Slashdot Mirror
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.
You know, the guy with the 'u' phobia and the 'z' fetish.
Indeed. But why does this not surprise me?
Why go far, look right here on Slashdot. These are geeks, supposedly the folks who're "smarter" than the average population.
And even here, instead of accepting grammatical and spelling mistakes, people would rather flame you for correcting them. Not to mention the piss-poor quality of writing that most Slashdotters (and the editors) have. If you can follow the rules in a programming language, why is it so hard to do so for a natural language?
Personally, if folks do not communicate in good English, I'd simply not respond - be it IM, SMS or e-mail. And guess what? Most folks talk a lot better English when they're communicating with me, simply because they know that they'd not get a response - or that they'd get their English corrected.
I do not care if you are using e-mail, IM or SMS, use that period and use that apostrophe. Use appropriate and proper punctuation, capitalization, spelling and grammar, else I'm simply not talking to you.
That needs to be the general attitude, if we want to see any semblance of Good English (TM) exist in the next few generations.
Seriously, encourage your kids to look up that dictionary. Encourage them to read good literature, aside from the pop crap that exists today. Encourage them to write, to put down their thoughts. The only way you are going to develop writing skills is by writing.
Can you really think of something if you don't have the words to describe it?
And even if you could wrap your head around a concept for which there are no words to describe, how can you communicate it to others? That's the problem. Your ability to think is strongly linked to your language skills. It's not that we wouldn't be able to understand each other, just that nobody would have anything worth saying!
=Smidge=
Something I keep around for "young people are illiterate" discussions like this one.
"Students today can't prepare bark to calculate their problems.
They depend upon their slates which are more expensive. What will
they do when their slate is dropped and it breaks? They will be
unable to write!"
-Teachers Conference,1790
"Students today depend upon paper too much. They don't know how to
write on slate without getting chalk dust all over themselves. They
can't clean a slate properly. What will they do when they run out of
paper?"
-Principals Association, 1815
"Students today depend too much upon ink. They don't know how to use a
pen knife to sharpen a pencil. Pen and ink will never replace the
pencil!"
-National Association of Teachers, 1907
"Students today depend upon store bought ink. They don't know how to
make their own. When they run our of ink they will be unable to write
words or ciphers until their next trip to the settlement. This is a
sad commentary on modern education."
-The Rural American Teacher, 1929
"Students today depend upon these expensive fountain pens. They can
no longer write with a straight pen and nib (not to mention
sharpening their own quills). We parents must not allow them to
wallow in such luxury to the detriment of learning how to cope in
the real business world, which is not so extravagant."
-PTA Gazette,1941
"Ball point pens will be the ruin of education in our country. Students
use these devices and then throw them away. The American virtues of
thrift and frugality being discarded. Business and banks will never
allow such expensive luxuries."
-Federal Teacher, 1950
I start out with a statement: "Chat speak" is not permitted in any form and is defined it as using punctuation symbols or shorthand as cognates for words and concepts that are normally expressed with letters. To wit, Using "@" for "at" or "2" for "to" or "too" or "U" for "you" is not permitted and not limited to those examples. Abbreviations are permitted as long as an abbreviation appears in Webster's New World College Dictionary and conforms either to the Chicago or APA styles. Any usage of "chat speak" in any communication to me in query to this class or through the normal course of instruction, test answer for grade or essay submitted for grade will result in my ignoring the communication and automatically marking the answer as incorrect or marking the grade down on the essay.
;) thx" bullshit in its tracks.
Stops that "Hey prof U are keepin me outta grad skool can i meet U @ yr office 2 talk?
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
We all use slang, we all use abbreviations, jargon and impolite ways of speaking, especially with friends and family. The problem i run into is more and more people who cant "Turn it off" when they need to. People who use the same bad grammar when writing an office e-mail that they do when chatting with buddies online or at happy hour. Kids who cant write a coherent written sentence because they are so used to using slang. Its nothing that different from what I say when talking to friends, or get into a flamewar, but i DONT use it in the office, or when meeting someone for the first time, or when applying for a job. Thats the problem.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
What, the use of AIM and MSN etc is causing a decline in spelling skills! Unpossible!
Seriously, this is a big issue. My little sister is 14 and whenever I see her on the computer she's typing away to her friends in another language. It's more than just the old cliché "lol"s and "omfg"s, it's also a large influence from 'ghetto' speak or whatever you want to call that particular variety of pidgin English. All her friends do the same and it's so difficult to decipher it. Contractions are the order of the day, even contractions of contractions, so "uk babe" means "are you okay, my dear?" - that one's quite ambiguous to a non-savvy reader. Also, these other words creep in from spoken language; eg, in Nottingham it seems to be 'cool' for these kids to refer to members of the female gender as "gyals" - your guess is as good as mine as to how this one's pronounced, but they all know what it means.
The fact is (and I'm speaking as an English undergraduate) that written and spoken language are (obviously) two very different beasts, but the rise of technology and the communications advances it brings have blurred the lines. What method of communication is IM - spoken or written? Logic would say written, but virtually nobody (below the age of 20, anyway) types as they would write in, say, a letter. Instant Messaging and other forms of online communication (email, forums, etc) aren't one or the other, but they do tend to show closer links with spoken language, which is having a detrimental effect on written language since the twain should never meet, historically. We know it's becoming an issue when kids are handing in exam papers written in 'net shorthand, and if there aren't better controls established either in schools to make sure kids can see the differences, or online to try to limit the level of intellect-crushing abrvtns, the future generations are gonna be really limited.
Too right. One of the words that has suffered from this linquistic drift is "unique," which in English means "one of a kind." Now, we Americans, (and possibly Brits, I don't know) often use this word to mean "unusual," "cool," or "neat-o." I actually heard a commercial the other day describing something as "unique and one-of-a-kind."
It's very frustrating.
I don't care that language changes - I'm a descriptivist. I care that language becomes less useful and less precise. We already have lots of words to mean "unusual," but few that mean "unique." Now we have to say "one-of-a-kind," which the folks will probably start using to mean "unusual."
Now, if someone had even a passing familarity with Latin, she would know that the prefix "uni" means "one," and that "unique" probably means, "one-of-a-kind," not "cool." That's the argument the Classicists would make, at least.
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
It is quite interesting how I did a whole lot better in the English classes at an American university than most Americans, even though English is my third language. At first I thought they were smart but they just didn't care, but it turned out that they really didn't know to write and they didn't care.
I guess I expected everyone to do worse in science only, not in Enlish -- their own language! Oh, well, more jobs for immigrants like me, "Thanks! US primary educational system!"
Isn't the problem that you are sending real time messages and don't have hours and days to proof read things? How long does it take to write a term paper and make sure it is good? Compare that to how long it takes to write an IM message and send that. Sure, you could turn in your term paper after the first draft, or spend a week reviewing your IM message, but they are different animals.
The United Statis is declining because we don't reward the people who are smart. Some ape who can put a rubber ball through a round hoop is a highly paid hero, while someone who IS literate, scientific, etc... is lucky if their jobs aren't outsourced over seas. Before you start getting down on kids maybe you should look at the message that society sends.
Oh, and this also answers the age old question of why people die. If they didn't there would never be any change. The old crowd would stick to their old ways and prevent any progress because it is a perversion. Look at the muslims. They used to be highly advanced, but now it's more important to observe the old ways.
I guess the more things change the more they do stay the same.
Modern comics are written by professional writers and contain far more complex vocabulary than he's crediting them. The only exceptions would be special characters like "Bizarro" that speak improper grammar because it's a trait of the character. Even the japanese manga imported has proper grammar if it's translated correctly.
Perhaps if you weren't so condescending you'd realize that your research is no better than the parent poster's. Speaking as someone who holds a PhD in classical studies, I can tell you that literacy did indeed survive, in a few good way, after the collapse of the Western Empire as you say. Where do you think most of our manuscripts for ancient texts come from? Monks, from this very time period. 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. Beowulf, one of the great epic poems, was composing in this time period, and no doubt many other texts that we have yet to uncover (and probably will never uncover). "Dark" doesn't mean dumb, it means unknown.
Windows is shutting down, and grammar are
On their last leg. So what am we to do?
A letter of complaint go just so far,
Proving the only one in step are you.
Better, perhaps, to simply let it goes.
A sentence have to be screwed pretty bad
Before they gets to where you doesnt knows
The meaning what it must of meant to had.
The meteor have hit. Extinction spread,
But evolution do not stop for that.
A mutant languages rise from the dead
And all them rules is suddenly old hat.
Too bad for we, us what has had so long
The best seat from the only game in town.
But there it am, and whom can say its wrong?
Those are the break. Windows is shutting down.
Clive James in The Guardian -- Saturday April 30, 2005
Insert witty sig here.
Well, there you have it.
Current net-speak was not entirely made up from scratch anyway; I'm not a native English speaker, but I'd wager that the numbers-for-letters and numbers-for-parts-of-words substitutions were already known in the English language.
I have studied exactly that phenomenon once, albeit in respect to Croatian and Slovenian. Slovenian has about the same kind of numbers-for-parts-of-words substitutions as English does, while Croatian, genetically, geographically and culturally much closer to Slovenian, does not.
I have concluded that the major factor was the relation of phonology and spelling; Croatian spelling is much more phonological in its nature, hence dicouraging this kind of wordplay. (Croatian language is much too pompous in some other areas as well, in my opinion, bu that's not the issue now.)
And I have noted - mainly from experience - that people (children) like to experiment with language quite a lot, especially until certain age (it usually stops somewhere at the end of puberty); then they continue using the more-or-less standard idiom. I believe that this toying with language is a valuable part of language learning process, so I definitely would not prohibit my future students from doing so, as long as they proved they knew wat they were toying with and how.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Of course, I'll test for other things as well. Unfortunately, this may be a humbling experience for some applicants.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Too true. I remember an ad in Tesco(British Supermarket). It read: "Permanently slashed prices! Forever!". It pained me every time I saw that ad.
If you think about it a bit however, it's not so much that the general population have gotten less literate, it's more that they're writing more. Welcome to the Information age. The age where every John Doe can send a txt 2 u.
*sigh*
I guess this is just another one of these things we'll have to learn to deal with...
Langauge and usage is always being analyzed way too much.. language is what it is. It is a method of communicating thoughts and ideas with others. As long as we understand each other there is nothing "wrong" and we are devolving or whatever these people seem to think.
That is the easy way out. Sure, there are a few rules that can be safely ignored, but grammar is essentally a way to structure your thoughts in written text to be understood by others. Both parties need to know the key to unencrypt the meaning. People who write without concern for grammar are not unintelligible, but people who use grammar correctly are better understood. Language does change, and grammar should reflect that, but if everyone makes their own rules, soon no one will understand anyone else. There must be a uniform set of rules that are malleable but not volatile.
Yet there are reasons why grammatical rules exist -- those rules facilitate the accurate communication of thoughts and ideas to others. For example, your partial failure to capitalize the first word of your sentences make your post a little harder to read than it would be otherwise. When you misspell "language" as "langauge", it's a distraction from the flow of points you're trying to make. When you say "Langauge and usage skills is always being analyzed way too much", and you use the singular "is" rather than the plural "are", are you referring only to language or only to skills? This sort of imprecision may seem trivial, but if you stack enough of those trivial imprecisions up your text quickly becomes incomprehensible.
It's true that language evolves to serve the needs of its users, but I think it's important that we distinguish between evolution and simple poor grammar.
(Sure, -1 Grammar Nazi, but it's relevant here, right?)
The problem with instant communication, like chat and SMS, is that by encouraging this abbreviated slang it encourages ambiguity and incoherence as well.
yes, things were so much better in the days of the telegraph, when people were charged by the letter or word and so made every effort to ABBREVIATE their message to the recipient.
Oh, wait... the telegraph is still around! And still in wide use on the amateur radio bands! People having been using the ancestor of SMS for decades now, so how is this problem (allegedly) suddenly on the rise?
Oh, that's right... it isn't. This is just more quacking from unfed ducks. At least once a decade we get articles like this from some mumble-mumble know it all professor somewhere ranting about how literacy is on the decline.
The Romans had a similar view when they carved their tombstones and road signs. The result was a separate "mini-language" that takes extra study to decipher. For example, there are abbreviations for all of the common Roman names and certain positions in the government and military. Certain popular phrases were merely acronymed out a la SPQR. 4 years of Latin really won't help deciphering a Roman tombstone. You have to either be fluent in the language and extremely knowledgable about history, or have a codex created for you by someone who is. They honestly assumed that their audience would be Roman, and would simply "know what they meant anyway."
Can you imagine a future scholar trying to decipher AIMspeak? I imagine the Roman inscription rules, but made up on the fly, relying on puns and phonetic mutations, and I shudder. The future had better breed some damn fine linguists if we want 20th century culture to be recorded accurately.
A strain of paranoid prevention can be worse than the disease, whate'er the intention.
The first point I would make is that George Orwell was not talking about the same 'literacy' that article was talking about. Orwell was making commentary regarding the ability of individuals to talk but convey no real meaning. I syntactically correct prose with no content. This is what we in the contemporary period would probably call managerial speak (itself a pun in the language coined in 1984).
The generational decline of language as being successive from its predecessor is regarded as the etymological falacy. Whether they are correct, linguistics critics that is, the jury is still out.
The article mentioned nothing about morals. That is only your associative mind at work making something irrelevant seem relevant.
The author is not talking about people's ability to communicate. Most five year olds have a moderate grasp on the syntactic nature of english. He is talking about the ability of individuals to transmit a stream of conscious to paper. This is not postmodern crap. This is plain writing ability.
It is irrefutable this is in recession. Term papers and examinations as well as the constant barrage of media provide more than enough case study material. Linguistics, sociologist and anthropologists with more time than me dedicate much research to this.
Your right, communication has changed. There are new form and it is generally faster. However, the basic units of professional writing have remained. Periodicals and treatsies persevere. An sms of 'c u l8r' does not transmit the same volume and value of content as Henry Thoreau's Thinking Like A Mountain.
I would argue that the decline in language is concurrent with people reading less formal literature. Goerge Orwells political commentary may be such, and so might be Henry Thoreau. At the least it wont do them any harm and with luck it might provide role models for their own scholastic meanderings.
The entire point of writing (well, at least this form of writing; obviously, things like novels and poetry are a different story) is to express what you mean clearly and precisely so that people can understand you
Rubbish. If that were true you wouldn't use English, you'd use mathematics, or a computer language. English and just about every language in the world are by their very nature imprecise, open to multiple interpretations, and deeply entrenched in the culture of the day. People who think otherwise are living in a fantasy world.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
This is something that people are always complaining about without really knowing much about how languages, or Language works. Unfortunately, most of the slashdotters that have been posting aren't really quite clear on what's going on either.
1) Language does change. There's no such thing as a change "for the worse" or "for the better." There's no language that lends itself more than any other towards communicating clearly. The problem arises most likely from the fact that people using SMSes and IMs and what-have-you are communicating with each other perfectly clearly. Adults, or the old world users of language, don't understand this register because they're not used to it. It's nothing inherent about the use of language, it's about how you're used to using it. Try taking a look at something written in the 19th or 18th century - It's difficult to read, because the writers and audiences at the time were used to a completely different sort of register.
2) Comic books are an amazing new venue. Look at "The Sandman" or "Watchmen." or "Maus." In the same way that movies blend images and spoken language, comics blend images and written language. Sure, there are a lot of purile comic books. But look at how science fiction got its start - cowboys and aliens. And the fact that most movies are relatively void of "literary value" (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean) doesn't mean that something good can't come out of that medium.
3) You can't seperate the medium and the message. Someone pointed out that it's the medium that's changing, not the message, but with every new medium comes a new way of looking at language that ends up fundamentally altering it.
4) Archaeologists don't say that language is always changing - Linguists do. Maybe he could've gotten half credit if he said "Anthropologists," but linguistics isn't a subfield of anthropology any more than physics is a subfield of math.