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Literacy Limps Into the Kill Zone
Ant writes to tell us that Wired has an interesting look at the current standards of writing and the general decline of spelling and grammar in today's "comic book generation." The author blames many of the problems on instant or near-instant communications stating that the slang developed is essentially eroding our ability to formulate coherent thoughts in writing when called upon to do so.
Maybe it's just me, but aside from a speling(sic!) error here and there I hardly ever find bigger errors (not to mention the LOL, ROTFL, etc. "monstrosities" he mentions) in comic books, and there's a lot of interesting stories that are more than just the pulp he thinks they are out there - and of course there's also a lot of printed dreck novels out there - Rosamunde Pilcher, anyone?
Can we please call it the "1337 chat generation" already?
KTHXBYE.
np: Luke Vibert - Acidisco (YosepH)
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
Interesting post, but completely irrelevant to the topic at hand.
If any of those quotes noted a decrease in students' writing skill that accompanied use of a new technology, then it'd be close to relevant.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
This doesn't actually mean anything relevant to the current conversation.
All this says is that the MEDIUM changes. The language itself, and the ability for a person to appropriately and effectively communicate concepts and ideas, has nothing to do with whether it is written on bark, slate, or paper, written with chalk, pencil, or pen.
Shinma
I recently taught a course to help undergraduate students to write English properly. I made them all create blogs and told them to write a short review of a game every week. Most weeks I conducted a "critique" session on Friday, where I went through every review and gave pointers on style, grammar and punctuation (mostly the latter two). I think the most interesting thing that I learned was that most students don't think of these things as important at all. So for a long time, some of them had significant problems understanding the difference between writing properly and not writing properly. Often they would write just as they speak, and it took a while for them to understand that this looks wrong. Many of my students had an extremely hard time finding errors in their own writing, no matter how many times they re-read it. When I asked students to edit other students' work, they tended to lack the confidence in their own ability to do this. The technique that most of them found most helpful was to concentrate hard on the structure of paragraphs and to build up paragraphs sentence by sentence in a very formulaic way.
I think that over the course of the module, most students did improve somewhat and they said that they enjoyed it. However, I have doubts about how much of what they learned will stick during the rest of their studies. I feel that it will be pretty hard for them to undo fifteen years of neglect of their English writing skills.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
When will moderaters learn that just because words look like someone is making sense doesn't mean they're actually addressing the relevant point of the story. Or that they even read the story, as evidenced by the article STATING that the English language is ever-changing and evolving and has been for centuries. No one is trying to avoid this point, it isn't the point of the article.
Of course language changes, and there's always people who decry any change. It's the speed and vastness of these changes that are of more concern now than they would have been in the 40s, and every other time before then. Changes are now almost instantaneous. It doesn't take months, or years, for a new word, usage, slang, etc. to really take hold, it now only takes hours before such things are globally propigated. There was at least a slow progression that had an evolution of sorts. That is not longer the case. Email and instant messaging have taken any chance of language, "evolution" and turned it more into instant mutation.
We're not even talking about some bad spelling, or not being as accurate with use of tense of pronouns. We're talking about a complete and utter disregard for ANY language structure whatsoever. No more sentences, no more capitilization, puncuation, no more words as we know them if they have too many letters, shorten that down so I can one-finger-type it better on my phone keypad.
Will the world survive because people are reverting to the modern equivilent of heiroglyphics and cave drawings? I'd like to think that question wouldn't even need to be asked, never mind answered. But since the OP was kind enough to point out that we're still alive and kicking 70 years after George Orwell made his comments on language, I guess I was wrong.
No, the human race will not die off because language changes. Now that we've got that covered, it also won't die off because little black dresses fall out of fashion, green becomes a common house-paint color, or you're not able to find the newest pop song on something they used to call a, "compact disc."
Humans will happily chug along and find other ways to kill themselves regardless of whether the attack order takes thirty-seven pages of detail, or a simple message of, "FU!"
It's not change in diction that I have a problem with, it's the poor syntax. The problem with instant communication, like chat and SMS, is that by encouraging this abbreviated slang it encourages ambiguity and incoherence as well. This isn't due to some elitist "old generation" attitude, it's simply because having the skill to use language formally and correctly goes hand-in-hand with the skill to think precisely, reason correctly and argue persuasively.
In fact, I am one of the "young generation" -- I'm a 21 year old college student. Despite that, I can see quite clearly that the people who are sloppy with their writing are also quite often sloppy with their reasoning also. For me, seeing slang and "l337-5p34k" tends to indicate that the writer both hasn't thought through, nor cares about, what he intends to say. By choosing to use it, the writer is only lowering the reader's opinion of him, and therefore is hurting himself. Presumably, if people understood this they wouldn't do so, but since they do I can only conclude that they're weak-minded, and that whatever what they were trying to say probably wasn't worth reading in the first place.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Women used to not wear pants.
The aristocracy didn't. It was not too uncommon among the peasantry, since practicality often won out there. Ladies didn't wear trousers, but women most certainly did.
Men had short hair.
For some periods in history, yes. In many cultures, long hair was considered a sign of virility (not surprisingly, since hair growth is linked to testosterone). In the 18th century it was fashionable for men to have long braided hair. The idea that men should have short hair is a fairly modern one.
We were ranked by a persons pedigree and not by their job title or money.
Only among the aristocracy, who didn't have jobs. Among the lower aristocracy wealth was very important. I presume you've read Jane Austin, and therefor recall that Mr Bingley (who only had £5,000 a year) was 'nothing next to Mr Darcy' whose income was £10,000 a year.
Moving further down the social hierarchy, the job was important. Members of the professions (soldiers or priests, for example) were more respected than members of the trades. A professional might hope to marry the younger daughter of a junior aristocrat, while a tradesman would not.
Plus Ça Change, Plus C'est La Même Chose
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It's not called the "dark ages" because everyone was stupid, it's been called the "dark ages" for so long because we just haven't known a lot about the period.
Well, Petrarca called it Dark Ages in the XIV-th century and he certainly knew more about it than you seem to, as he actively tried to recover as many writings from Antiquity as he could. And the "Monks saved our culture" argument was dissected by a previous poster already. The scientific part, especially, went down the drain in Europe - the Arabs preserved and developed it in the first Millenium - and eventually passed it back through Spain (to monks, as well - and the parts monks cared for). Why, at the time Khayyam was solving cubic equations (XI-th century) Europe had little idea what Geometry meant because Euclid didn't parse as Latina Vulgata. "It's all Greek to me," eh? Mathematics, Physics, Medicine, Architecture - by all accounts Europe was the land of barbarians at the time and civilisation rested with the Moors. Even Literature, insofar as it pertained to non-religious writings. Why do you think so much Greek theater and poetry is lost nowadays? An please, a documented opinion for a change.
I'm not even going to compare the level of education in Ancient Greece to the Europe of the second half of the first Millenium, it's a complete joke. 'Look, Ma, I no longer know how to write so I've rediscovered this wonderful oral tradition to pass on poetry! later I'll invent minstrels, everyone will love it!' So yes, there was a reason for calling the Dark Ages dark and it's not the one you think it was.
Some of these manuscripts were translated into arab, which Averroes later translated into latin. This is probably were the faulty notion, that the arabs preserved all of the greek texts, came from.
Or perhaps from the fact that Arabs actually did something with them. Where Europeans had all but forgotten Aristotle, Arabs actually studied it, not merely copied over Greek gibberish. Even more - while upon reintroduction in the West Aristotle became something of a dogma, the Arabs had no restraint debating it and pointing out mistakes. I would say this qualifies as preservation in both letter and spirit. And what about Medicine? The heritage of Hippocrates and Galenus came back to Europe mainly through Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and in general through Arab physicians. I won't even touch Mathematics or Astronomy.
A manuscript that is only recopied to gather dust is for all intents and purposes a dead manuscript. The content is nore important than the form and the Arabs kept the content alive and moving forward for so much of what later become European science. And I for one am grateful for it (Christian as I am)
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(Fashykekes) Capitalization is the difference between "I had to help my uncle Jack off a horse.." and "I had to help my uncle jack off a horse.."
Famous quote.
Famous in the tech/IRC/bash world of course.