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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)."
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
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
May we never see th
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.
which modifies "jarjestelma" 'system' into 'even with his/her lack of causing of systematicalization, I wonder?', as you can readily see.
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"
Okay, nobody uses that word. But still. Our words are longer than yours.
(Funny. Laugh.)
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.