Proposal Suggests UK Students Study Wikipedia and Twitter

An anonymous reader writes "Who needs crusty old rubbish like the Victorian era or World War II? Instead, an Ofsted report leaked to The Guardian details of proposals to teach UK primary school children how to use Wikipedia, Twitter, podcasts and blogs. Presumably they're already au fait with b3ta and 4chan. And you already can't get the kids off Bebo without a crowbar."

Comments

Re:Grammer Nitpick

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And then came the Grammar Nazis. But for them, we would be able to carry on conversations without pointless interruptions.

Speaking as one who spent about five years as a professional editor, it is perfectly fine to start sentences with conjunctions. Like anything, it shouldn't be overused. But I will take a sentence that begins with "but" over one that inserts "however" as a clause any day. "However" reads weak. Similarly, if you can start a sentence with "and" where the only alternative would be to use a longer word or phrase, go with "and." People use it that way all the time in normal speech, and written text that sounds like natural speech is almost always preferable to a string of long words that were chosen out of a desire to sound "proper."

And by the way, starting sentences with conjunctions is not even a new practice. "But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?" It's just difficult to teach young writers to do it properly, which is why most high-school English teachers stick to the (false) rule. Your writing will be better if you don't do it at all than if you do it badly.