you asking if we should arm our children with magic wands or if thats what the harry potter cult is going to attack with?

I can forgive the alliteration

[evronm]

Harry Potter fan fiction forums (sorry about the alliteration)

But writing "forums" when one means "fora" is simply unforgivable.

For the humor impaired, the above is joke. Get over it!

Re:I can forgive the alliteration

[ebbomega]

Reminds me of a troll on another forum I was on. When I wrote "viri" he responded with "IT'S SPELLED VIRII" and other such flames. I was amused, because in latin, the singular "us" is pluralized to "i", so virus would be viri.

Funniest thing is the plural of "virus" is "viruses".

IM Doesn't Directly Harm Writing Ability

[oobob]

Even though many have disparaged the effects of IM on schoolchildrens' prose, some kids are actually becoming better writers by participating in online communities.

I don't get why people say this. You could claim that IM faciliates poor English, but I don't see this as an direct effect. How could a program turn words and structure into that s*** you find in chatrooms?

I think kids are just farking lazy. While IM allows them to write horrible sentences without being screeched at by teachers, implying that poor prose is caused by IM is a stretch. These are the kids who, don't know when to, use commas, or won't use the correct words, even if they're forced. IM just allows that trend to solidify into habit, since they're all chatting instead of watching TV or talking on the phone. Think about it: if computers didn't exist, when would these people write at all?

wold u disagre?

In high school, I offered a classmate (in the accelerated English class, mind you) the chance to break my physics bridge if he wrote a pro-choice paper, mainly because I was sick of hearing his Christian ramblings during class. I'm undecided on abortion, but I wanted to understand how someone like him would argue against his beliefs. I saw a perfect opportunity to challenge his arrogant moral zeal, the same flavor that makes the rest of the world hate us and makes me want to break his face. When I saw his draft, I almost cried. The writing was so unstructured that I could hardly understand anything. The kid couldn't conceptualize a thought he didn't agree with, much less express it in a quasi-coherent form.

When I started using IM, my anal-retentive friend would scream at me if I didn't include puncuation, or capitalize my sentences. Now, I can't stand when others don't do the same, and my writing has benefited tremendously. If I write a paper and check it once, I catch most errors, and figure out more effective ways to arrange sentences. Your ear will learn syntax and structure, even if you don't. Writing benefits writing, and the only harm inflicted by IM is allowing kids to write how they want. If you read any number of high school papers (my dad used to teach 10th-11th grade English), you'd understand. The difference between those papers and IMs? Well, they capitalize their sentences, and they're considerate enough to include periods.

Re:IM Doesn't Directly Harm Writing Ability

[TempeTerra]

You could claim that IM faciliates poor English, but I don't see this as an direct effect. How could a program turn words and structure into that s*** you find in chatrooms?

Actually, IM minus touchtyping leads to poor english. IM conventions are a result of people who don't know the layout of a keyboard thinking "crap! I need to reply! where's the `e' key?", which results from real-time chat, or cruddy interfaces like text messages on mobile phones.

That's one of the reasons IM conventions don't show up much on slashdot; we all know our way around our keyboards intimately. The grammatical bottleneck is somewhere inside the user's head, rather than at the keyboard so a user's natural level of grammar comes out. (Hi Slashdot crew!)

Re:IM Doesn't Directly Harm Writing Ability

[CdBee]

As part of my self-imposed re-education, I'm currently working on going from an adequate to competent command of the French language

Part of this has involved spending an hour a day in IRC (Efnet #France under this name)

In French perhaps more than english I'd have to agree that online chat does not help language development.

For example the qu' which is so common in French becomes k' (quelqu'un "someone" becomes kkn), strings of phonetically useless vowels are dropped (beaucoup "much/many" becomes bcp)

In English , also having many phonetically redundnant letters, the same sort of compression occurs

This seems to repress regular sentence formation as well as punctuation. I don't mean to say that Cerber, Natacha, Loque the bot et al are harming my command of french - indeed they greatly improve it by giving me an understanding of the current slang use of the language, an essential to my social skills, as well as tolerating my manglings and helpfully explaining and encouraging, but that I can see more clearly how hard it would be to gain command of your own lnguage by mangling it so.

if we're going to be picky...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, just the part about people being picky made me write this.

It should be tandem, not tandom.

Good luck at colombia!

Slashdot has helped my writing skills!

[quantaman]

Seriously!

No, it hasn't really improved my grammar or spelling (sorry grammar nazis), but through the obscene number of posts I've made since I've started contributing to slashdot discussions I have refined my writing skills. In my quest to come across intelligently and post something that people will want to read I've gained valuable communication skills. For evidence I simply consider how much better I do with respect to karma than when I first started posting, sure the karma bonus helps and I've probably learned to be a bit of a karma whore (why post something that no one will read) but I do believe a significant increase in the number of my comments that get modded up is due to writing skills I have improved by posting to slashdot.

As well I've even tried writing short stories and posting them on my site, not that they're any good but it's fun to put up something that someone might read (even if it's only a couple friends who give pleasently baised reviews:). I don't get to write as much as I'd like to but I've found I very much enjoy doing it and I am sure I never would of started if it was not for the ability to post them online even though no one will read them but a couple friends who I could have given them to anyway.

It doesn't matter if it's posts to slashdot or short stories on my site, the online community has inspired me to write things that require thought and that cannot help but cause my writing abilities to improve. Now I merely await the trolls who shall flock to point out that this post isn't well written at all (hey it's 1 am here!).

Re:Slashdot has helped my writing skills!

[teamhasnoi]

You beat me to it :)

I'm coming up on 1900 posts on slashdot, and though many of them were funny one liners, incoherent rants, subtle trolls and raging flamebait, many have been rather thought out and labored over.

I find posting to slashdot is like a journal of sorts; I've discovered and formed many opinions, revised them, thrown some out, and revisited them.

Slashdot has done much for my thinking, as responding to arguments requires (for me anyway) a well-reasoned response. Mostly I've found that I'm consistently +5 funny before I wake up in the morning and in the 12th hour of a deadline. Like now. Back to 2am work :(

Re:Slashdot has helped my writing skills!

[Anonymous Coward]

Never stop writing; if you enjoy it, as you alluded to in your post, then never deny yourself that pleasure. No matter what anyone else might say about you or your words, never stop that which gives you meaning.

Never forget it.

Re:Slashdot has helped my writing skills!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck urself with a trout you shitty bitch

Re:Slashdot has helped my writing skills!

[brucmack]

I don't get to write as much as I'd like to but I've found I very much enjoy doing it and I am sure I never would of started if it was not for the ability to post them online even though no one will read them but a couple friends who I could have given them to anyway.

Slashdot still needs to help you with run-on sentences, apparently... :)

Henry Jenkins

[Anonymous Coward]

Henry Jenkins has been featured on Slashdot before over the years. Most notably, for defending "different" kids to Congress through his essays and papers. He defended goth, punk, geek and nerd kids when we were all under attack during the aftermath of Columbine. He also was quick to stand up and intelligently combat anti-videogame loonies who wanted to impose massive restrictions on them and blame every ill in society on them.

Henry Jenkins is incredibly intelligent, well-spoken and puts his effort into a lot of things that a lot of *us* find very important.

closer to a college level?

[Pyromage]

Honestly, have you read the crap that most people write? You write far and away better than 95% of college students. And that's just because you can spell and puncuate.

Re: Closer to a college level?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, mod parent up.

My mother (a highschool dropout, ironically) has spent the last 18 years doing typing and editing professionally. The last 5 years she's done mostly doctoral dissertations. She's shown me some of the writing in these things... her job was to do the final edit, which is supposed to be fine-tuning every last little detail to meet the standards of the inch thick book regarding every detail of formatting for doctoral dissertations. I have to say, she's shown me some of the most unintelligible, long winded, just plane badly written sentences I have every seen, straight out of dissertations which were supposedly almost complete. And that's coming from me; I'm a notoriously long winded orator, and equally verbose in my writing.

The funniest part, as I recall, was all the customers who would ask her when she's doing her dissertation. I believe her standard response was just to politely say "well, I don't need one." and leave it at that.

Re: Closer to a college level?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope she doesn't simply use a spell checker because they cannot detect homophones. Obviously you are one person that it would help because you planely need it.

My favourite alliteration:

[Captain Splendid]

"Holy Hell, he hardly hesitated!"

The point of learning Latin

[Serious Simon]

Having taken Latin classes for six years, many years ago, I have sometimes pondered the point of learning a dead language.
I came to the conclusion that by learning Latin I actually learned a lot about my own language (which is Dutch, by the way).

In fact, exercises almost exclusively consisted of translating from Latin and not the other way around.

An interesting aspect of Latin is that the grammatical structure relies more on declinations (word endings); and word order in Latin sentences does generally not correspond to that of the translation in e.g. English or Dutch. Translating a Latin sentence involves looking up unfamiliar words, and figuring out the grammatical functions and relations of the words in the sentence. After the analysis comes the synthesis: writing a grammatically correct sentence in Dutch (or English, etc.) that accurately represents the meaning of the Latin sentence. I am sure that the skills thus learned are also helpful when it comes to expressing original thoughts.

Re:The point of learning Latin

[TomV]

"Latin is a language
as dead as dead can be.
It killed the ancient Romans,
and now it's killing me."

Nonetheless, I honestly believe that learning Latin at school has genuinely contributed to my coding. It's a wonderfully rigorous and structured language, but one which uses that rigour and structure to describe the real world. The strength of Latin is its unforgiving structure, while the strength of English is its flexibility.

Apart from anything else Latin lessons gave me a clear understanding of terms such as 'syntax' and 'parse', of proper sentence construction and the importance of precision in language.

I also feel there may, in some sense, be an added benefit, which manifests in a variety of ways, some obvious and some far more subtle, to be gained from the study of a language, even a language which is no longer current, vernacular or in any sense idiomatic, from which not only are a great many of the present day languages of Europe clear derivatives, but which was also the nearest thing to a universal language for many centuries, in which it would be, were that language to be more widely used today, considered entirely reasonable to construct sentences of great structural complexity, far beyond that displayed in current English, containing a range of subsidiary clauses, embedded phrases, hypothetical diversions and clearly structured formations such as the dreaded Ablative Absolute, with the consequent benefit of a remarkable precision in the expression of far more complex constructs in a single structural unit than might be possible in a language tending towards a shorter, more atomic, style of construction.

On the other hand, there's readability to consider... ;-)

Re:The point of learning Latin

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, it all dependes on how (what) the languages happen to be... Your native Dutch is very close kin to English, so the Latin comes in handy.

I'm Finnish, and as we have a very explicit syntax (visibly encoded in affixes), I didn't need exposure to another language to become aware of it. What was nice, the English grammar was a piece of cake to learn after Finnish. (And the pronunciation (more accurately, the *spelling*) in turn was a nightmare to get right...)

In Finnish, word order just adds nuances; it is essentially free. You encode objects, subjets, tense, number et cetera with prefixes, infixes, transfixes, and suffixes. You can pile 'em up too: one example of an impractical but prefectly legitimate single word -- not a compound -- is "jarjestelmallistyttamattomyydellaansakaankohan"
which modifies "jarjestelma" 'system' into 'even with his/her lack of causing of systematicalization, I wonder?', as you can readily see.

Okay, nobody uses that word. But still. Our words are longer than yours.

(Funny. Laugh.)

Re:The point of learning Latin

[hhnerkopfabbeisser]

In my expierience, translating Latin to something alive usually involved a considerable amount of guessing because Latin lacks structure.

They just use the ablative for everything and you have to guess which meaning of the ablative to might be the right one, they have no punctuation, putting the words of a sentence in any meaningful order is optional.

Latin's heavy reliance on word-endings makes it way to complicated, you have to try to find out which word in the sentence might be related to which of the other words (as I said, often they are in no meaningful order), which might be acceptable if these relations were unambiguous.

There are many reasons why Latin as we are/were tought it was never a spoken language.

Re:The point of learning Latin

[CRCulver]

In my expierience, translating Latin to something alive usually involved a considerable amount of guessing because Latin lacks structure.

Maybe because you are thinking in English and applying its paradigms when you should be thinking in Latin?

There are many reasons why Latin as we are/were tought it was never a spoken language.

So you don't think languages which encode meaning in endings can be spoken languages? You might have a glance at Finnish; an earlier poster explained how Finnish word order is also often arbitrary and it uses complex noun morphology like Latin. Or take Hungarian, my favourite, a language arguably more complex than Latin with both word-endings and postpositions, free word-order, and frequent lack of subjects or objects making one dependent on context. Among purely IE languages, the Slavic languages still preserve a lot of the complex noun morphology of the early Indo-European languages, but they are spoken daily by millions with no problems.

Classical Latin was never a daily spoken language, though people could understand easily recited classical Latin, look how much poetry was composed it it. Vulgar Latin, however, the language of the uneducated masses, was just as complex as classical Latin until a relatively late era.

Re:The point of learning Latin

[hhnerkopfabbeisser]

Sure, there are worse languages, but when you talk about structure and programming and Latin, I feel that there is a "not" missing somewhere.
When you want to shape your programming style or a new programming language after a natural language, Latin does show some Dos, but a lot of Don'ts too.

Frankly, next time I'm asked if I'd rather learn Latin or French, I'll go for French.
And if you want to learn a dead language just for the sake of the learning... wouldn't Esperanto be a better choice?

PS: I would've been thinking in German, not English.

Re:The point of learning Latin

[CRCulver]

And if you want to learn a dead language just for the sake of the learning... wouldn't Esperanto be a better choice?

Geez, I just wrote an entire post responding to myths about Esperanto, and right away someone brings them up again. Esperanto isn't dead. In the past three years I a) worked in an office where Esperanto is the language in use, and b) carried on a love affair with a girl with whom Esperanto was our common language. I speak it daily, and most of my social circles use Esperanto.

As far as learning a dead language, that really depends on what one is interested in. I'm a classics major, so obviously Latin is Real Important for me. I also want to do graduate study in IE comparative philology, so I'm currently learning two dead languages for the sake of learning a whole lot more dead languages.

Re:The point of learning Latin

[hhnerkopfabbeisser]

For Esperanto, that's my point exactly. I would't yet call it "alive", but it has future.

Re:The point of learning Latin

[CRCulver]

So for you what exactly does Esperanto have to do to be "alive" if it already has a viable community of speakers, and is even producing some native speakers on a charmingly often basis?

Re:The point of learning Latin

[Coward the Anonymous]

Bah, Latin is for pansies. Try learning Ancient Greek. Now that's a hard dead language to learn. Nothing like a new alphabet to bring into the mix. And don't forget that many words are well over 10 characters in length. And the accenting rules, sheesh!

Seriously, the declensions in Greek (and Latin too), and the lack of word order bearing any meaning whatsoever really threw me for a loop at first.

I also have learned so much about English grammar.

Greek and Latin should be taught in every school.

Re:The point of learning Latin

[digitalsushi]

I also feel there may, in some sense, be an added benefit, [breathe]which manifests in a variety of ways, some obvious and some far more subtle, [breathe]to be gained from the study of a language, even a language which is no longer current, vernacular [breathe]or in any sense idiomatic, from which not only are a great many of the present day [breathe]languages of Europe clear derivatives, but which was also the nearest thing to a universal language for many centuries,[breathe] in which it would be, were that language to be more widely used today, considered entirely reasonable [breathe]to construct sentences of great structural complexity, far beyond that displayed in current English,[breathe] containing a range of subsidiary clauses, embedded phrases, hypothetical diversions and [breathe]clearly structured formations such as the dreaded Ablative Absolute, with the consequent benefit of a remarkable precision [breathe]in the expression of far more complex constructs in a single structural unit than might be possible in a language [breathe]tending towards a shorter, more atomic, style of construction.

On the other hand, there's readability to consider... ;-)

Indeed!

Re:The point of learning Latin

[spike hay]

Dutch is a Germanic language, if I am not mistaken. Does it display more similarities to Latin than English? English does have many latin influences, although its French, Anglo-Saxon, and Celtic influences are greater.

Re:The point of learning Latin

[Neon Crossing]

"Greek and Latin should be taught in every school." I agree. My school starts with Latin and moves onto Greek, and bother have given me a new understanding of English grammar. The system works!

Re:The point of learning Latin

[Alphtoo]

Do what?

Re:The point of learning Latin

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree heartily. I study Latin, though I'm still a high school student, and I've found that it has helped my comprehension of the English language drastically. In the lower grades, I was always an excellent English student, but I never felt that I had a real grasp on the structure and syntax of the language. Now, I also find myself noting the cases and functions of different words at times as I read. I think this helps me to be able to write better, because I really understand why things are the way they are.

One of the reasons Latin teaches grammar so well is that, like you mentioned, you're for the most part translating from Latin into English and thus you really have to look and the vocabulary and grammar.

I think my Latin foundation will also help me in learning other modern languages. In about six months I'm going to be taking beginning French classes, and it will be interesting to see how that is helped by my knowledge of Latin.

WHAT?

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, every day I see people talking with incorrect grammar and spelling. The classic "u r so kewl" type of junk.

nmourtos@rogers.com

Re:WHAT?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even worse is this guy I know who also includes "yew" in his grammar. He replaces "you" with "yew" ALL HE TIME.

I hate people who spell cutesy, thinking it makes them seem really neat and cool. All it does is make you look like a fucking *moron*.

I disagree

[Seft]

Firstly, writing isn;t improving due to some fan fiction. Writing is improving due to the fact that people are reading more. Whereas 5+ years ago kids could get away almost entirely without reading, now they *have* to read to use the internet. This is especially true for those who will be reading more serious pages. Improved writing is a result of an improved vocabulary, logically this has to be the case. Equally, grammar is declining simply because it isn't being taught. If you have ever taken a modern language, you will agree that you learn far more grammar in a year than you will have ever learnt in english. Solution? Get children learning a second language early.

Most People Can't Spell

[NixLuver]

The title is a little bit of a stretch; what I mean to say is that most of the people I exchange IMs with are abominable at spelling and worse at grammar. Fortunately for my peace of mind, it doesn't bother me very much as long as I can actually apprehend what they're trying to convey.

People that speak clearly will put punctuation in random places. One of my friends explained to me that he knew punctuation belonged in there, but he didn't know where it went, so he made it up as he went along.

In the end, however, language is a popularity contest, right? The words used the most frequently prosper and surge into the forefront of our vocabularies, and those less often used fade away. Spelling and grammar are also in flux constantly, but at a very slow rate that drops below most peoples' radars.

As time goes on and these electronic tools become more and more common, I would expect to see a levelling occur; Even though I can spell fairly well, I'd advocate phonetic spelling and reduction or elimination of homonyms. Call me a philistine, I don't care...

change for the machines. It's a stoned-the-crows-at-home Schroedinger's world.

Re:Most People Can't Spell

[kaosrules]

mE abjuct !! i no shpellin . Shakespear willl b prawed off me !

Re:Most People Can't Spell

[Anonymous Coward]

> ... I'd advocate phonetic spelling...

Please tell me this is a joke! Phonetic spelling is a terribly bad idea when you take into account the huge number of accents (think Scottish) that would result in a different phonetic spelling.

For this reason I'd advocate the opposite of what you advocate. For example, think about this: Mandarin and Cantonese are vastly different (spoken) languages, but they are the same when written.

harry potter fanfiction...

[spare.dave]

"Harry Potter fan fiction forums"

Yea, I know a lot of these Harry Potter writers. They have a pretty broad range of topics.... .. anything from "harry has affectionate thoughts for [random male cast member]" to "harry rapes/gets raped by [random male cast member] using a monkey, a tub of lard, a spare tire, and a crowbar". In between is a mix of bondage, teenage romance (with [random male cast member]), and some more bondage.

Something about the little dude seems to have drawn together every slash writer that can put together a coherent sentence (and most who can't).

I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but don't be fooling yourselves.

Sure, you're 12 year old daughter is imagining herself as a wizard at Hogwarts, flying around on a broomstick and chasing dragons. Just remember that at the end of the day when the classes are over and the dragons are chased, she'll be in the back-room, sodomizing little harry potter with her broomstick.

Poor Headline

[porp]

Okay, maybe I'm just drunk, but I read the headline "Kids Improve Writing Online" about 100 different ways before reading the blurb and seeing what the poster meant. Now that I understand that kids are improving their writing abilities by communicating in online forums, the headline is still pretty ambiguous. Perhaps the kids should improve writing slashdot. online.

porp

Re:Poor Headline

[Excen]

Okay, maybe I'm just drunk

Yes, yes you are.

writing

[Triv]

Anybody remember these guys?

Triv

Re:writing

[togofspookware]

yah... e2 is teh sux

Writers do it to themselves

[nic barajas]

What is improving the writing of students - or even adults - may be communities like this, but only if the person is so inclined to improve him or herself. Or instead have people pushing them to change. My brother, for example, is involved in a role playing game played via e-mail. He is on top of his grammar and spelling, while others are not.

Some will never get off their 'u r 2 kewl' and onto meaningful spelling. It's when you are writing for a larger audience than a high school English class that you become more obsessed with the way you convey your meaning. (That's what makes writing this comment so hard!)

Appropriate words for the correct forum.

[Anonymous Coward]

I write in a lot of different ways which vary greatly depending on where I am trying to communicate via the keyboard. This is entirely natural, however people seem damned sure to miss the obvious logical connection.

Different forums. Different grammar.

On livejournal my words come out pretty much like they would from my head, random, stream of consciousness with little regard for form. Chatting? Chatting is for filling in on communication with another person when you can't/won't see them in person or talk on the phone. IM doesn't need or require the same level of formality that one puts into papers or correspondence for work.

There's nothing wrong with 'teh k1dz' these days writing garbage in chat or in forums because these are throw away mediums, no different than a phone chat, except they may be saved for others to see.

Re:Appropriate words for the correct forum.

[Anonymous Coward]

[AnonCoward] very true.
[AnonCoward] on irc I tend to write without caps or much punctuation, because it's quicker
[AnonCoward] it doesn't really matter on irc though, it's easier to read because the lines are so short,
[AnonCoward] it's more like reading a script than reading paragraphed text

Obviously, when writing in a form where speed isn't important and ease of reading is, you write slower, with more regard for correctness.

I tend to think of forums as a "correct writing" environment, since people don't usually have conversations in real time; on most of the forums I post on, the convention is that it's fine to be a bit sloppier than you would when writing web pages, but clear writing is important since it's all anyone knows about you. It always annoys me when I see either posts which are one big paragraph, or posts which are so badly thought out that I actually have trouble reading them.

I suspect posters whose first language isn't English have a bit of trouble with some forum posts by "teh k1dz". Interestingly, among the people whose nationality I know, the worst English seems to come from some of the British and American posters; the non-native English speakers (mostly German and Dutch, on the forums I use) generally write quite well, although occasionally they phrase something in a way that makes it clear what they mean, but isn't something a native English speaker would say.

Mobile phones teach kids to spell

[fact0r]

It is taking the education sector some time to be comfortable about the idea that technology may have a place equal to the teacher in the classroom.

Take mobile phones - with the development of predictive text no longer do I read newspaper articles about essays handed up for assesment in SMS shorthand. SMS now teaches kids to spell like no number of spelling bees can.

So parents invest in your child's future - pay their mobile phone bill for them.

Graduation

[Grym]

I'll never forget the time when I was standing in line to appear for graduation (2002). All of us in the top ten were talking about our speeches, and I asked one of them (2nd in our class) if I could read her speech. I skimmed through the standard-issue "glad we made it this far"-crap, but when I finished, I realized that she ended the speech with a preposition. I laughed, and mentioned this to her, suggesting a minor change. Her response? She simply shrugged and said she didn't care.

I think this is the true problem with most kids nowadays. They don't care. And why should they? I remember most of my "writing" classes consisted of idiotic writing prompts like:
"If you were a seagull, what would you do?" (actual prompt)
These classes are too much about expressing your inner-seagull that punctuation and grammar are considered secondary at best; page length being the most important factor, of course.

I mean, honestly, the problem isn't that difficult to define. Let's not blame IM for what is fundamentally the fault of our society as a whole. I think, before we point fingers, we all need to step back and ask ourselves, "What is going on here?"

-Grym

Re:Graduation

[clarinetforhire]

Wow, I had actually forgotten how stupid highschool english classes were until I read that! Most of mine were better than "If you were a seagull, what would you do?" (actual prompt), but that is exactly what all the standardized tests looked like.
My guess is somebody decided that creativity is much more important than the knowing what the phrase "past participle" means. Parents don't want their children to be the next $40,000/year editor at Harper Collins, they want their kid to be the next J.K. Rowling.

I don't think creativity can be taught, and the school's attempts at teaching creativity are worthless. English class basically consisted of being told "write a ten page story." So I'd write a story, then get it handed back to me with a few spelling errors circled, but those were words I knew how to spell and just happened to miss for some reason. So in the end I had learned nothing. Then we'd do it again.

Re:Graduation

[Anonymous Coward]

It's quite possible she didn't care because it doesn't fucking matter. If she gets across what she wants to, in the style she wants to, then it is her speech. It belongs to her.

The nazis died in 1945. Feel out of place?

Re:Graduation

[odin53]

As Winston Churchill said, "This is the sort of English up with which I will not put."

You might want to pick up a copy of Strunk and White: "Not only is the preposition acceptable at the end, sometimes it is more effective in that spot than anywhere else." You won't find a reputable modern English guide that teaches differently.

Re:Graduation

[efflux]

I couldn't remember whom that quote was from. Thanks for reminding me.

I r improoven

[Lindy]

Yester dey I kud knot speel da wurd teknisssshun.
Too dey I r wun.

ALERT!

[Anonymous Coward]

This just in, writing frequently improves related skills.

literacy tutor

[Aqua OS X]

I'm not surprised. A few years ago I had a job as a literacy tutor. At my school (an elementary school), kids who studied a second language usually performed better with reading and writing in English.

Punctuation or meaning?

[nic barajas]

What you failed to mention was whether her speech had any meaning to it.

It's true that spelling and punctuation are important, but that's not what this article was stressing - and that makes the poster's comments even worse. It is more how a student is able to write better than how they are able to put a comma in the right place. We should still be faulting people for their mistakes in punctuations and grammar, but only when it fails to convey their meaning properly.

elitist ignorance

[themusicgod1]

i have perhaps met three people who know english. english is a hack, of many different languages and dialects, warped and twisted generation after generation. i sure has hell don't claim to know english.
seriously though, why should anyone be expected to learn a language as bloated, and crufty as english? while i have yet find a replacement(esperanto?), i think if it is understandable, that is all that matters. isn't that what the point of a language is, in the first place? to get meaning/information from one point to another?
this thinking people as worse because of their incapability to learn a near-impossible language is just naieve. there's infinitely more important things to do than learn how to communicate absurdly more accurately.

Re:elitist ignorance

[forevermore]

english is a hack, of many different languages and dialects, warped and twisted generation after generation

Show me a language, other than a manmade one like Sanskrit (yes, it was codified, organized and "fixed in stone" about 2000-2400 years ago), that isn't. All languages evolve, that's what makes them "living" languages (as opposed to so-called "dead" ones like latin, ancient greek or classical arabic). You described a pidgin, which English definitely isn't. English has been evolving and in use as its own language for over 1500 years.

If we only had one language (like your example of Esperanto), it, too would begin to evolve as new technologies, etc. came into being. Esperanto lost popularity because it was too simple of a language -- it didn't contain enough complexity to convey the meanings necessary to carry on an intellectual conversation.

Languages, dialects and words evolve because of communication needs. Imagine if I said something like "this is wonderfully spicy food." English uses the word "spicy" for (at least) two different meanings: "flavorful from having a number of spices added", and "hot, as in chili peppers." A language like Spanish has evolved its own word (picante) for the latter meaning, and thus if I were to say "esta comida es deliciosamente picante," you'd know immediately that I love hot-spicy food.

It's not elitist to ask that people learn and use good grammar or spelling. Grammar is what gives sentences meaning. You can completely change the meaning of a sentence by misplacing a comma (I know, I spent an hour defending one sentence in my philosophy thesis because of an ambiguous comma) or other punctuation mark, just as you can make a sentence very difficult to read by using "it's" (it is) instead of "its" (belongs to "it").

Granted, English is a horribly over-complex language that has adopted words and phrases from a variety of other (often non-related) languages, you said it yourself - it's extremely difficult to find a replacement for it. I'm not about to say that everyone should learn English and nothing else -- far from it, I speak/understand 3 languages (only one of them very well, anymore) and find it attrocious that Americans can barely speak their own language, let alone at least one more -- but, it has become the dominant language of information, and like it or not, especially because so many people speak it, it's very important to follow the rules (and the exceptions) in order to be understood.

Just for an experiment, if you want to see how much more effort it is to have something that's just "understandable," go read some Middle English like Chaucer, where words were spelled phonetically instead of according to specified rules (and the spellings change between instances of the words). You practically have to read it aloud if you want to understand it easily. There's a reason why grammar and spelling standards evolved within languages.

Re:elitist ignorance

[tehanu]

For one thing - if you knew proper grammar, sentence-structure etc. it would have made your comment that much easier to read. I'm not a grammar Nazi. But in your case I spent a lot more time concentrating on the process of reading what you wrote rather than thinking about what you wrote. This is mainly because your lack of capitalisation means that your comment just looks like one big blob of text. Also your sentence structure sucks. You put commas where there should be full-stops which means that the flow of the text is wrong and I have to stop to think about what you really meant. At least you attempted to put it in paragraphs.

Good grammar is about making it easier for your readers to read what you wrote by breaking up the text into logical structures that are easy for the eyes to parse. Whenever I see something on the web that is just one big blob of text (no capitalisation, no paragraph breaks etc.) with very bad spelling I don't read it unless the information it contains is vital. Why? Because it gives me a headache and strains my eyes just trying to parse the text to get to the information. It's not about elitism. It's about saving my eyes and head from having to read 3 times slower and concentrating twice as hard to get to the information than if the author had bothered to try to separate the words into a proper structure and ran it through a spell-check.

Having proper grammar and spelling is like having everyone using standard C or standard C++ rather than weird variant number 1000 that only works on this computer when there is a full moon. It might be more boring and staid, but having a standard framework that everyone agrees on makes it much easier to understand what the other guy is talking about. Smaller groups may use their own special deviations (which make it harder for those outside their group to understand their programs). If new deviations become popular enough they get added to the standard. But still having that standard framework is vital, and those who choose to deviate from it should still be fully grounded in it so they can communicate easily with others not in their special "group".

Re:elitist ignorance

[Anonymous Coward]

Overall, I agree with your post. My only quibble is that Esperanto is still growing, so to claim it's lost popularity (much less because you can't hold an 'intellectual conversation' in it) is a bit silly. The grammar is certainly extremely simple, but it's like how C is a small language; it's quite expressive, and you can say things in a number of different, valid ways. You mark the direct object of a phrase with an 'n' for instance, so you can say "Mi havas akvon" or "akvon mi havas" (I have water) in a variety of different ways. This isn't just an intellectual curiosity; it allows people to use word order from their native languages and be understood perfectly well. Esperanto is my third language; I've been learning it for about a week, and while far from fluent, it's definately quite easy to learn. Having struggled with a second language, and seeing people literally daily who have trouble with at least one of the languages I speak, I can appreciate simplicity. Being able to hold complicated conversations is more a function of vocabulary; with esperanto's suffix and affix system, you can express some concepts much more easily at times than in other languages. The words for one (unu) and first (unua) are related, and if you know one the other is obvious, unlike in English.
For a conversation on a technical topic, such as computers, English is at present the best language.
A language which has gained 2 million fluent speakers in the last hundred-odd years, being similar to modern Hewbrew in pure numbers should not be dismissed immediately, with nothing but an off the cuff remark on why it must be bad/useless.
http://www.geocities.com/c_piron/1.html is an exploration of this; the best one I've seen is at http://infoweb.magi.com/~mfettes/psyres.html ("psychological reactions to esperanto"), but the site seems to be down at present; ymmv.
Esperanto is meant to be a universal second(/third/whatever) language, and I think it's incredibly well suited to that role.

Re:elitist ignorance

[monkeyfinger]

Just for an experiment, if you want to see how much more effort it is to have something that's just "understandable," go read some Middle English like Chaucer, where words were spelled phonetically instead of according to specified rules

I'd reccomend reading Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh. It's about scottish drug addicts and the entire book is written in phonetic scottish. It's weird at first, but it really works. It's also an amazing book.

Re:elitist ignorance

[CRCulver]

Esperanto lost popularity because it was too simple of a language -- it didn't contain enough complexity to convey the meanings necessary to carry on an intellectual conversation.

What?!?! This is the silliest thing I've read all day. Linguists, John Wells for example or the popular linguistics writer David Crystal, have come on record as saying that Esperanto is a "real language" just like any other, capable of expressing all thoughts that national languages do.

Esperanto is in daily use in all spheres of life. Books on all sorts of fields are published in it, from geology to theology. It's used for original works of art--William Auld, a poet in the language, has been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature--because it is entirely capable of subtle communication. Esperanto speakers meet, fall in love, and have children (who occasionally become native speakers) without ever feeling that the language is "insufficient" for their lives.

Maybe you should check out a book in English (or whatever your native language might be) on the history of the language and its movement. You'll see quite quickly that such a myth, which pops up only among the populace and never in competent studies of Esperanto's linguistic qualities, is entirely false.

Re:elitist ignorance

[aardvarkjoe]

i liked the beginning of your post, but it's way too long. u should b using more abbreviations, so i can read the hole thing.

Re:elitist ignorance

[forevermore]

My only quibble is that Esperanto is still growing

My bad, then. One of my college roommates spoke Esperanto, and had told me that it was getting harder and harder to find people interested in the language, let alone those who spoke it. Since I remember hearing a lot more about Esperanto in the '80's than I do now, it made sense.

Re:elitist ignorance

[fejikso]

Actually, it seems that the Internet is giving a big push to the Esperanto movement. It's now very easy to find Esperanto speakers in the net.

There are Esperanto chat rooms and a newsgroup soc.culture.esperanto

Many people, including myself, taught themselves Esperanto using online tutorials. It's a surprisingly easy language to learn. I wouldn't have learned Esperanto if I had not the online tools to learn it.

If you're interested, I recommend http://www.cursodeesperanto.com.br

Re:elitist ignorance

[Anonymous Coward]

Although I haven't read Trainspotting I have read the Marabou Stork Nightmares also by Irvine Welsh and about a third of the book is in in phonetic Scottish and I found it painful to read. I mean it was an intersting idea for about a chapter but reading so much of it was really tiresome.

I would guess that it is much easier from people from Scotland (obviiously) and the North of England to read, but maybe it is just the difficulty of translating the phonetics that bothered me more so than the Scottish dialect specifically.

Re:elitist ignorance

[Chacham]

>english is a hack, of many different languages and dialects, warped and twisted generation after generation

Show me a language, other than a manmade one like Sanskrit (yes, it was codified, organized and "fixed in stone" about 2000-2400 years ago), that isn't.

Hebrew. Although Ivrit, "Modern Hebrew", evolves, actual Hebrew is written and spoken by many religous Jews. It has not evolved in any major way that i know of.

Re:elitist ignorance

[themusicgod1]

the lack of a language that is not a hack does not make english not a hack, nor does it counter anything that follows from english being a hack.

grammar is *not* what gives sentances meaning. *experience* is what gives sentances meaning.

and if 'because so many people speak it' were the driving force in learning grammatical rules i think spanish or chinese rules would supercede any english ones.

granted, i havn't read chaucer in a while, and i do remember it being terse but don't get me wrong: rules are good.
english is just so bloated that it is not only niegh-impossible to learn, but that its bloat is a necesarry part of the development of language.
i'm not sure what teh-solution is, should one exist.

Re:elitist ignorance

[themusicgod1]

if i knew propper grammar, propper gramar for what language? english? well guess what? i don't speak english, or write it, so i'm afraid if you and your english world would like to understand me you are going to have to translate it into some form of predigested-bytecode-garbage that english can interpret...and i'd love you for carrying my ideas onward if this would occur.

the reason that my post appears to be a blob of text is, well, because it *is* a blob of text. i can't believe how this isn't obvious to you.

i applaud you for not viewing things within your language/propper grammar structure and implying censorship upon those who cannot phrase their thoughts in your tounge/thought-ruleset. this implies a barrier where bad ideas, faulty thinking, is filterred out and if my message was REALLY IMPORTANT someone who can understand me better(*gasp*, yes, they are rumoured to exist.) and who can communicate with you.
bullshit-o-meters are a good thing, even if they are somewhat questionable(using other people to think for you, but hey! your clock cycles are more important than theirs, because you are obviuosly smarter than they!, for they speak the language of the base themusicgod1, they cannot possibly be as articulate and specific as you!)

Comparing c to english is blashemy.

Worked for me

[ReyTFox]

I've probably written pages and pages of stuff since I was 8(18 now), when we first got an Internet connection. At first, it was embarrassing(at least to today's me) posts to Usenet. Then forums...and irc but that's never really changed how I write so much, other than the (temporary) discarding of a few rules and some capitalization to improve the flow, and little habits I picked up like: /me sighs and has to come up with an example.

This fomula is very convenient cause it lets you express emotion in the first part and then immediately act on it in the second part. Typical in person, harder to convey in standard writing.

Another benefit of writing is that when I write about subjects I'm interested in, I tend to learn about them by going through the writing process, and I get to do research from Google(and nowadays Wikipedia) every so often. It's all very good practice.

Re:Worked for me

[Gramie2]

I've probably written pages and pages of stuff since I was 8(18 now)

Don't you think this is a bit of an exaggeration? Oh, but I see you used the word probably. :-)

Well, which is it, then?!

[fishbert42]

Whether you agree or disagree with the story, it's bound to change again in another five months.

Re: second language

[some guy I know]

kids who studied a second language usually performed better with reading and writing in English.

That may have been because kids that want to learn a second language are probably more interested in language than those who don't.
In this case, cause and effect may not be what you think.

Writing improves itself

[Cappy Red]

The best way to improve one's writing is to write more. The rise of fan-fiction has just provided an attractive outlet to those who wouldn't otherwise be writing.

I have always liked to read, but my lower education English classes did a fair job of beating a love of writing out of me. It wasn't until I accidently stumbled into and started writing fan-fiction online that I learned to enjoy it.

Peer review helps, but the amount that it helps depends on the peer group. Books on writing can be good sources of ideas, but they can't improve your writing for you. If you want to write better, you have to write. Given time, you can't help but improve.

*honk*

HellYah Dude I'V Become a better writer

[wifitek]

Jsut Rom woking at my yob."AS as Netwerk Enjinare! Y

What's wrong with alliteration?

[Anonymous Coward]

>...fan fiction forums (sorry about the alliteration).

Why would anyone object to a little alliteration--unless perhaps they're a little illiterate?

Re:HellYah Dude I'V Become a better writer

[wifitek]

How can this be Offtopic?

I thought it was....

[ztwilight]

Pharry Photter Fan Fiction Forums

slashdot

[Spy Hunter]

I've often wondered what effect Slashdot has had on my writing skills. I post fairly often. When I first got my account I was playing the Karma game, so I went for +5 Funny all the time (it's the easiest to get, just be one of the first few posts and say something mildly amusing). But once I got 50 Karma, getting another +5 post just wasn't that rewarding. Since then I haven't been trying for high ratings, just good discussion.

The moderation system definitely rewards humor. It also rewards clear and concise writing. I think writing tons of Slashdot posts has made my writing more concise. I blame this for my inability to meet page length requirements on my papers. I get right to the point, say everything I want to say in a few pages, and then can't fill the rest up with BS. I also think reading Slashdot has given me a better sense of how to be funny in writing (ignoring IN SOVIET RUSSIA and friends for the moment). I'm constantly looking at failed joke posts and saying "man, that could have been a +5 funny if only he had phrased that differently, or said this extra thing."

Overall, I think Slashdot has given me experience in writing short, clear prose that may be useful in work communication or writing documentation. It hasn't helped with writing 10-page research papers, but once you're out of school nobody cares how many pages you write. I'm interested in what other people think of Slashdot's effect on writing skills. Have you noticed an effect it's had on your writing?

Extra benefits

[gimpyben]

Even if the benefit to writing skills is dubious, this could still be good. It's getting kids interested in being part of an online community, and since netiquette (or whatever you want to call it) will only become more important with, it would be nice to have people understand these things at a young age. Plus, it'll help their typing too.

Re:this is my home

[0x0d0a]

Don't touch computers when you're drunk. I had a friend that locked his before heading off to a bar, since he could never remember the password when he was really drunk. Computers generally have email clients, and email clients let you send email (frequently to someone who can't figure out that you're drunk -- with a phone call, it's pretty clear) and that just causes all kinds of misery later on when people are pissed and you can't figure out *why*.

Oh please...

[KDan]

For every online community that may improve the writing of a handful of the kids who participate to it, there are 10'000 online communities where everyone (mostly native english speakers) spells like english was their fifth language that they're still learning. That's like saying that watching the debilitating cartoons on the usual channels improves kids' imaginations and creativity. It's a complete pile of arse.

There is a tiny minority who are improving themselves despite the apalling effects of the absence of grammar and spelling education, but pointing at those and saying "oh, look, the system works!" is just plain stupid.

Daniel

Re:Oh please...

[nomadic]

10'000 online communities where everyone (mostly native english speakers) spells like english was their fifth language that they're still learning.

Hey, I've seen that online community you're talking about. It's called babelfish.

Re:Oh please...

[cloudmaster]

I writre good now, LOL!

Sigh. Improved writing skills my eye. The above's right - look at any online message board, and witness the abhorrent spelling 'n grammar. Even basic sentence structure eludes most IM-ers, which makes sense. The goal is speed, with accuracy being a distant second. I find it rather unlikely that downplaying the importance of accuracy somehow *improves* accuracy... :)

Re:Oh please...

[fireboy1919]

It could work, though, if parents kept got a log for what their kids wrote and assigned punishment for forgetting punctuation, and for misspelling. Either that, or giving rewards for not forgetting it, and not mispelling.

Maybe, if we all work together, one day people who type like third graders will be treated like third graders.

Re:Oh please...

[WuphonsReach]

Exactly, without negative/positive feedback that's targeted at improving their writing skills, the majority of people will never improve their writing. Most folks are lazy and without external input will do nothing to change.

Indeed, the opposite will happen if their peers give positive feedback for conforming to the bad spelling/grammer (a.k.a. slang) of the group.

Re:Oh please...

[DPMeg]

Daniel - I think you've completely missed the point of what Henry Jenkins was talking about. My name is Heather Lawver, I'm the person the article was named for and I run the Daily Prophet - the Harry Potter fan fiction forum Mr. Jenkins was referring to. Obviously you haven't checked out any of the sites Mr. Jenkins referenced because, if you had, you would realized I'm not running anything remotely like a message board of IMing forum. Instead, Mr. Jenkins was referring to *supervised* educational publishing forums, where children are actually guided and mentored by trained individuals. And yes, I do believe that the likes of L33T speak and the lack of punctuation so commonly seen in IMing are deplorable. But in my own experience, a child only needs to publish one story with horrible punctuation and spelling, then receive constructive negative feedback, and suddenly they realize how ridiculous they're being. It can sometimes serve as a catalyst for their education. Regardless of that issue, I believe you've missed the point. Mr. Jenkins' article wasn't about unsupervised message boards, he was talking about actual educational forums and online tools. Please don't so vehemently dismiss something without first exploring the subject of the article.

Re:Oh please...

[lord_nightrose]

...A child only needs to publish one story with horrible punctuation and spelling, then receive constructive negative feedback, and suddenly they realize how ridiculous they're being.
I would almost believe you, except for the fact that I've had numerous discussions with people aged 14 and older about how poor their grammar skills are, and they simply say that it's cool. Kids do not care about their writing skills anymore, because nobody has to write anything by hand anymore.

Example: "dun tell me how 2 spel", "ive got a rite to bare arms", "bare means carry, bear is an animal"...
Kids have no interest in improving themselves. This is a result of the openness of the internet.

Here's the problem.

[Isldeur]

The problem with learning all of these grammar rules is that kids need to Think Different! Just like apple says.

I'm not sure what I need to think about "Different" but I'm still working on that.

Perhaps they meant "Think Differently"?

IM is not writing.

[JaredOfEuropa]

Using IM is more similar to speaking than to writing. Writing involves thinking, analysing, perhaps brainstorming, putting words to paper, and it often involves re-thinking or re-writing those words. Speaking (and IM) require a rather fast response, leaving you little time to ponder your words. Indeed, how often in a normal conversation have you paused to think, or carefully picked your words? Not often probably... such pauses aren't called 'uncomfortable silences' for nothing. Also... the next time you're speaking with someone, try and pay attention to grammar and pronunciation: you will notice that everyday spoken language is very rarely gramatically correct.

Proper writing and IM are so dissimilar in nature that I doubt that children will pick up good or bad habits by using the 'broken' language of IM. Let your kids use IM all they want; just make sure they do some 'proper' reading and writing as well sometimes.

How cna Hery Potar maek me be better at ritin?

[Anonymous Coward]

Teh riter of dis stroy dosent no nuthink. evan he cnat spil hery potra probely. but it tru u cna get beter mucj bete at ritng fi u raed jeff k, his a lejand. my dad si my cussin to.

English efficiency

[DuSTman31]

English isn't an efficient language in terms of the amount of stuff you have to write down to convey an idea.. Take Gzip - gzip an average english text and you'll find it reduces to about a third its former size, and that's without taking special account of the particular grammar to improve this compression.

For text writing, people get used to doing it properly and don't notice this inefficiency, but suddenly it becomes greatly more apparent when using a more limited text entry device..

So, people start abbreviating "you" to U and so on. Cretinous, but a sufficient skunkworks method of addressing the problem. We could do much better, though, by specifically designing a separate compact form of the language for efficient entry on small keypads.

Re:English efficiency

[Creepy Crawler]

Like secretary shorthand?

"Hlo. mname john. UR good. Go4 lunch 2morro ?"

I'd cringe if I had to read that "compressed" crap.

Re:English efficiency

[frause]

If we just standardized it a bit, I guess it would be fairly easy to read when used to it. You don't spell yourself all the way through every word anyway.Do you find it hard to read "it's" "don't" and other abbrevations? Of course you don't. You are used to them and see them as words, not letters.

You shouldn't "compress" too hard though, you don't want to limit the number of unique words too much.

Good Fanfiction Practices

[ancarett]

My experience with fanfiction predates the internet (not the DARPAnet, however). The one real advantage that some of these fanfiction sites such as Sugarquill have over other sites and just writing in your journal is the extensive editing process. Jenkins is correct to put a lot of emphasis on the editorial process: it's what can make fanfiction writing into a real learning experience!

The internet makes fanfiction reviewing and editing a quicker process. Think back to the days when we sent typescripts back and forth by mail! Nowadays internet writers can afford the luxury of several "beta-readers" all in the time it would take oldtime fans to get the first editorial review from one fanzine publisher.

True, many writers don't take advantage of beta-readers. They just dump their stories up at websites like Fanfiction.Net in all their first-draft horror. Then they often get savagely mocked by disappointed readers. Savvy fans learn to prefer the sites which practice some sort of review process.

Still learning after 22 years online

[michaelmalak]

Currently, my most stinging lessons come from reading my blog's Referer [sic] log. "Oh look, findlaw.com lists my site as the #1 search result for 'tresspass'." Then I do a search on Google and realize it's supposed to be "trespass."

P.S. Google is a much better dictionary than dictionary.com -- extremely fast, smarter suggested alternatives, and no pop-ups.

Re:Still learning after 22 years online

[WuphonsReach]

Google is a much better dictionary than dictionary.com -- extremely fast, smarter suggested alternatives, and no pop-ups.

Dictionary.com has pop-ups? Where? Oh, wait... I'm using Firebird!

The bigger advantage of Google for me is (a) it loads faster and (b) Firebird has a little Google search box.

Re:Still learning after 22 years online

[frause]

Heh, just what I thought. I usually find myself genuinely surprised when people camplains of "those annoying popups at site x", asking myself "I thought people stopped using those ages ago?".

Oh and I use dictionary.org with keyword "dict" and goggle with keyword "gg". Don't need searchboxes and other bloat. (Just back | forward | menus | location bar)

Thank kde for konqueror

[bluGill]

And God of course, but that is a different issue.

I've known for years that I'm a terrible speller. Konqueror finaly includes a spell checker in these forms, so I have a chance of speeling things correctly. Those complaining about my spelling for years can rejoice, I've found a web browser that checks my spelling!

Now if it would just make sure I get things its/it's right, but I make mistakes there less often than spelling mistakes.

To those writing other communication/IM tools, please follow KDE's lead and include a spell checker.

Re:Thank kde for konqueror

[Artemis]

Konqueror finaly includes a spell checker in these forms, so I have a chance of speeling things correctly.

Maybe you should try enabling that option in Konqueror, that way you can finally make sure your spelling is correct.

Re:Thank kde for konqueror

[bluGill]

Sigh, I did in fact. I have no clue what those words above mean, or what language they are in (I though I was set to only English) but somehow they passed the spell checker.

Proof that while spell checkers help, they do not solve the whole problem. That was half the point of my its/it's comment. Be thankful for the 3 mistakes corrected in this post.

Come on! This is a well known Samuel Clemens quote

[286]

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
- Mark Twain

go google it...

No surprise to me

[Rysc]

I was a terrible speller up until I got online.

I'm home schooled, and the way we did it I never was required to write papers by hand, or anything, and only once or twice on a computer. I know the letters, I read a lot, but my handwriting was horrible, my spelling was abysmal, and I didn't care. When did I ever use it? I told my parents that I couldn't spell and didn't care to learn to, it just wasn't something I needed.

A few years later we got AOL, a terrible place to be sure. I already know many of the things one must know... like AOL sucks, only morons use l33t speak, etc..

Being a Star Trek fan I went into the official Star Trek "The Bridge" chat room. I had an extreme fear of appearing foolish, and a worry about being understood. My grammar was as bad as my spelling, if not worse. I decided I just wouldn't say anything unless I was sure it was selled correctly. This lead to a /lot/ of occasions where I rephrased something so as to not use a word I could not spell for sure. But, being a big reader, and now having a motivation to learn how words were spelled, after a month or two my spelling was much improved. My grammar was stil not very good, but in a chat room you have little need for or chance to improve grammar.

Fast forward a year... I got invovled in a gaming community with a series of message boards. There was a certain amount of role playing that went on, and wars of words between different teams was common. I began posting, and arguing, and in effect writing like crazy. I probbaly wrote an average of at /least/ 1000 words per day for six months or more, just on those boards.

By the time I was halfway through those six months I was feared by all as a killer debater. Why? I marshalled my arguments well, turned phrases like nobodies business, and generally wrote up a storm.

Since that time I have grown considerably more lax with regards to all aspects of writing. (My speed, first honed in chat rooms so as to be able to keep up with the rapid scrolling, is the only thing which is better than it was then.) But now, though I worry less about putting in all the punctuation, and am no longer a strict capitalization nazi, I am much more engaged in general about English. Now I ama connoisseur of the English language, and am somewhat fascinated by language in general.

I attribute the majority of my skill and learning to being online and in a forum where I /want/ to write and write well.

Re:No surprise to me

[Anonymous Coward]

For fun, go to the GUComics forums and search for posts by "tome"... scary scary scary.

Re:No surprise to me

[Rallion]

Yeah, not wanting to look like a moron is great motivation for all things, no matter how it comes about. I have two friends who worked on their spelling like mad after their friends all made fun of them for the mistakes they made in IM conversations.

Then there's the friend-of-some-friends whose spelling is so bad (and funny) that people actually send things she types to me so I can laugh too...yet nobody ever tells her she's wrong.

That last bit has nothing to do with anything, really. I just think it's funny.

Re: No surprise to me

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup.

I've had roughly the same experience. I'm a lifelong homeschooler, and had notoriously poor writing skills until a few years ago when I started communicating with friends regularly (read: constantly) on-line.

It's really pretty obvious why, if you think about it: writing played a very small role in my life - %99 of my communication was verbal. I was not developmentally ready to learn to read till I was 12, when I (literally) went from a Box Car Children book to a Timothy Zahn novel in one day. Even after that, reading was important to me, but expressing myself in text was irrelevant; I never used it, so why should I care?

What's going to inspire you to learn something you have absolutely no use for in your life?

In classic homeschooler/unschooler fashion, I went from zero to sixty in a very short time, first in writing e-mails, and then in talking on IRC. The only IRC channel I talk on any more is a small private channel populated by 12-23 year old unschoolers, and I must say, we have higher standards of writing etiquette than I've even seen on another IRC channel. More social graces, too, come to think of it.

I'm 21 now, I can touch type faster than most people I know, and I keep being startled when friends ask me for editing tips on their writing. I can correct my own spelling and punctuation fast enough, mid-thought, to keep up with an active 6-way philosophical discussion on IRC without being hounded very often by the multitude of grammar nazi's (including an English teacher, a couple college newspaper editors, etc.) who hang out on the channel.

I still think primarily in verbal language, and am ceaselessly frustrated at the garbled job written English does of sensibly replicating spoken word. However, since I now probably spend more time communicating in text, on-line, than I do speaking to people in the real world, I have had reason and inclination to learn to write "properly", so it's happened.

In regards to IM and Fan Fiction helping kids learn to write, I think they sort of do, but it's a little more personal, and a little less straight forward cause and effect than that. Whether you learn anything "proper" from those activities depends entirely on whether the people you're communicating with give a shit about propriety. Repetitive use of a skill will lead to improvement in that skill. Whether the skill is "proper English" or "l33t" or individually contrived phonetic attempts at spelling, all depends on circumstances which vary drastically within the realms of on-line writing and communication forums.

Re: No surprise to me

[Rysc]

to a Timothy Zahn novel

Heir to the Empire, by any chance? That's one of my favorite Star Wars books/series, which I read around the age of 13.

I'm 21 now, I can touch type faster than most people I know, and I keep being startled when friends ask me for editing tips on their writing. I can correct my own spelling and punctuation fast enough, mid-thought, to keep up with an active 6-way philosophical discussion on IRC without being hounded very often by the multitude of grammar nazi's (including an English teacher, a couple college newspaper editors, etc.) who hang out on the channel.

Sounds a lot like me... I never bothered to learn formal (read: touch) typing, but I can hunt and peck at 80wpm without difficulty. My family are all quite astute when it comes to English, and you can be sure that they call me on any mistakes. It doesn't happen terribly often.

(Anyone who hasn't stood in a room with four other English lovers and discussed etymology and the like is missing out on one of lifes more pleasurable activities.)

In regards to IM and Fan Fiction helping kids learn to write, I think they sort of do, but it's a little more personal, and a little less straight forward cause and effect than that. Whether you learn anything "proper" from those activities depends entirely on whether the people you're communicating with give a shit about propriety. Repetitive use of a skill will lead to improvement in that skill. Whether the skill is "proper English" or "l33t" or individually contrived phonetic attempts at spelling, all depends on circumstances which vary drastically within the realms of on-line writing and communication forums.

Quite so! The majority will probably take from this story "Writing and reading fan fiction improves spelling and grammar," when in fact the news is no news at all: If you give someone a need for a skill that is within their power to learn, they will simply learn it.

I have good (enough) English...

[holizz]

(and I can write poshly when I want to) but I didn't learn it from German (which I passed), I learned it from using it. I guess there must be something more to learn about like the words to describe grammer? I didn't really learn the weird words like superlative or whatever in school, I actually found a website and learned a lot of them when my friend who speaks 7+ languages took the piss out of me and I got annoyed.

I just thought about the posters who were tutting at poor grammer/spelling these days but couldn't some of those poor gramatical/spelling things be incorporated into the language in the future if enough people use it.
For example it's meant to be "I and Alice went to the pictures" but lots of people say "Me and Alice went to the pictures". Is it possible that both forms will be acceptable in future? I certainly use the "me and..." way. And is that really so bad? English is living and therefore evolving - to evolve something has to change and the most successful forms survive. From how I notice people talking the "Me and" form is fairly successful.

Re:I have good (enough) English...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, for starters, it is spelt "grammar", and also that in English one tends to address other parties ahead of oneself, as in "my friend and I" as opposed to "I and my friend", but it could be more of the British chivalry we're exposed to in Singapore than any grammatical quibble.

- et

That's right.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's another example of how crappy the nation's schools are.

In my experience...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, with regards to some comments on improving writing from Slashdot, I'll say that it's somewhat difficult to pick up good grammar from Americans. :)

What I can say is that Slashdot, like K5 and other good websites like Metafilter, alert me to unusual instances of grammar (which either reinforces my knowledge of grammar, or when I am undecided, I might post a query to a teacher or on BBC Learning...) and new vocabulary and so on.

The main motivation in reading websites like Slashdot and K5 is to gain some insight (and reinforcement of that insight over and over again), perhaps, as to what people think in terms of things like privacy, and in a more negative light, myopic views of Asian culture (which is where I live).

One cannot learn grammar and writing skills in general from these websites per se. They are designed for quick communication of ideas, and usually don't involve any sort of major preparation in terms of post/essay structure. What is worse -- as in Singapore the English exams (it is compulsory to pass English exams to go further) have essay components -- is that students with the motivation to further their horizons by reading these websites are penalised because they pick up the wrong writing habits (as you may see with my post).

Short of reading newspaper opinion columns, it is hard to improve one's writing in the general sense through websites on the Internet, and especially news websites like this one.

It really depends

[Pedrito]

Look, I learned to write well for several reasons. First of all, my mother was an English major and my father is a journalist, so proper English was beaten into me at an early age and to this day, I receive the occasional correction, which I'm happy to accept.

Another reason I write well (and I don't mean shakespeare well or best-selling fiction author well) is that I write a lot and have since I was 16.

But the most important reason, and this is what will make the difference for anyone, is that I want to write well so I work at improving it. You can write all day long every day, but if you don't work to improve your writing, it won't improve. If you don't look up words in the dictionary, read books, and do other things to improve your grammar, vocabulary, and style, you'll just have a lot of bad writing.

The internet, if anything, has shown us that there are millions upon millions of illiterate people on the internet. Some of them write a lot, but they remain illiterate. There are children that think R and U as in "R U there?" are words. Children are incorporating net lingo into their school writings. You can argue that these are augmentations of the language, but I don't believe that they should be considered valid augmentations. I don't want to read newspapers written written in "1337353" (leetese?) or abbreviations (ROFL, BTW, and so forth) and I don't think that anyone that truely cares about the language does either.

English is a language with grammar and spelling rules. The rules exist for a reason. To provide a standard in communication. Without them, you end up with fractured communities that each speak their own variation (which still happens to some degree, but less than it would). This is sort of what happened to Latin. At the point the rules started being ignored, the language started pulling in words from other languages or changing words to fit the community's changing pronunciation. Eventually you end up with completely new languages like Spanish, Portugese, Italian and French.

While these changes take a long time to take place, I'd hate to see English become so fractured. Oh, but I'm rambling. I'll get off my soap box. You guys write however you want.

Possessives

[Anonymous Coward]

and she got pocessives all wrong.

You didn't? ;-)

gold and universal

[Anonymous Coward]

" In one of the great ironies of human affairs, the massive rethinking that schools require would cost so much less than we are spending now that it is not likely to happen"

-from parent article

Can't Write?

[Anonymous Coward]

I out-source my writing to India

English

[tmortn]

I have never understood the motivations of a grammar Nazi. English is a living language. As such, the rules governing its constant mutation are generally a decade or more behind, especially if the high and mighty decide some usage is beneath the dignity of recognition as official no matter how common the usage may be. The word ain't comes to mind. Say it ain't a word all you like, it ain't gonna make no difference.

The ultimate purpose of a language is to communicate. To me the definition of whether or not a written statement is literate or illiterate has to do with how well it conveys its message to its audience vrs the intent of the author. You can argue about misplaced commas, misspelled words and improper grammar all that you like. However the fact remains a language is about communication and communication does not always follow the rules. Classic example is literature written in dialect such as the ever popular Huckleberry Finn by Samuel Clemens. If you chose to re-write that story according to 'Proper English' it would not convey anywhere near the same story.

English is like Perl, The Romance Languages are like C. Thus English is like TIMTOWTDI to the max. In the end it only matters if the interpreter Groks what you are trying to say.... some interpreters may force you to use strict, others will completely grok your 1 line million statement nth degree nested code.

So called 'Proper English' is merely a central dialect with a more highly regarded and formalized structure. As the central trunk of the language it also serves as the common frame work which keeps all the various sub formats ( such as AIM speak, Blog speak, Geek, even 133t ) linked. In addition, being fluent in 'Proper English' has come to bear a mark of social significance. I leave it to you to choose whether or not it is one of merit or disparagement.

In short blind adherence to 'proper english' is valuing form over substance. Sometimes 'proper' formating provides the best solution and in others it ain't gonna cut it.

Re:English

[Anonymous Coward]

I have never understood the motivations of a grammar Nazi. English is a living language.

Godwin's law has been invoked!

Anyway...

English is indeed an evolving language. In fact one of its great advantages is the willingness of its speakers to absorb words and concepts from other languages and cultures. This makes English very dynamic and lively. I could never accept, for example, shielding English in the way that the French try to do their own native tongue. That's just shooting ones' self in the foot.

That said, 'proper' English is a Good Thing. Its goal is clear, concise expression for common understanding. It is a uniting force, not a dividing one. The fact that there is resistance to changing English willy-nilly is high-value social wisdom that recognizes the need to preserve and enhance the utility of the language.

Yes, English changes over time. But those changes that 'stick' have passed the utility test in that they make the language as a whole more useful and expressive, not more divisive.

The problem with individuals or groups making up lingusitic rules as they go along is that doing so is inherently exclusionary. Sure, you may think your 1337-speak (or ebonics, or bureaucrat-ese, or whatever) is neato-keen, but it's a waste of my time to figure out how to decode it, so in effect you isolate yourself from me. If that's what you want to do, fine, but don't ask me to endorse your way of communicating. Dialects like 1337-speak are fashion of (mostly) low cultural significance, and as we all know fashions come and go.

I promise you this: the good things in dialects will endure (and English will happily absorb them) while the useless stuff will wither away to find its rightful place on the trash heap of popular culture. That's part of living in an open society.

The value of involving young writers in online forms is that their desire to be recognized, heard and understood provides a motivation for making clear expression that's likely to be read at all, let alone thought well of. The ideas should come first and the communication should be transparent. And the most transparent form is proper English that's written at a diction level appropriate to its reading audience.

The fact that there are people (whom you so derisively label "Nazis") who care about spelling, grammar, punctuation, syntax and so forth may bother you, but consider this the next time you pick up a newspaper or magazine: these people assure that you can read the damn thing without your head exploding. That is their motivation: the common social good of clear, shared expression of ideas. Whether you realize it or not, you owe them a debt of gratitude for making your life better. So when a "grammar Nazi" finds a mistake in your work, suck it up and learn from it.

(Mark Twain was a master at using language to express class and culture; and ideas and notions embodied in them. The fact that his characters sometimes used nonstandard English shouldn't be taken as license for you to use "ain't" in your business correspondence - unless you want people to think you're a hayseed like Huckleberry Finn.)

Re:English

[tmortn]

If you think we are largely in disagreement I think you should go read my post once more.

However, we perhaps have a disagreement if you think the character of Mr. Finn to be a 'Hayseed' in any but the most superficial of definitions. If you do I suggest you read the tale of his exploits at least once more. If such a superficial lack of polish inclines you to write him off as a simpleton then at least part of the messege presented by the masterfull Mr. Clemens has fallen on deaf ears in your case.

Perhaps you derived some mis-understanding from my term grammar Nazi. Perhaps you think I was implying that any correction of grammer is worthy of such a label of extreme intolerance. Perhaps it would clear your perception of my post if you stopped to consider the nature of the give and take in the English language of which you have indicated you are aware. In the change of the language there are the elements of change and the dogmatic deffense of the status quo aka. Grammar Nazi's. A grammar Nazi opposes reading Huckleberry Finn in an English class because it contains 'improper english'. A grammer Nazi quibles about a comma when it has zero bearing on the meaning of a passage. A grammer Nazi says aint isn't a word when they know perfectly well what it means.

I am no great fan of 133t. But in its proper context it is every bit as proper as Cambridge diction. A grammar Nazi opposes it simply on the grounds it does not conform.

Re:English

[dvd_tude]

You sure went to an awful amount of trouble to miss the AC poster's point, dude.

Re:English

[tmortn]

How so ?

I don't disagree that there must be a force acting against change.
I agree that context largely determines what is correct for the occasion.

However, in either case if you never allow change or you never break context the language becomes stale. Thus you must have those that forment change and at the opposing end you need people who are biased against change. That is not to say people who never accept a change, or conversely those who think any change is acceptable.

Kudos to that!

[sheptastic]

Hey, as long as it can break the habit of "ur" = "your/you're," I'm all for it.

Yeah, but . . .

[scrimmer]

real geeks would diagram that sentence! ;-)

keepin it real

[Anonymous Coward]

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Books Harry Potter Enemy, Friend or Lover?
text size: (+) : (-)

Author: chebetta

PG-13 - English - General - Reviews: 9 - Published: 11-21-03 - Updated: 02-06-04
id:1609713

Enemy or Friend?

The New Us

Hermione ran thought the barrier and looked around. The Hogwarts express was there, smoke blowing out of the top. This was going to be Hermione's last year at Hogwarts.

"Hey! 'Moine!" Hermione heard Ginny yell from behind her.

"Hey, Gin. What's up?" Hermione asked, looking around at all the people then at Ginny.

"Man, girl!" Ginny gasped. "What happened to you?" Ginny asked, looking Hermione up and down. Her whole self was different. Ginny took in Hermione's new muggle skater shoes, her new tight faded jeans, her shirt that showed everything. Ginny could see that Hermione's chest grew over the summer. She was now in the sixth year and now getting looks from the guys. Her hair was half way down her back, soft and smooth as silk. She had a bit of makeup on, making her look like a young goddess.

Ginny just stared at her then a smile started to appear. "You look good." she complemented Hermione.

Hermione turned a deep red and then smiled back. "Thanks, Gin."

Harry walked up to them. He was getting tall. His hair, still messy and the same body as last year. A great body. Last year he had gotten bigger and suddenly got muscles. Last year, Harry had picked her right up and carried her down seven sets of stairs. His body was the kind that the girls would talk and giggle about. Hermione had to stare at him. There was something about him1/4 but what was it? Hermione wondered. The green in his eyes really stuck out. Why was that? His glasses! He didn't have his glasses! 'Oh, yeah!' Hermione thought. He had owled Hermione telling her that he was getting contacts. Wow, what an improvement.

"Hey, Herms." Harry said, giving Hermione a warm smile and hug. When he backed away from her he frowned. "You look1/4 " he looked at her new shoes to the top of her now perfect hair, "different." he finished then quickly said, "in a good way."

Hermione seen Ron jump off of the train and started towards them. A Ravenclaw girl asked him something and he smiled to her and talked back to her for about a minute.

Over the summer, Ron's hair turned a weird red-blonde. He spiked it, making his hair look really good. Ron's family got a whole lot of money at the end of last year and could now afford new clothes and books. Getting richer, make the Weasley family higher thought of. He had a few freckles on the bridge of his nose and a great smile. He was a lot bigger than last year and was muscular. You could see it through his clothes. That young, scrawny, little guy, was now a tall, strong, handsome, young man.

He walked over to Hermione, Ginny, and Harry. His eyes were fixed on something just above Harry's shoulder.

Still looking over Harry's shoulder he started to complain. "They always to that! Bat their eyes, think the world is all about them! Ugh! And it's so gross!

"Hi, to you too, Ron." Hermione said sarcastically.

"Oh," Ron said, still looking over Harry's shoulder. "Hey, Hermione." then he slowly drawn his eyes away from where he was looking over to Hermione. His eyes instantly widened and his mouth opened a bit. Nothing came out of his mouth, he just simply stared at her. Then a slow, "holy fuck," came out of his mouth.

Hemrione was a little taken back and Ginny whacked Ron on the back of his head. His head right away went to the back of his head where Ginny had smacked him.

"Ow! Jeez, Ginny! Did you have to whack me so hard?" he wined.

"Well did you have to say holy fuck? No, jeez, Hermione, you look good. Or wow, Hermi? Just holy fuck?!"

"Ron shrugged. "I would take it as a complement." he said, nose in the air. The he turned back to Hermione. "Sorry. You look great, Hermione."

Mark Twain NOT Ben Franklin

[--duke24--]

Mark Twain said "I never let my schooling interfere with my education." NOT Ben Franklin. Politicians as a general rule are not elegant with their speech.

Slash invades Slashdot!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just waiting for all the slashdotters to have their eyes bug out when they realize that "K/S" does not refer to Hooke's Law and "HP" is not an OEM.

Re:Slash invades Slashdot!

[Anonymous Coward]

And K/m is not the Michaelis-Menten constant of enzymatic reactions.

It still bothers me that copper sulfate isn't in the proper order to be Sato/Cutler.

Re:Slash invades Slashdot!

[Anonymous Coward]

So, does "K2SO4" mean that when there are two Kirks, Spock has four orgasms?

Re:Slash invades Slashdot!

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, fine, mister, let's see what you can do with C12H22O11. ~_^

Re:Slash invades Slashdot!

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, fine, mister, let's see what you can do with C12H22O11.

Chakotay and . . . Harry?

I never knew you were a Voyager fan!

The Quill Society

[InceptionOS]

Well, I am resurrecting The Quill Society, and it's similiar but meant for all and not just kids and teens...we don't currently have a lot of posts in the forum; but if anyone on here likes to write -- or read -- please feel free to join as we need members!

Your opinion = wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not a kid anymore (passed the two-oh mark a couple years back) but my writing has improved tremendously since I've gotten involved in the Star Trek fanfic community.

I was always terrible in English at school--math whiz all the way--and when we did creative writing assignments I fell on my face. I was awful!

What's different about the online community of media fans is that you can find someone who's so enthused about, say, Star Trek, that they're willing to look over your crappy fanfic and tell you what's wrong with it and how to make it better. And you get to return the favor by looking over other people's work in progress. You learn a lot by seeing that process that feeds back into your own work.

Sure, there have always been expensive writer's workshops for this sort of thing, but the fact that it's fandom reduces the competitiveness and increases the mutual interest, and the online aspect makes it much, much easier for fans to find each other.

Based on my observations . . .

[scrimmer]

you, sir, are correct.

My own experiences, personal and professional, speak to this truth. When I was a student, I had a solid understanding (or at least I thought I did) of English grammar, and when I began studying the Spanish language, I discovered two things: I understood Spanish grammar easily, and I found that this understanding led to a deeper understanding of my native English grammar. Professionally, my students have taught me quite a bit about how kids learn grammar as well.

The problem as I've witnessed it so far is that students (at least my native English-speakers) have an innate understanding of syntax and grammar, but it's all oral. When it comes time for my freshmen and sophomores to focus on written syntax and grammar, many of them falter because they are unable to see and to use the connections between their oral and written understanding of grammar. Part of this problem may be the result of not having had any grammar instruction while in elementary school, or so little of it and so early on in their education that most students forget it because it hasn't been reinforced through the intermediate grades.

When these students reach middle school or high school and begin (sometimes for the first time) their study of a foreign language, they learn both oral and written aspects of that language concurrently, and thus it is a bit easier to see some of the explicit connections between the two modes.

My students that struggle with English grammar are the same students that struggle with the grammars of other languages, according to my colleagues in the Spanish and French departments. Those students don't "get" Spanish grammar because they don't have a solid understanding of English grammar. For those students who possess at least middling understanding of English grammar, the reinforcement they receive in their study of Spanish, for example, strengthens their knowledge and use of written and oral English.

Keep in mind that I've not completely researched this yet, but this is what I've observed in my own classroom and in speaking with other teachers.

Now, for a tangential rant:

Some research shows that isolated instruction in English grammar (parts of speech drills) does little to improve student writing. Unfortunately, much of what I've read from the NCTE shows that they infer from this research that students shouldn't receive any explicit grammar instruction. You can read more about their grammar policies here. Most reasonable people agree that grammar instruction is only effective when taught in the context a student's own writing. One instructor whose work I've found useful and, as a consequence, have implemented in my own classroom, is Ed Vavra's K.I.S.S. grammar, whose objective is to teach grammar by focusing on syntax.

This issue of improving student writing (and grammar's role in it) doesn't seem like it should be so complex, but it is (at least here in California).

I don't know how correct it is, but I like to use a math analogy: can we expect a student to understand the subtleties of calculus and higher maths if he doesn't understand such basic terms as "add," "subtract," "multiply," or "divide"? How can students improve their writing without understanding the grammatical and syntactical foundations of their language?

you dolt

[Anonymous Coward]

For example it's meant to be "I and Alice went to the pictures" but lots of people say "Me and Alice went to the pictures".

It's Alice and I, you ineluctable clod!

Dwelling on grammar is missing the point.

[razjml]

Learning grammar is great all, but the thing to remember is that when you're caught up in the intricacies of a medium, you fail to express anything through it. Grammar nazis might point out the syntactical flaws of your argument, but they have nothing to contribute to what you're actually saying. The skill of writing must be mastered before anything can be written using those skills, but if your mind is constantly on those skills nothing will be said. F. Scott Fitzgerald had terrible spelling and grammatical accuracy, yet the Great Gatsby is considered the 2nd best novel of the 20th century by the Modern Library. Ever read Joyce? Check out Ulysses, the 1st book on the list, and then tell me how much James Joyce adheres to conventional grammar. Or, to make it easier on you, just flip through the last couple pages.

Re:Dwelling on grammar is missing the point.

[PinkHeidi]

Point taken, but one has to learn the rules before one can abuse them. When we at FictionAlley.org (I'm one of the admins) ask for reasonably good grammar and accurate spelling of major canon characters' names and places, we're expecting that people won't submit things like this:

"HaRrY; cOme out-side." Ron said.

Instead, we hope they submit:

"Harry, come outside," Ron said.

And if they don't know what's wrong with the first one on first glance, we teach it to them. We're not asking for perfection, and we have little tweaky rules about things like semicolons - if it's technically proper to use a semicolon and you use a dash instead, that's *fine by us*. But there's an enormous number of people who have read all five of the Harry Potter books, in English, and still can't figure out that declarative sentences in dialogue should have a comma at the end if it's being followed by an "X said..." bit. We're not asking for rigid adherence to conventional grammar; we do need readability.

In resonse to your sig

[lowtekneq]

Homer and Krusty look like clones because MG wanted to make a satirical point. Bart has no respect for his father but worships this TV clown. Eventually they did change them a little, but the original idea stuck...

:-O

[Flourish]

Wow. You know, I was really more impressed by the fact that that article made it to Slashdot than the fact that I was in Technology Review. Guess that says something about me... (yes, I am the Flourish in the article)

Coherent, strong writers, practice makes perfect

[1eyedhive]

I'm a high school senior, I'm not that much into reading books, usually only what's required for coursework. However I do read a lot, online reading that is. Technical journals, /., other message boards, etc. My reading proficiency level has been tested numerous times over the past 9-10 years or so and I have tested far above grade level in both reading and writing proficiency.

I learned most everything Iknow about good writing by reading others, online. I didn't immerse myself in books, but in online story archives, tech journals, and the like.

I can believe that an online site, such as the kid run HP newspaper is a great tool for learning to write, as the kids are doing it voluntarily, learning without consciously realizing that they are expanding their mind. School tends to shove things down your throat and expects you to regurgitate on cue in the form of exams. This stuff, on the other hand is absorbed, processed and output not by force, but by choice.

It has been my experience that IM and chat sessions are steam of consciousness, quick and simple, akin to spoken speech. As such, grammatical conventions take a back seat to the point of the message and phonetical spellings and acronyms are abound. I myself use them, in the interest of time mostly, one need not capitalize and punctuate a one line IM. If a message is longer, my natural writing tendencies kick in and I end up punctuating and capitalizing sorta like normal.

All I can really say is, there needs to be more stuff for kids like this out there.

Re: second language

[Aqua OS X]

Kids usually don't want to learn anything more then they have to... at least in elementary school. In 2nd grade no one want to sit inside and write when they could be outside playing.

The kids that I tutored -had- to learn a second language for some reason or another. I never met one that voluntarily decided to undertake more classwork and homework.

Kids that learn a second language have a better understanding of the fundamental structures of language. They get to see how written and verbal communication functions within different dialects. From that they get to see what structures and concepts can be applied to multiple languages.