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.

Comments

Re:They don't realise language changes.

[scot4875]

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

Re:They don't realise language changes.

[shinma]

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.

Undergraduate students' writing skills

[ctid]

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.

Re:They don't realise language changes.

[mrchaotica]

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.

Re:The abuse of language

[TheRaven64]

Things changes.

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

Re:They don't realise language changes.

[VxJasonxV]

http://bash.org/?367896
(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.