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Students Failing Because of Poor Grammar
innocent_white_lamb writes "30% of freshman university students fail a 'simple English test' at Waterloo University (up from 25% a few years ago. Academic papers are riddled with 'cuz' (in place of 'because') and even include little emoticon faces. One professor says that students 'think commas are sort of like parmesan cheese that you sprinkle on your words.' At Simon Fraser University, 10% of students are not qualified to take the mandatory writing courses."
Me fail English? That's unpossible.
LOL i red this, coz I iz gud, at ritin english init, there all morans ROFL
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
I'm usually a grammar and spelling Nazi, but this thread invites the Nerdpocalypse. May God have mercy on our souls.
Its a basement cat conspiracy I tell you!
ACK
At this point, is our decline even reversible? I could draw some parallels with history (as I have in past posts) --- but what would be the point? We'll just have more people argue that education is worthless, or say how it's all the fault of teachers' unions, or argue that we need more charter schools.
So, we point fingers, scream, and ape talking points while our society crumbles around us. What's the point?
We're already the laughingstock of the world; the next generation actually looks worse than the boomers do, and that's an accomplishment. Screw this: I'm getting out. There must be some place in the world that welcomes those Americans who manage to not be complete morons.
Emoticons are simply forms of expressing a particular feeling or intensity, in the same way as an exclamation mark. Is the only difference that exclamation marks are considered acceptable, because they are, in some way, traditional?
Why should one not consider indicating a humorous point by placing a winking face at the end of it, rather than using some other punctuation?
After all it's pretty natural that languages evolve.
I once had a freshman student write in a paper, "The bathroom smelled in a way that is not relevant to life."
If the schpelling and granmma on slashhdot is anythyn too go bi
FTA:
"But "spelling is getting better because of Spellcheck," says Margaret Proctor, University of Toronto writing support co-ordinator.
. I'd like to see some hard evidence before I agree with this statement. In my experience, people tend to make spelling errors and go with the spell chedking results without actually investigating the error.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
How the hell do those people pass schools without anyone telling them that something like that in official texts is bad, BAD, *BAD* in that country?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma
AKA the Oxford Comma.
It actually demonstrates grammar. Oh noo! Stop the grammarians!
I can confurm, exactly what iz stated, here.
A course I'm currently taking requires frequent posting in threads created by the other students. The grammar is truly a sight to see.
"That 10 per cent must take so-called "foundational" writing courses first."
Considering they're taking on students who can't write English properly, it's kind of ironic they've picked the most obscure/rare adjective form of 'foundation' for the title of the course.(Unless of course if foundational is often used on the other side of the pond, in which case I withdraw my laughter...)
What part of speech is "eh?"
Is there a problem with the gasses they use? Maybe they need more vinegar?
Fixed your missing parenthesis for you. Perhaps a community college would be more your style?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
OMG Juliet was like, oh oh, OMG were is my bf Romeo and I was like, so GET OVER IT teh rediculus bitch.
To quote the book of the above title:
A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.
'Why?' asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
'Well, I'm a panda', he says, at the door. 'Look it up.'
The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. 'Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.'
I've actually noticed myself becoming extremely careful about punctuation. If you get your punctuation wrong when programming, all sorts of bad things happen. English is just a natural extension of this.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
It's still "english" and the 'grammar' may be correct but you don't speak like that and it's not necessarily 'english' you'd recognize as how you think or speak in your own voice.
A rather silly complaint. If any book were written in the same way people spoke (pauses, repetitions, stuttering, incomprehension, disfluences, repetition, talking over one another, etc), it would be almost incomprehensible.
My wife works in the public schools. I learned one thing from her. Parents claim they want schools with touch academics. However, they also wants their kids to get a 4.0, or very close to it and go apeshit when it doesn't happen. So when a school does crack down and start to grade accurately to touch academic standards, the parents go ballistic. These parents start harassing the teacher, the principal, the administrators, and the school board.
So it's no shock that these kids, of which very little was ever demanded or expected of them, should suddenly find themselves failing college once the gloves come off.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
'cuz the rant starts NOW.
Now let's see, it's one thing to write incoherently, another thing is to write wrongly (that is not obeying proper grammar and spelling).
This is the way language evolves, this is why no one writes 'perchance', or uses ð anymore (well, except for Bjork :P)
And even though Englysh language scholars are much less picky (or rather, are not a total pain in the behind like let's say, French language scholars) my opinion of both (that is, those exclusively dealing with their mother tongue) is similar: those who can't do, teach. (yes, this is very biased and certainly doesn't apply for several professors, but still, for them, especially)
how long until
Better punctuation would have made your point a whole lot clearer.
The point here is not about the evolution of language, it's about the accurate use of accepted language to make a point. With consistency comes clarity, and clarity is what academic expression is all about.
What percentage of freshman students at UW are from Hong Kong?
Just sayin', is all.
Time to go back to school! The bell curve is going to heavily favour those of us who know how to write...and spell.
Hai, I can haz degree?
I'm pleasantly surprised that these students actually failed their tests. I half-expect colleges to just dumb down the test and let them pass.
"Cuz" is perfectly acceptable in an SMS. It is not in a paper. Someone who fails to distinguish between formal and informal writing may have difficulty distinguishing formal and informal behavior in other situations and end up telling your major client, who just happens to be a devout Christian, that she spent the last three days at a pot-fueled Wiccan orgy. (Or tell your other major client, who happens to be an LGBT activist, that she thinks all homos should be put to death by stoning.)
Mark Twain, anyone?
See the example given above.
I've got a degree in Anthropology and the linguists in the department will agree with you on this point. The official Anthropological stance is that language is just language, there is no "right" or "wrong." If it communicates, then it does its job.
Having said that, I'm not sure I agree with the linguists. There is something to be said for formal writing; baseline communication. What you do in your spare time (on facespace or in text messages) is your own business. But what you do on academic time or professional time is another matter. There are plenty of people out there that can speak or write in multiple dialects, and there's no reason to think that the children of today suddenly lost the ability to cross those kinds of boundaries at will.
I think the sloppiness is just an amalgamation of laziness and arrogance compounded by certain sociological factors (viz. that college is just an extension of high school with beer and sex, not really a learning institution; or that universities are first and foremost businesses and not learning institutions).
Seriously, this isn't anything new. I'm a grad myself and yes every year lots of people fail that test. And they have every reason to.
So it must be hard right? No, it isn't. I passed and my grammer is what Charles Barkley would say is 'turrible'
But this is why most students fail.
1) A ton of international students because of the technical programs. In computer science and engineering, you are likely: Chinese, Indian or Russian. Many do not have english as a first language.
2) The education system in Ontario (the province Waterloo resides in) doesn't teach grammer. I don't recall ever doing any sort of grammer drills in elementary school. Grammer is a set of rules, if you don't know them, then you can't apply them
Elementary school needs to get back to teaching grammer in the form of drills. The teachers themselves need to polish up on their practices as well and deduct more marks on grammer. The more students grades drop as a result of careless grammer, the more they will pay attention and improve. And if they fail? Great! their skills need refinement.
(I am not a linguist.)
Yes. Language evolves with how people use it... while respecting the already established language. There have been many changes to the English language, due to influences from French and German, and before that from northern Europe, Latin and Greek. Not to mention countless other languages which have contributed words like shampoo, algebra and igloo, and neologisms (etc.) like radar and internet.
But none of the above occurred with a person consciously intending to speak English "his way". Rather, the changes developed due to changing needs and attitudes regarding how we should spell, use grammar etc.
When you, use, commas like this, all you're showing, is, that you're ignorant, of what commas are for.
This "simple English test" had been a requirement at the University of Waterloo for a while. When I started there in 1998, all new students in all faculties and programs had to satisfy an English reading/writing requirement by the end of their first year. This meant either passing the written test or showing that you achieved a grade of 80% (considered an A in Canada) in your senior university-track English class in high school in Ontario. Because the entrance requirements were pretty high and because students' senior high school English class had to be included in the six senior grades that students submitted with their application, I remember being surprised that so many of my fellow math and computer science students had to write the exam. They all passed, though. Some of my friends had to write the test not because they had poor grades in high school English but because they went to high school in another province or country. At the time my impression was that the test would be pretty easy for almost any university student whose first language was English. However, I didn't actually see the test myself.
I heard about this on the radio yesterday, and they said that the University of Waterloo is one of the few in Canada with such a requirement.
By the way, it is never properly called "Waterloo University".
Atheism is a religion to the same extent that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Australia recently released rankings of all our schools.
Chifley College Dunheved Campus was the worst ranked school in Sydney.
As you can see, the school isn't very inspiring
This XKCD comic was made just for you.
There's no global dumb-people-breeding conspiracy and every one of these kids has the ability for higher learning. The sad fact is there's a growing percentage that's never had to try in an education system where no-one fails.
Why learn proper english when the alternative nets you the same result and more free time?
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
tl;dr
Seriously though, I agree with you for the most part. (I apologize now for grammar Nazis on this site who will attack you imminently.) I don't think shortening all words to their acronyms is the best way to go. If you run across a word you don't know, you can make a good guess at the pronunciation from the spelling. You're pretty much screwed with all the modern shortcuts though. Plus I'd hate to read a paper with emoticons at the front of a class and have to mimic all the little faces. Finally, typing speeds in the new generation have really dropped. They can text message in a blazing fury, but that's for the most part useless. Heck, I don't even like people who type slow on my MMO team.
I can't be arsed copy/pasting the numerous examples of it, but fucking hell, as somebody who's worked as a print news editor I was a bit disappointed by the crappy style and bad writing in an article about falling literacy standards. On the other hand, you'd be shocked by the overall poor quality of the language coming out of any news wire service you'd care to name. This isn't a cultural or national thing, it's just as bad no matter what language it's in or what country the wire is about; most articles will need at least one or two corrections that should at least have been caught by a decent automated checker.
I previously worked for about 8 years for a medium-sized marketing and design agency, as the lead web developer. On almost every project that passed across my desk, I seemed to be the only one spotting spelling errors, grammatical mistakes and punctuation problems before copy went to the web and to print. This was in a company of 30-ish young, university educated professionals in London.
When the programmers are copy-editing your marketing material, that should be a sign you've got literacy problems!
The weird thing was that when I sent the copy back, corrected, everyone told me I was being anal - apparently not bothered about bad copy to billboards and magazines nationwide.
I agree with a commenter above, though - I think coding does encourage attention to detail when a stray semicolon becomes important.
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
It's death by Twitter: "I'm such a self-absorbed, self-promoting whore that I will text total strangers my every waking thought (such as they are...) but I will do it in such a way as to be illegible to anyone with better than an 8th grade education."
Personally, I'd have preferred lead in the goblets or a Barbarian invasion, but I guess one does not get to choose these things...
Yes, language evolves, but in academia, students are expected to use good style (whether it is MLA, APA or something else). No style find emoticons acceptable yet.
I feel like this is less of a problem with literacy, and more of a problem about not being able to adapt your writing style to fit your audience.
Plus, there's nothing wrong with professors sticking up for today's grammar in the face of change.
There's little doubt the English language has evolved and, some argue, is always evolving.
However, grammar and syntax rules for a human language are essentially no different than rules for a computer language. The rules are set to establish use and understanding.
If I, suddenly decided, that every, second word, should be, separated by, commas then, it would, make this, sentence much, tougher to, use and, understand right?
The rules can be archaic at times, but no less useful and necessary. Language efficiency is important. However, the language becomes less efficient if everyone is working from a slightly different set of rules, and it becomes near useless if it takes even longer to use and understand what is being said.
No, Vern. They just let him in.
I fear for my generation.
I have a hard time believing this (though I didn't read the article), but I suppose it's true. I grew up in Ontario. When I was in high school in the 90s, they really grilled us for spelling & grammar, especially "comma splices." I remember in particular the teachers "threatening" us by claiming that in university you lost something like 10% for each spelling mistake (though from my experience, they really didn't care outside of literature courses).
Where I work now we have a steady supply of co-op students. I remember we had this one student who made liberal use of chat-speak... over IM. I was actually pretty surprised to see a client-facing email of hers written perfectly eloquently.
If people are using 'cuz' in academic papers, they deserve to fail. Dang idiots.
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
Language is about communication. You aren't supposed to use dialect terms or syntax in publications because a lot of the people reading it won't be native speakers. You and I know what 'cuz' means, but what about the reader whose first language is French, Spanish, Hindi, or Mandarin? It works for us because we can do the phonetic transform, but a native French speaker will wonder what 'coos' is meant to be short for or mean, and will have to look it up.
The tiny fraction of a second that you save typing cuz instead of because will cause people reading your paper to have to spend several seconds looking it up. The total time wasted, if more than a few people read your paper, will be several minutes. Wasting minutes of other people's time to save you a fraction of a second is incredibly impolite.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
She spend three days at a pot-fueled Wiccan orgy and still manages to be a devout Christian? I'm impressed. (yes, I know what you meant. But as Barbie should have said, "Grammar is hard, and dangling modifiers are a bitch.")
Is our children learning?
The KJV isn't meant to be spoken English per se. They hired on some of the best literary minds available in England at the time, who could also read the original Greek, Latin and Hebrew, then translated the original text and re-wrote it in literary form. Part of literature, particularly verse (poetry, song lyrics) is playing with grammar so as that while it's still recognizable, its different enough that even the form of the sentence is noticeable in addition to the actual content. So, I'm not sure I'd use the KJV as an a point any more than I would William Blake.
Now, Chaucer might be a better example as the difference between middle and modern English is substantial enough to not just be a difference between written literature and spoken vernacular. However there is a difference between the way in which phonetic units are pronounced overtime and being completely ignorant of fundamental grammatical constructs, and the inability to use the language of power has massive implications in society, both economic and political.
Loss of grammatical knowledge in the vernacular eventual brought the vulgate latin down to where it morphed into Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian -- but the language of the church and government remained Latin, and when the people and their rulers are separated by linguistic barriers like that, then it just leads to oppression and resentment, then eventually to revolution and upheaval, and there has been MAJOR upheaval in all of those countries even after the powerful accepted the new vernacular when high profile people, such as Dante and Cervantes began to write in it, or Chaucer -- the first major author in the English language after the Norman conquest brought French in as the language of the landed.
My degree is in literature and history, and I studied linguistics in school. I fully understand that language changes, words shift meaning, etc -- however for a democracy to function it is essential that proper education be as wide-spread as possible and that the language of the powerful not differ to greatly from the language of the proletariate, lest the gulf continue to grow. This has nothing to do with efficiency of language. It has to do with can you read the ballot and pamphlet, can you communicate in court, can you deal in the workplace, etc?
But, as usual, most people refuse to see this, or much anything beyond the reach of their computer monitor, which far from being a window to the world at large has, in recent years, turned out to be a tool for reenforcing one's own ideology by being able to filter information down to almost exclusively that with which one is wont to agree. O, tempora... O, mores!
Random usage of commas is not language evolving, it's language deteriorating. Written language is supposed to convey meaning, especially in a scientific context. Punctuation is a structural element: Sometimes it just helps the reader "look ahead", but often it can and does have semantic influence.
Misspellings hinder the reader's flow. While there is only one correct spelling of "because", there are many misspellings which can still be understood. This unnecessary complexity is disrespectful to the reader and distracts from the content. Orthography is not the place to express individualism. Scientists are supposed to make themselves known for their ideas, not their hip style. A few can get away with it, if their thoughts are worth overlooking poor spelling. Most should do everything they can to make their texts as accessible to the audience as possible.
As an academic, I would love to live in a world in which this were true!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If the universities were to adapt to the 'txting language', by the time I hit 70 years old there would be 3 or 4 iterations of English being used in the US alone.
You can call me old-fashioned (I'm 30) but 'cuz' is lazy. Of course I know what it means and I don't care if people use it informally... but when it comes to a school paper or a business letter it just isn't acceptable. The problem is the kids using don't understand the difference between slang and normal English.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
One of the big problems with poor written English is reading it and understanding it. Try this: Ask students to write a paper on a particular subject Read and then grade the 50 papers Read and regrade those 50 papers Do that with five classes of 50 students and then have another go at discussing whether good written English is helpful to the student. I think you'll find that when you've read one paper for an hour (and it should have taken you no longer than 30 minutes) and you are still none the wiser as to what they are telling you, you'll soon realise why it is that good written English helps all parties to understand each other.
Language also needs to be readable and convey a point clearly, two things which "LOLspeak" is not well suited for.
What a Maroon
The trend that youngsters are less and less able to write a coherent sentence seems to be a global thing. I'm not a native English speaker myself, so excuse me for any mistakes, but I'm often amazed at how incredibly bad my fellow Dutchmen write, especially on the internet.
I wonder if the decline of the paper media have got anything to do with this. Sure, books, newspapers and magazines aren't perfect or even decent at a lot things, but at least they contain (mostly) correctly written texts. People reading these texts are likely to adopt the language used, which means that if the majority of the population use these media as a source of information, they're likely to write what they read. But as the paper media are rapidly losing ground, so is correctly spelled language. On the internet, nobody checks your texts for errors in spelling or grammar, because nobody seems to care. It's all about speed instead of correctness.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
While I definitely agree there is a problem with people not caring about proper writing (this is also the case with my native language, Dutch); I would say that "Academic papers are riddled with 'cuz'..." is a definite exaggeration. Never have I encountered such an article. I've seen some really badly written articles while still being reviewed (they didn't get accepted), and even those did not contain abbreviations such as 'cuz'.
I teach a 3rd year OS course. It is mostly concepts (scheduling, concurrency, etc). The only math that has to be done in the exam is calculating the average of 5 or 6 numbers all less than 30 (e.g. average waiting time for a set of process bursts). There are no calculators allowed on the exam. A significant fraction of the students are not capable of adding 5 2 digit numbers and dividing by 5 and getting the right number.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
Religion ("believing in something") is considered more important than science ("examining things"). So what is the surprise in that education in general goes down the drain? The home-schooling religious right has one thing correct: Education is fundamentally hostile to religion and all the other "we already have the answers" bullshit bingo.
The biggest problem - Dawkins got that right - is that rational thinking doesn't have much of a lobby. Heck, thinking of any kind doesn't. If you can check your facts, you don't have this desire to defend them religiously. You think that if someone doubts you, he can repeat the double-blind experiment and be convinced. Except that you are the one who's double-blind - to both the fact that the religious doubters won't repeat the experiment and even if they would, it wouldn't convince them of anything. Because religion is not falsifyable, it's a reverse-falsification system: The more you disprove it, the more fanatical its believers become.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I have a degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Waterloo and I live in the region still. One of the reasons that UW has so many people failing the ELPE (English Language Proficiency Exam), and one of the reasons it requires the test in the first place, is because of the numbers of foreign students at the university.
Waterloo has, I believe, the largest math and computer science programmes in the world. It also what is generally regarded as Canada's best engineering school. These hard science and engineering programmes attract a large number of far eastern students. When I was in school in the '90s, you'd have been more likely to hear Cantonese than English if you wandered around the Math building. I don't want to generalise, but many of these students probably come to Waterloo because they can get a great education in a programme that doesn't require them to speak perfect English, and where they have a large number of their peers.
Probably one of the reasons that Waterloo students fail the ELPE in such high numbers is that many of them are foreigners for whom English is a second, third, or fourth language. I only wish I spoke multiple languages as well as many Waterloo students speak English.
www.clarke.ca
Perfect example. I gave up on Huckleberry Finn at page 50. The second time, when I had to read it because it was assigned in school, I retained approximately nothing.
Did anyone every stop to consider that language is evolving and that it is the traditional grammar which is failing to keep up with modern society?
Its my experience that people whom can not learn the proper tools to express themselves, coincidentally also have nothing useful inside themselves to express. Just a coincidence, and correlation does not imply causality, but it is a useful predictor that is almost never wrong. Think of it as a filter, kind of like a website with flash navigation is probably utterly useless, not because it uses flash, but because using flash for navigation indicates a certain stupidity that probably extends far beyond mere inability to create a properly navigable website.
Swearing is another example. Its not that the words are inherently in and of themselves wrong because some clown declared them wrong, it's that it shows a smallness of vocabulary, an inability to express complicated ideas, a distinct lack of intelligent contemplation.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Yes. Did you ever stop to consider that "thats" is not a word?
Sounds to me like these universities need to bump their admissions standards a bit. Do they still require essays even?
The error is simply sub-standard education. We already have a whole generation of people here in Finland who have been using phones and IM for ages. (Everyone had cell phones when I was in high school, and I've passed thirty.) But we also have (for now) a rather good educational system. Taught right, people can distinguish informal and formal writing properly.
One thing I've never understood about the US system: Why do you people think kids have to learn to read at such a young age? Is it just peer pressure? Here most kids learn to read at the age of seven, and yet we seem to be doing just fine compared to a lot of places. Early education here centers a lot on letting kids be kids and develop "normally", whatever that is... ;)
.: Max Romantschuk
People read less with movies, games, youtube, etc. available to fill their time.
Ironically enough it's academic work that is jargon laden, wasn't it einstein who said if you can't communicate it in simple language you're not really good at communicating or understanding your own ideas?
Simple grammar errors have become so common in everyday written conversation that many people have begun to accept them as normal. Most people don't want to play grammar nazi and derail casual online conversations by calling down friends for their writing, so bad writing habits run unchecked. The problem is that these people bring those same bad habits with them when writing anything in an even remotely serious situation, but don't realize that such errors makes them look like idiots.
No.
Replacing 'because' with 'cuz' is theoretically a form of language evolution. Simplifying commonly used words is an acceptable evolution, particularly when there is no risk of misinterpretation. On the other hand, inserting commas in the same way you sprinkle Parmesan cheese is not language evolution. The lack of consistency impairs the ability to convey ideas; the student which produced the writing is likely incapable of producing the same patterns of commas twice. Misplaced commas, along with poor capitalization and spelling, can lead to all sorts of misinterpretations, e.g. the panda which "Eats, shoots and leaves," or the time I "helped my uncle jack off a horse." Language evolution is different from language deterioration.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Language evolves with how people use it... ... and speak it. The so-called "misuse" of grammar is kind of idiotic given that language is invented and grammar changes naturally over time.
We aren't discussing how people speak words to each-other. We're discussing how they write formal essays and tests. There is a specific syntax for these things, to ensure comprehension.
Sure, pseudocode is good for getting ideas across to other human beings and developing a rough idea of program flow... But it isn't going to compile. And it doesn't matter how much you argue that programming languages evolve over the years and get new features added and whatnot, your pseudocode still isn't going to compile.
Try reading a really old king james version of the bible. It's still "english" and the 'grammar' may be correct but you don't speak like that and it's not necessarily 'english' you'd recognize as how you think or speak in your own voice.
Actually, we have words for these things. Which is part of the complaint about the decline of the English language... Instead of using perfectly good words that describe exactly what you're trying to say, you borrow some other word that you already know, or stuff a bunch of random words together, and hope it conveys the right idea.
The main reason the old King James Version bibles read oddly is because they were written in Early Modern English - a period when folks were still trying to agree on the correct spelling of words. It doesn't help matters that they intentionally avoided modern (at the time) idioms in favor of already-archaic (but more impressive) ones... Or that they were trying to find English equivalents for Latin.
Let's also face facts there are many problems with the english language in general that don't make much sense at all from the way you pronounce a vowel or word and the way it is spelled. Not to mention the strange special cases of silent consonants and the like.
All of which is carefully documented, just like the proper use of parenthesis and semicolons and whatnot is documented in a programming language.
People like efficiency, while some may think this is an expression of illiteracy others just see it as the most efficient way to express an idea.
The problem is, this isn't a matter of opinion.
In day-to-day discussion, it might be enough to say that pi = "three-ish"... But on a math test, or an engineering project, they're going to expect quite a bit more precision.
And if you're writing an essay for a college class... Or taking some kind of placement exam... Then it isn't a matter of opinion. There is a right way and a wrong way to put your words together. And if you do it wrong, you will be graded accordingly.
The problem isn't that people put words together differently when they're speaking to another human being... Or when they're writing en email to a friend... Or posting a comment on a blog... Or throwing together a text message... The problem is that people do not know how to put words together when they are taking a test or writing an essay.
It isn't a matter of choice - such as when an author deliberately emulates the speaking style of a character. It's a matter of ignorance.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
One professor says that students 'think commas are sort of like parmesan cheese that you sprinkle on your words.'
I guess on a professor's salary they can only afford the processed stuff.
In my house we freshly grate our commas directly over our words.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
Depends, did you consider that language can also devolve and that it is the traditional grammar which is logically more correct where modern society is just tring to fit more words within preset 'Twitter boundaries'?
set Tinfoil_hat := 1;
Are the people at Twitter or at the mobilephone companies trying to get a monopoly on language?
set Tinfoil_hat := 0;
If you can't pass a basic English test, you shouldn't be admitted to university. TFA says professors are reduced to teaching basic grammar, which undermines the value of a university education. Degrees are earned, not sprinkled out like parmesan cheese (or commas.)
Descriptivism coddles ignorance and laziness. It's leaning on the hands of the Idiocracy clock.
Informal speech and writing have their place... in chat rooms, in the living room and so on. But when you are at work or at school, you should put the laziness and excuses aside.
Not all change is evolution/good. The collective singular was a good change. Not knowing the difference between jealous and envious is not. That's just ignorance. Using the word decimate when you mean obliterate is ignorance. It's laziness to stay ignorant. It's laziness and cowardice to tolerate or worse yet justify it. "Poor Timmy can't tie his shoes, let's get him some velcro!" Learning to tie your shoes might be a challenge at first, but once you get the hang of it, it's easy.
We can has as the cuz we want here. But when you're at work or at school... run a fucking spell and grammar check.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
The pass rate seems quite respectable. I'm sure slashdot commenters and editors would have a much worse pass rate!
Did anyone every stop to consider that language is evolving and that it is the traditional grammar which is failing to keep up with modern society?
Did you ever stop to consider that language may be devolving? Change isn't good in and of itself.
If you are really interested in researching this, you can start here.
Did anyone every stop to consider that language is evolving and that it is the traditional grammar which is failing to keep up with modern society?
This is honestly one of the most intellectually lazy excuses ever. Or to put it in terms you geeks might understand: "My code failed to compile because the compiler isn't aware of my new syntax."
Has there been any increase in Quebecois students studying at Waterloo?
The "english iz evolving, get over it and STFU" crowd are missing an important point. These people are presumably going to college because they want to get a decent job, not to strike a blow against language fascism.
I work at a Big 10 university. When companies come to campus to interview graduating job-seekers, the kids still dress up in suits and ties. Why? Isn't fashion always evolving? Shouldn't they just wear what they always wear?
We all know why-- there are certain formalities that must be observed if one wants to be taken seriously by the bad old Establishment. Your use of language falls in the same category. How do you expect to get a serious job with a serious company if you can't string a grammatically correct, coherent sentence together?
So, if you always wanted to be a lumberjack, or a commune-squatting hippie, don't sweat your grammar. Don't bother applying to a university, either.
I was quite amused when I perused this article because my excellent reading skills allowed me to appreciate how stupid they are.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
low education standards or mass-retardation?
Thanks for clarifying that for me. Cuz, I would have thought you was just referring to Yo Momma's Nephew.
I'm amazed at the number of graduates of English speaking universities who can't even string a simple sentence together. In my day, they wouldn't have passed GCE 'O' level English. Come to think of it, most of them wouldn't have survived in the days when you couldn't use a calculator for maths. Even these days I can still work it out in my head faster than many youngsters can with a calculator. Education has sure been dumbed down over the years.
I'm going to assume that the repetition of "repetition" was intentional... :)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
You know what it was when I did it?
"Write 4 pages on the subject of: 57 Channels and Nothing On" in limited time, with no reference materials.
Apparently, this was a song I had never heard of. I drew a blank. I struggled to generate that much meaningless text.
It doesn't test English literacy so much as the ability to produce unlimited bullshit on command.
The testers are just idiots.
Maybe. Although more likely I suspect the failed students don't understand *any* type of grammar, traditional or otherwise. Inability to use proper English indicates the students are poorly read and have little experience writing English. University educations require reading modern literature which, last time I checked, was written in English rather than omgwtfbbq.
Name just 1 scholarly journal thats writaen n txt spk then maybe u got a point.
The point is not that we do not know what 'cuz' means, it is that they are writing academic paper and so should realise they need to write in a formal style, as if talking to a respected elderly person (who might not understand shortened language and emoticons), and that this is not the 'formally correct' word
It is not that they are writing as they speak and txt, it is that they do not seem to realise that you should change your writing style depending on your audience
Do they also speak to their friends, parents, teachers, and at job interviews, all in the same style.... if so it will affect their job prospects, as will a lack of appropriate writing skills...
Language evolves and so does formal/informal writing, and formal/informal speaking, but they have always been different, and this is what these students seem to be lacking, written language has to more formal than spoken language or meaning is lost (you don't have the facial, body language and other non-verbal clues)
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
There's a quote that's often attributed to him along those lines, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough" (and variants), but I can't find any good documentation that he actually said it, or where it might be from (it's only mentioned, as far as I can find, in poorly sourced quote collections, both online and in books).
There is a fictional scientist in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle who says something similar:
"Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn't explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan."
Orwell's classic Politics and the English Language echoes some similar sentiment.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Dudes, get it right. This is an edit #fail.
It's the University of Waterloo, not Waterloo University, just like it's University of Notre Dame, not the other way around. The top Google search comes up with the correct name. Although, given the topic, feel free to mod this #ironic.
Alex
Yep, a UW grad.
Pfft. English, who needs english, I'm never going to England. --- Homer J. Simpson
That means the system is working. Re-take the classes until you learn to communicate properly.
I have five kids, ranging from two college graduates to a kindergartner, and I am not at all surprised. At the risk of sounding like someone who sits on his front porch and reminisces about the good old days and walking uphill to school both ways, while waiting for kids to touch my property so I can yell at them, I firmly and insistently blame primary schools. Over the years, somehow, phonics has increased in teaching, encouraging kids to try and spell more complex words (which is fine), but does not in any way penalize them for misspelling or bad grammar. My 2nd grader routinely turns in papers with words that would be a challenge for a 6th grader, yet I don't see any red ink or corrections, telling them how to spell the word correctly. I can only attribute this three ways: 1) the teacher doesn't have the time to do it (WTF?!?!?) or 2) they don't want to actually make someone feel bad for messing up (WTF?!?!?) or 3) they just don't care. Probably a combination of all three. This is especially prevalent with my 8th grader, whose grammar is only corrected for English class, but anything else she turns in for any other class is remarkably devoid of red ink to correct spelling and grammar.
With a lack of consistent reinforcement of the basics in every class and in every setting, is it any wonder that the kids can't spell when they get to college? I recall getting points marked down in all my classes (including science classes) for misspellings, and I am stunned by the fact that somehow proper spelling and grammar is not considered something that anyone other than an English teacher should be concerned about when grading.
Recently, we allowed our teenager to get a Facebook account, with the proviso that we remain her friends and that we have access to the account. I reply to every post she makes abusively correcting her piss-poor grammar.
Any way you cut it, a consistent use of proper red ink would likely solve this issue quickly, even for high-school aged children who have learned bad habits.
Bill
So what this demonstrates is that universities are not adapting as fast as the English language is. It makes sense in the information age that our language would be evolving at unprecedented rates. We could be like the L'academie Francaise and dictate that because it wasn't invented in an ivory tower it's not the true language; but English has historically been a living language - that is it's greatest strength. (We all know what 'cuz' means; don't TAs and Professors?)
There are uses for more formal linguistics, in the same way Latin was used well past the end of the Roman empire, to sound regal or intellectual - but it's really all for show.
And a formal test in a college class is probably a good place to use a formal language, don't you think?
Do you want to lose points on a test because you used the language in an odd way that your professor didn't understand?
You claim that we all know what 'cuz' means... Honestly, the first thing that pops into my mind is 'cousin' - I have a number of family members from the south who refer to cousins as 'cuz'.
So... We could take a pile of words like "cuz he said so" and translate that as either "because he said so" or "cousin, he said so." And if you're going to use the language in vague ways like that, you're going to have to accept the possibility of misunderstandings. And points taken off of your exam.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
One of the teachers said this in the interview:
"I get their essays and I go 'You obviously don't know what a sentence fragment is. You think commas are sort of like parmesan cheese that you sprinkle on your words'," said Budra.
If this is what the educator at the University level is using as "English", is it any wonder that the students are failing?
(for anyone that missed it, we do not "go" some particular set of words, we "say" them.
The article states that 25 percent of students failed the English Language Proficiency Exam (ELPE) at Waterloo 5 years ago, and that now the number is 30 percent.
Here's my question: have those numbers been normalized to the increasing numbers of students in university?
Some schools (including UW) are letting more and more students in. It's an easy way to keep the budget balanced. It stands to reason that the "extra" students who are admitted to university aren't going to be at the top of the heap, but rather students who were only on the cusp of getting in.
I think the problem isn't with Twitter or the internet. Rather, the problem is universities are letting in students who wouldn't have gotten in otherwise.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
Someone might show up at IBM wearing blue jeans! Wait, that was 1995. http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P2-819481.html
It would do the younger generation well to learn the language and traditions of their elders so that they can blend in and become gainfully employed until their generation is old enough to make the rules; but you're guilty of a slippery slope line of thinking to associate using modern informal English in a paper with a lack of basic interpersonal skills.
Someone else in this thread made a point about the King James version of the Bible, and I have encountered a small amount of high medieval English in my studies as well. The former is awkward to read, the latter impossible without taking a course in it. Between 1500 and 1700AD there was such a massive transformation of the English language that I sincerely doubt many people could have fluently read and written what was popular among both the octogenarians and the youth.
As for the comments on grammar from other posts; grammar studies were invented to reflect the language not vice-versa. There are numerous models and none of the ones taught in elementary school have accurately reflected the language to a great degree. To say that we must conform to a model of a crude after the fact model of our language is like telling the universe that it must conform to Newtonian physics.
"But, as usual, most people refuse to see this, or much anything beyond the reach of their computer monitor, which far from being a window to the world at large has, in recent years, turned out to be a tool for reenforcing one's own ideology by being able to filter information down to almost exclusively that with which one is wont to agree. O, tempora... O, mores!"
But this has always been a problem, the truth is human beings have always preferred what appeals to them over truth, after all what is religion other then another triumph of ideology over truth?
We might call them useful lies or noble lies, or try to justify it but even leaders of past ages recognized human nature and the insanity and cosmic malfunctioning of a large percentage of the population. Consider it was at one point ok not so long ago to be openly racist. It's hard to imagine people being so cruel to one another but it was normal for many.
Let's try not to idealize the past, the devolution of language has more to do with demographic and the growing population of those who are not cognitively well endowed and poor environment then anything else I would imagine.
Written English is more or less formalized and uses a fairly standard grammar. It is actually much more loose and flexible than most other languages in the world. Exactly which part of the formal grammar is failing to keep up with "modern society"? And why would society being modern have anything to do with it? As it is now, I fail to see any "we're so advanced that we're transcending grammar!" argument as having any validity. English is an enormously huge language with incredible flexibility, even in its most rigid written form. However, statements must be clear, and for this we rely on basic grammar, punctuation, etc.
It just sounds like a bunch of ignorant children never learned their mother tongue. Would anyone want to buy a book or read a thesis that was written by someone who can't even write competently? How can any self-respecting English speaker not cringe at the sight of texting abbreviations or emoticons in formal writing?
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
These universities are in Canada. It is hardly a surprise that they have to teach their students how to write. The current government has spent the last year running negative election campaign ads (not that there is an election on, mind you) smearing the leader of the opposition party with the fact that he is an educated, erudite, well-educated former university professor. After all, we wouldn't want someone smart and learned to lead the country. Nope, what we want is someone like us. Illiterate lottery players who can't get up off the chesterfield between hockey games so we have to ask our wife/sister to pick up our smokes and beer on the way home from Wal-Mart.
Heck, I'm surprised we still have universities. Isn't it good enough to simply evaluate our learners under the rubric of the provincial exemplar and promote them with their peers?
It's not "one thing and another thing" - the less you obey grammar and spelling, the more incoherent your writing becomes.
Try reading some Irvine Welsh books. The thick Leith (Edinburgh) accent is almost incomprehensible, hard to read but strangely addictive.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
and I go like, wtf dude?
I like microcars
Jeez, and it's not even my own language!
At least half the comments here, as well as TFA confirm the general observation of falling literacy skills even among the university educated.
It's an interjection. And it's spelled "curiosity".
it's so sad and cliché to lament the "declining state of our youth".
i'm a college professor too, and while bad writing is a problem, i think this is pretty sensationalized. students know not to put "cuz" in a paper, but they do it anyway because they don't understand the difference between formal/good writing and lousy/bad writing. maybe it does have something to do with grammar instruction, but i think it's more related to the fact that there are fewer and fewer situations where these kids have to use formal language -- so it gets deemphasized. but i assure you, they DO know how to use it. I've seen them meet our university president and boy does it come right out :)
anyway, yes i agree it's a result of bad instruction, but it just seems like they're looking at a number and going "these kids are dumb" and jumping to the conclusion that it's because they don't teach grammar anymore... i'm much more apt to blame it on the formulaic writing style they get taught to pass things like the FCAT.
As an undergrad in the early 1970's, I had poor grammar skills. Sadly, mine were better than many of my peers at Cornell and Old Dominion. It wasn't until grad school 20 years later that I became proficient in grammar, preparing me to contribute to the Red Hat/Fedora Unleashed series with Bill Ball.
The problem is a broken system of education that doesn't care if students actually learn as long as they 'pass' a standardized test and permits incompetent teachers and administrators to remain employed.
The same grad school professor that helped me learn to write well is now a local school board chairman fighting to correct testing abuses ignored by the former superintendent. Thank you, Dr. Steven Tonnelson; your teaching has made my life richer. I know that you'll help many more students.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Nevermind that this creates a compilation error!
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I'm assuming by Waterloo University the author means the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. If this is the case, the reason for the poor performance is likely the large number of ELS (English as a second language) students. We have a large number of International students; however, I personally know of a few English-speaking Arts majors who also failed the ELPE (English language proficiency exam).
Last year, I was attending the local IUFM and during my observation course in middle and high school, I noticed that a lot of students struggled with grammar, both in French and English. My tutor told me that things had changed and that kids had stopped learning proper grammar in primary school. I spent the next holidays asking around, and most kids and teachers told me the same thing: a lot of kids just don't learn grammar.
Oh well, even the French Minister of National Education doesn't speak good French.
"The body may heal, but the mind is not always so resilient." -- Deus Ex: Human Revolution
No, it is just you.
if we don't need the same level of complexity, language will devolve naturally.
chimps and dolphins have gotten along OK without it....
My sophomore year of high school I walked into my English class and started writing. My mind took over and, before I realized it, my I's were uncapitalized, my words were abbreviated, and many words were misspelled for the purpose of shortening. That summer I had spent more time on instant messenger programs than I had in past years. Without realizing it, my mind was setup to use Internet speak. The rules of grammar were still there, somewhere. They were hard to access, though. It was a struggle to get myself to start writing coherently. Since then, I've switched my style and have been trying to maintain proper grammar throughout all of my text conversations.
This was 2003
This is going to naturally happen in any situation in which people develop a shorthand language. I doubt teaching grammar in schools will help because most students will forget the rules before college. I question if there really is a solution to this outside of individuals taking notice and attempting to fix their mistakes.
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
Catcher in the Rye reads very much like a train of thought / inner speech, and that makes it a very "easy" read.
"isn't as not as good". Yep. Sounds about right for an article criticizing spelling and grammar.
Saying your "phone ran out of batteries" is like saying your "car ran out of gas tanks".
IMHO, affixing some kind of rigid standard to spoken language is the lazy way -- computer code it not a good analogy. computer code has to be extremely semantically rigid so the machine can understand it.
on the other hand, i can generate an infinite number of novel sentences and you can understand them -- not to mention generate words that are not "in the dictionary" and you will understand them too. language is _constantly_ evolving and changing... anyone who says otherwise is the real product of bad english teaching.
Well, what do you expect when you tweet your 140 character essay to your professor? And don't even get me started on how many tweets a bibliography takes up - you have to cite Wikipedia like 4 or 5 times!
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
if we don't need the same level of complexity, language will devolve naturally.
chimps and dolphins have gotten along OK without it....
YOu tell him!
I walked up to this attractive woman, gave her an orange, she took it, and I started to have sex with her. The bitch called the cops! What a fucking tease!
The title claims students are failing because of twitter, but almost the entire article claims that it's because they're not teaching grammar in schools. Way to understand what you're writing, numbnuts.
Saying your "phone ran out of batteries" is like saying your "car ran out of gas tanks".
This is definitely not a new thing. The difficulties many of my classmates had in writing reports was one of the first things I noticed when I started at Waterloo in 2000.
The blame should almost certainly be placed at the high school level, as that's where heavy-duty grammar teaching should be taking place. Thankfully my high school English courses included this.
The high school system in Ontario has changed since I went through it, but when I started at Waterloo there was definitely a huge difference in the difficulty level of different high schools. I remember being amazed to hear some of my classmates comparing how many courses they had scored 100% in - apparently it was normal at their schools for there to be "bonus marks" on tests, such that their final grades were often rounded down to 100%. Waterloo weighted the grades internally when processing admissions so thankfully this wasn't a problem for the rest of us.
I find it funny that a professor in the article mentions the "a lot" vs. "alot" issue. One of the things we learned in high school English was that "a lot" is a piece of property, not a replacement for "much" or "many" (and "due to" means "owed to", not "because of").
I've found that in some cases a noticeable spelling mistake can actually attract attention to a given advertisement. However, it's a fairly fine line between something that might attract attention VS a mistake that makes your company look like a bunch of uneducated boobs.
Every day I drive past an glass shop that advertises "windsheild repair." I'm fairly sure the misspelling is not intentional, but it does grab my attention even as it drives me nuts.
---
If I, suddenly decided, that every, second word, should be, separated by, commas then, it would, make this, sentence much, tougher to, use and, understand right?
---
Perhaps you're just trying to sound like William Shatner?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I'm not trying to idealize the past, but we need to learn from it or the future is going to kick all of our asses and, as usual, its going to be the poor and uneducated who are going to take the brunt of the suffering.
Taking your point about racism -- when racism manifests itself in say, segregated, limited, or banned education for minorities -- say, blacks in the Americas, Jews in Eastern Europe, etc -- then the effect is that one group is institutionally denied access to the information, skills, and cultural knowledge necessary to successfully operate in the culture and the economy. The widening gulf then just serves to reinforce prevailing notions that one group is superior and the other inferior -- after all, if everyone where truly equal, then we shouldn't see discrepancies, should we?
You then see the creation of perennial underclasses, major linguistic splits, dialects and jargon eventually might even turn into completely different languages and then you cease to have a nation based on any common cultural thread, but instead just an out and out separation of populations and power.
Cockney English vs RP in the UK, for instance. Or Ebonics vs "standard English" in the US. Of course, the situation is even worse with immigrant populations from countries with vastly different backgrounds and languages. A lot of anti-immigrant types in the US are afraid that Spanish-speaking immigrants are going to destroy American culture or some such. Of course, many Spanish speaking immigrants, especially those with families, would like nothing better than to learn to speak English, or for their children to learn. Why? Because English is now, and will be for the foreseeable future, the language of power and influence. To get ahead, they need to learn it and they know it.
Meanwhile, we have our own children just flagrantly disregarding education. People with advanced degrees are generally viewed with suspicion on the right, and the degrees themselves are usually denigrated by technical people as "worthless" (for some reason). The people in power are selling the farm, replacing industry with a "knowledge economy," but the people who are going to need to get "real jobs" ('cause, you know, those hippie liberal intellectuals are all a bunch of commies...) don't even see the ground shifting out from underneath them.
Under the Spanish Republic, they pushed for public schooling because education is necessary to the future of a democracy, whether liberal, socialist, anarchist, or whatever else have you. You need to be able to read and write, communicate your ideas, at least perform enough mathematics to do the job you do, etc. Of course, the aristocrats, fascists and the army were against this. In the USA, the GOP is always pushing to undermine public schools, pushing for charter schools, private schools, home schools -- which are all well and good for people who can afford them, but most cannot. So, its just an attempt to limit education to the people who already have economic and political power so that they can maintain their stranglehold on it, under the thin veil of "reform." B.S.
But, again, it appears that large portions of the population are content to let their rights be eroded and their future dimmed, so maybe I should just stop caring, too. Sometimes I wish I hadn't spent the time and money to get an education, because then I could just remain ignorant of the whole situation.
The demographic of the underclass is now and has always been manufactured for the purpose of serving the people who have access to knowledge. If that class is growing, then it only means that the elites are more successful at it.
FTA:
"But "spelling is getting better because of Spellcheck," says Margaret Proctor, University of Toronto writing support co-ordinator.
. I'd like to see some hard evidence before I agree with this statement. In my experience, people tend to make spelling errors and go with the spell chedking results without actually investigating the error.
Yes, the "Cupertino effect" can make you look like an idiot, but on the other hand....
While it's true that language does evolve, the ones who use this argument to prop up their inability to express themselves are likely to think that English can 'evolve' into French in a single generation. Language evolves, but it doesn't happen nearly that quickly.
"Cos" as slang for "because" is hundreds of years old. If it were evolution, it would have evolved by now.
Don't blame cell phones or twitter about the problem, they are the symptom of the disease. Grammar needs to be taught at an early age and reinforced over the years with continuous practice until it becomes second nature. Too often they are giving just a basic introduction that is enough to cover the curriculum and no more than that. I noticed a drop in the work load for my two oldest and that is a lot more than what our youngest is learning at school. They now are assigned little to no homework to help reinforce what they learn in school. I try to do what I can to help her learn basic composition and grammar, but, even I don't know all of the rules and exceptions to the rules. Twitter and cell phones are tools and not the problem. These new technological tools have limits on what you can send so we all learn to do various short cuts to maximize what can be sent.
Teachers understand what is happening, but, all too often they cannot do much more as many parents complain that their precious children get too much work at school and homework is somehow damaging to their children.
Panic now, beat the rush!
If you can communicate, what is the difference? Yes I know the grammar nazi people claim it disrupts the flow and they get totally confused when a person writes its instead of it's but the other 99% of the population can breeze right by that minor error without even noticing. If I can meet you on the street and say "it's cold out" and you fully understand and compreend my statement, how do you get so confused and disrupted if I write "its cold out"?
Well, this is the throwing the cat game - the reality is that because of the inflated immigration from the South and East Asia which accounts in Toronto already for more than 50% of its inhabitants hearing and expecting good English is not realistic anymore. The traditional Canadian culture has sunk under a Bollywood mist - and, its going to get to the level where the standard spoken English will be in fact the South-Asian dialect/variant. Just as simple as that http://www.toronto.ca/immigration/message_imm.htm
...for wasting a perfect opportunity to say, "can't read good," in the opening paragraph.
to having a support structure so you cannot fail. Government leadership has created a system by which there is always money to keep you happy with your representative and any failures on your part are not truly yours but instead because others had an unfair advantage, cheated you, or just consume too much.
It doesn't requiring breeding dummies, it requires a culture of ignorance and sloth and then catering to that. If you make it easy to be lazy, dumb, or unhealthy, people will do so. If you remove the consequences doubly so.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
...whether you were being humorous or are just a complete moron. I'm going to go with moron. The question was testing your ability to understand the question (it's not about a song), criticaly think (you could even disagree with the question's premise) and to then express yourself coherently. You clearely fell at the first hurdle (you couldn't even understand the question) and the test served it's purpose in sorting the wheat from the chaff.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
But everyone else gets held up.
I think its originally from the Latin: per centum .
LOL
...is it all right for a professor to criticise (shut up) the standard of students' grammar and spelling, and use 'sort of like' in a sentence?
I don't use commas, like a stupid person.
1. Its a pretty good result. More than 30% of students at UWaterloo are not native English speakers.
2. I've seen entire graduate classes, where there was not one Euro/American surname on the list...
Canadian universities like to educate the elites of other countries. Canadian kids work at Ford and GM and MCD's.
This sort of thing really is a problem. I dated a girl whose mother believed she should say whatever popped into her head because she wanted to be honest. Any omission was a sin. The result was that she had alienated almost everyone who had ever loved her through meanness and insensitivity. (Little statements like, "Well, if all those children would just pray to God they wouldn't need children's hospitals.")
We're social animals. Context is important. It's necessary to have a standard to deal with people whose beliefs and attitudes differ from one's own in a civil manner.
Someone has to be the janitor. I think the difference between the past and present is that these people didn't go to college. Another possibility is that their illiteracy didn't jump off the page like it does now with acronyms, emoticons, and shorthand, it simply presented itself in another form like spelling and run-on sentences. When everyone believes that college is necessary to make a good living, even those not capable will give it a try (and eventually end up in marketing).
I'm sure someone is going to find that overly abrasive, but that's my opinion and I'm sticking to it.
I am horrified by the number of people who use its/it's, their/there etc interchangeably. I'm a lawyer, and such mispellings are common even in trainee solicitors these days. How on earth do you make it through 13 years of school, 3 years of undergraduate and 2 years of post-graduate education and still not know these basic rules?
It looks bad enough on a greengrocer's sign, but when these errors are in a letter from someone you're paying £109/hr it looks bloody awful IMO.
I'm not fanatical about it in general, but when words are your tool you should really have a grasp of the elementary rules governing them.
"When I went to high school in the '70s I was never taught grammar in English. I learned grammar from Latin classes."
... 'well, this person doesn't think very clearly, and they're not very good at analyzing complex subjects, and they're not very good at expressing themselves, or at worse, they can't spell, they can't punctuate,' " he says.
Budra was taught to read and write using whole language rather than phonetics - not a good way to go in his books.
I find this part interesting. In French canadian schools, we blamed the bad grammar back in the 80s for using phonetics instead of the more traditional methods. As I was told back then, they stopped using it in France because it didn't work while we here in Canada keeped using it for some 10 years and sacrificed an entire generation as far as grammar goes.
Needless to say, we're no better off today then we were back then as the failure rates of students just keeps rising in French Canada.
I feel that the problem is that we want to find a one size fits all approach and forget that no all kids absorb knowledge the same way or at the same speed.
A quick search in the local french news turns up a fact that did not get pointed out in that article. The new and current test in French universities points to a failure of over 50% for the teachers. How can you educate when you don't know what your teaching?
I suspect this failure would be pretty high in english schools as well.
It's rather interesting that no one's bothered to point any fingers towards teachers. I wish we could stop this blame the students mentality for all failures. Teachers have they're part in this too and they need to acknowledge it.
The Internet norm of ignoring punctuation and capitalization as well as using emoticons may be acceptable in an email to friends and family, but it can have a deadly effect on one's career if used at work.
"It would say to me
"These folks are going to short-change themselves, and right or wrong, they're looked down upon in traditional corporations," notes Postman.
The problem I see here is that as the language degrades, so will corporations' abilities to hire people with such skills and eventually it will end up in upper management.
Don't forget about the number of students who are not native English speakers. For most Canadian universities, this population forms a sizable chunk. For many freshmen students, this is their first time in an English-speaking country. They have some experience -- enough to fulfil the entry requirements, but not enough to perform well with the language in every context.
In 1980 I was T.A.-ing an introductory course. A senior journalism major's essay was so poorly written that I couldn't tell for sure what it said but I was generous and gave it a 'C'. When the student came to complain, the excuse was that I was "just taking off for grammar" and the notion that there was nothing in the essay which indicated that the student knew the material was simply unthinkable. I didn't budge but the student went to the professor (who was a notorious soft touch for women with short skirts) raised it to an 'A'.
"The demographic of the underclass is now and has always been manufactured for the purpose of serving the people who have access to knowledge. If that class is growing, then it only means that the elites are more successful at it."
No doubt about it, I agree with pretty much everything you say but lets also not forget that much of the lack of effort comes from being born "rich" (historically speaking), being ignorant, inexperienced, young and not exposed to the harshness to real crushing poverty or war gives one a warped view of what one's ancestors built and escaped from.
The problem is this corruption flows via the mass media and from the top down many times, the richer you are the more you can afford to just flagrantly indulge whatever animal impulses you have because you are free from burden of answering to others for your existence.
That and many schools simply cannot maintain quality control on their teachers, looking back on my own education in public school and highschool it was bloody miracle most of those people had jobs!
I think it is more a problem that with wealth comes the ability to afford to be picky and choosy about whom you associate with or not, this goes a long way to explaining the divorce rate and relaxation of mores as well.
I don't understand what the economic status of one's grandparents has to do with academic achievement.
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
Yes. But no. Language is extremely ambiguous, even when carefully written. Sloppy grammar leads to misunderstandings, and these are not acceptable in formal situations. To illustrate my point: I just finished marking master's AI exams last weekend, and literally got answers whose correctness depended on the interpretation of a comma. Simply because students couldn't bother to write in complete sentences.
Language is about communication: sloppy grammar leads to fast communication on forums (fora?) where, let's face it, speed and lack of effort are more important than content. Precise grammar leads to effective communication anywhere else.
I can't say that I'm overly surprised that proper use of English is suffering these days. It's pretty sad when even professional news outlets don't seem to bother to check their spelling or grammar. What does it mean to be "disbaled?"
It's sad to see mistakes that even a spell-checker should have been able to catch, coming from what should be a fairly professional news source.
I did an independent study class in high school in my junior year. I shared the classroom with an 8th-grade class (not concurrently) and there were a few dozen posters up from some sort of project.
I walked around the room and every single poster had a "their/there" or a "to/too/two" or "your/you're". Every. Single. One.
Now when I was in 8th grade, neither I nor anyone in my class made anything close to that number of mistakes (and I have the papers to prove it).
That grade is the current sophomores. The classes before them are more-or-less OK on the grammar front, but I shudder to think what will happen when these people start writing on more than posters...
I think it's because my class, and a few classes behind mine, grew up before everybody had high-speed internet. Using the internet was slow, and it was a treat. Those 8th-graders were only 6 in 2000. They grew up with DSL and cable... so instant messenger was a fact of life. I think that's the biggest factor.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
For the life of me, I cannot get tenses correct in a lengthy piece of writing. Even when the mistakes are pointed out, I don't recognize them.
But there are things in English that make it hard to learn as well. In languages like German, except for some imported words, pronunciation and spelling went hand in hand and are extremely consistent.
How would you pronounce this:
"Ghoti"
If the "gh" was pronounced like like it was in "tough", the "o" like it was in "women", and the "ti" as in "nation"? And that's just the tip of the iceberg on our arbitrary rules.
"cuz", "u", and other slang are just simplifications.
I'm just glad we have a latin alphabet and don't have to learn kanji and the like. Talk about a long-winded system.
If we take this as proof that our school system's broken and that any one able to get accepted into university or college, should be able to speak and write english, and you are telling me this is not the case, i look back at all those people that pushed for a more lenient
system for their kids because their kids were lazy, instead of pushing to motivate them to learn more.
Kids will learn what they are interested in. They will learn the mortal kombat fight finish combo for each character, they will learn how to farm gold on any MMO rpg game, they will even learn how to brake and enter, steal cars, mma fighting etc, etc...the list goes on.
These things are cool, and interesting to them. How to make learning fun and creative to the new mind.
Well it falls on the teachers that do not want to spark that fire in their students soul, it falls on the parents that are too lazy
or unaware of what their kids are into, and how to motivate them. I am not jewish and I definitely think they are not THE race, but jews (the tight community that most never get to see) although having a moral dilemma on how they get their message across, brainwashing or whatever you want to call it, have an effective means of pushing academy, and smarts to their young.
At a young age, they get into counting their piggy bank money over and over. They get into calculating how many allowances
it takes to get their "toy", however, they also know if they do not buy their toy, and invest into a shovel to shovel sidewalks, they get even more money....then instead of doing the hard labor, they help out their friends buy shovels, and all the friends earn money, with some money going back to the one that lent it in the first place.
Yes jews have short comings in social aspects when dealing with others not of their kin, but take their efforts at instilling good values in their young at an early age, and you have to respect that no matter what. That is not to say all jews are made equal, I know some jewish parents that have fallen into the rut of not being present in their child's life and ending up with a very troubled kid...
but all that aside, the ratio is high. Much higher then the norm for the average amercian (non jew) that is screaming , "why?"
ps - again, i am not jewish, and not rasict but i do tend to see the patterns...this is one of them.
Note that people used commas far more freely in the 19th century than now and that comma usage of today differs slightly between American and British English.
A lack of consistent comma rules is, of course bad, but it is wrong to assume that what those rules actually are won't change.
The cake is a pie
When I was in the Pittsburgh a few of years ago, I noticed something quite amusing. If you went to the local supermarket, which catered to the majority, they used 'American' on the labels of all sorts of things meaning 'good'. Many of these were produced outside of America, but they were, in some undefinable way, American. If you walked ten minutes to a deli that catered mainly to the upper middle classes, you saw the word 'imported' used in exactly the same way. It didn't seem to matter where they were imported from. Parmesan from Canada or Mexico was just as good as parmesan from Italy, the thing that mattered was that it wasn't from the USA.
Hating America seems to be, to use Tom Lehrer's phrase, a particularly fashionable form of idiocy among the self-styled intellectuals. Gilbert and Sullivan's Lord High Executioner was right to put 'the idiot to praises, with enthusiastic tones, all centuries but this and every country but his own' on his little list. The attitude 'everything my country does is wrong' is just as dangerous as 'my country, right or wrong.' Critical introspection is healthy, self-flaggelation is not.
Note: As a Brit, I reserve the right to bash America. It's one of our national pass times, although we generally only indulge in it when we are bored of bashing the French.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I used to tutor as an undergrad. Mostly math, but occasionally I'd proofread English papers. A very large number of them were written the same way that the student would write a text message or e-mail to a friend. What's worse is that very few of them understood why they had gotten such bad grades. These people had somehow made it to college without realizing that English has rules that are followed in formal writing. You should not have graduated high school if you can't write a decently formal paper, barring disabilities and such.
I do realize that language is arbitrary so long as ideas can be communicated. However, as social animals I would argue that there is a need for formal language. We need a way to communicate with others in a way that is regarded as polite and civil. We need a way to express differing opinions without being insulting or starting arguments, and everyone should know how to communicate in this way.
Except that if you allow the language to evolve, eventually you will have new languages everywhere. Forcing people to write and speak in a certain way limits the creation of new variants based on the English language. A bit like how Latin became Romanian, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and a lot of other smaller languages like Sicilian.
Perfect example. I gave up on Huckleberry Finn at page 50. The second time, when I had to read it because it was assigned in school, I retained approximately nothing.
Well, it does say something about our society that one of the greatest books that was specifically written to be accessible to the masses, while satirizing broad socio-political themes, is falling into the category of "incomprehensible". I suspect Gulliver's Travels is next...
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
I'm a CS undergrad at Waterloo and I think a lot of people are looking at this the wrong way. Waterloo is mainly known for its Math and Engineering faculties, and they attract a lot of foreign students. Many of these students are scarily complicated in their chosen fields, but for whatever reason have no interest or aptitude for English. My friends here are almost exclusively some flavour of East-Asian, and I've read their writing. You don't need to be anything like a grammar nazi to pass this test.
This has nothing to do with the school not keeping up with the language as far as I can tell. A lot of the people failing this test have trouble conjugating simple verbs. It may have something to do with schools not teaching spelling and grammar, but I don't think that's the main cause. I imagine that if you look at the language being spoken at the homes of those that failed the test, you'd find that for most it wasn't English. My best friend's parents speak almost no English, for example.
I don't know the stats for Waterloo specifically, but I know that just under half the population of Toronto (major city about an hour and a half away) was born outside this country. Canada is still a very young country in this respect.
The majority of people failing the ELPE are not dumb by any stretch of the imagination, Waterloo is a fairly prestigious university and you're not going to get in without pretty decent marks (at least for the more technical faculties). As far as I can tell it's just that they don't speak, read or write much English. They spend a lot of time working on the field they're interested in, to the exclusion of just about everything else.
Short version: People who don't speak much English fail test designed to catch people who can't write English very well. Film at 11.
I can't say I'm surprised. You see this on Second Life on a daily basis. The quality of education in the US in general is pretty pathetic.
Furries make the internet go.
How about "due to". I guess people write like they speak.
That article has 43 paragraphs. Almost every sentence is in its own paragraph. What happened to putting related sentences together? Examples:
Also, I already see a grammatical error:
"one in 10 new students are not qualified" ("one" is singular)
mmmm ... cheese
As an anthropologist, I'd assume that you are familiar with the concept of a dialect or patois. They originate within tribal structures and serve as a mechanism for identifying outsiders. Using dialect constructs in formal writing is not acceptable because it makes it harder for people to understand if they are not part of your tribe. This includes foreign language speakers, older people, and so on. Or, to give it a programming language analogy, don't use GCC or MSVC extensions if you want to write portable code.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
No word is a part of speech unless it is used in context.
(But in the typical Canadian context, such as "Great hockey game, eh?" or "Watch out for that moose, eh?", it is an interjection.)
No OS on the planet can protect itself from a user with the admin password. - Yvan256
FTA:
"If a student has problems with articles, prepositions, verb tenses, that's a problem."
Uh, that was every rap/hiphop/R&B guy on the Grammy Awards last night.
Also, instead of giving the papers back to the students to rewrite, how about simply not admitting them to the college?
Item One: I teach four classes a semester in English literature and composition at a major state university. I bring home 2,000/month. Anyone choosing such a career is an idiot. I'll confess: I'm an idiot. I have a doctorate degree, a nearly-complete book manuscript, published poems, published interviews with major poets, and a chapter in a forthcoming book of literary criticism. I can't get a better job. There are simply too many people with doctorates in English. We're all idiots. Item II: My dad was a HS teacher, and anyone who will take the sort of crap he did from parents for years and years is also an idiot. He worked very hard, grading, taking night classes for further certification. We were never able to live in a better neighborhood. People were shot in our back yard. Dad got death threats for failing a football player. Item C: my wife is getting an MS in instructional technology. A couple of women in one of her courses bragged about never having found it necessary to set foot in the university library. Item IV: during my first semester here at Big Football U., I had an honors student whose grammar was so bad that I could understand about one sentence in every three. Mind you, I also have training in English as a Second Language and how to recognize the signs of disability in writing, and this young woman was an intelligent native speaker, yet her writing was still like drunken Dada raving to me. I asked her what her about her family. Her dad is an English professor at Second Rate U. over in our state capitol. Awesome. Oh, P.S.: I was a National Merit Scholar and went to university on a full-ride academic scholarship and graduated cum laude. I have wasted my talent and potential trying to teach others. I am an idiot.
We all know what 'cuz' means
Yo, dog, it all be good. Yo cuz be yo homie.
Using the ghetto slang "cuz" is simply laziness. "Because" is literate, "cuz" is not. Prison/ghetto literacy is about as intelligent as the stupid "pants down showing your underwear" prison/ghetto fashion. If you use a term that was coined by people who are proud of their illiteracy, you will be seeen as illiterate.
Free Martian Whores!
Additionally, consider that languages and dialects differ in their expressiveness, and IRC-speak (or whatever they're calling it these days) is not among the most expressive. You have to leave that idiom to express ideas like this post's or its parent's; so someone who can't leave the idiom can't vocalize certain kinds of thoughts short of the Greenspun's Tenth Rule case.
Anyone who's tried to do philosophy in formal Modern English appreciates how terrible of a language it is for the purpose compared with Greek or German; and IRC-speak is a language that makes Modern English look expressive...
She spend three days...
Enough said?
I find that odd, because the institution I went to, and the places that my various kids went to, all had English competency exams for entry. I thought it was the norm, not the exception.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Some people shouldn't be in university. Based on this article, I'd put the number somewhere around 25%. That's not to say they're bad people; just that society is unlikely to benefit from their having spent four years in college. Unfortunately, the system is set up so that they personally benefit form those four years in college (even if they learn nothing) so long as it results in a diploma.
...
And if you're writing an essay for a college class... Or taking some kind of placement exam... Then it isn't a matter of opinion. There is a right way and a wrong way to put your words together. And if you do it wrong, you will be graded accordingly.
Mod parent up beyond 5.
One of the main points of many courses is to teach the students how to construct a good way to put words together.
So yes, it makes perfect sense to fail those who don't.
...My pet peeve: "Paid" vs. "payed".
This would only be true if the modernization of the language had some perceived benefit at the academic level.
I do not complain about poor grammar on the internet-- although I used to.
The point of tall our writing is to communicate. Depending on what you wish to communicate, the modern evolutions of language are very useful. For example, take the question below:
"Would you please join me in watching a movie at eight o'clock 'post meridiem'?"
The question is highly personal, affecting only a few people. Removing information from this sentence will likely have little effect on it's meaning because so much of it may be infered from knowledge of the speaker / writer or the context.
If we were instead to write the phrase below:
"Movie @ 8?"
All the information that is lost can be assumed. We can assume that our audience is familiar with the "@". Similarly, it may be past eight o'clock in the morning. Even if it is not, few movies play at that hour. The word movie may even be replaced by a common slang that both parties understand.
The rules for writing out numbers need not apply because there is not greater structure to worry about. The reader is unlikely to be fatigued by numbers, you need not worry about balancing white space, or breaking the flow of the reader by introducing said number.
In short, this sentence is concise. It breaks formality, but it is not a formal sentence so this little matters.
Now take a sentence from popular philosophy:
"A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view."
There are other ways to say this to be sure, but few will retain the elegance of the above statement. Moreover, this sentence appears within a much greater textual context. It is specific and written for a particular purpose and emphasis.
Other examples could be found in scientific journals. Simply jotting down the general idea behind a theory or experiment would result in much confusion. The sentences must be crafted carefully to present the argument in a clear manner, unambiguous in meaning and scope.
The failing of modern students and education is the fact that these two forms of communication are not considered separate.
Even this post is less formal than that of a academic text. I won't spell check, check for comma misuse, use of rhythm, pacing, dramatic emphasis, parallelism, flow or continuity. It simply is too much work for a /. post.
Writing to persuade or to inform is not the same as asking a friend out for beer or posting on the internet. "Texting" is more akin to speaking than to writing, and it has long been custom to speak much differently than we write.
The disaster that is befalling us is not that modern language; the disaster is modern language is ubiquitous. Complex topics will not be able to be discussed in honest language if the trend continues. Complex ideas will fail to be communicated as our language loses it's accuracy in written form. This is the danger.
I do not care if my coworkers ask me out for a beer with a jumble of numbers and letters. I will care when arguments over morals, ethics and economics are dominated by a language which cannot accurately describe the ideals which pin them to this earth.
They're all on Slashdot, apparently.
The English language must continue to evolve, or fork or the language will be supplanted by another.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
The young people think you're being anal because the linguistic norms are changing. They don't even see the spelling and grammar errors because they're a part of the language they know. It's only us older folk who learned our language in a time when publishing was much more restricted that get hung up on these changes. Still, it's a good thing they had you to proofread what they wrote since many of your customers would be likewise appalled at their spelling and grammar.
How could young people today be less literate than the young people of decades past? They consume vastly more written information and write frequently. When I was young, voluntary writing was a rarity. During school breaks I might write nothing for days or weeks except short lists and game codes. Kids now are texting, emailing, blogging, and commenting constantly. They have far more chance to absorb, practice, and communicate with written language.
So is it really a tragedy if "because" morphs into "cuz"? Or apostrophes become redundant when meaning is clear without them? Language has been changing as long as language has existed. There are plenty of words in Middle English that I can't make any sense of, and even writing as recent as the early 1900's is jarring and awkward to my eyes. It's like reading Fortran - I can do it with effort, but I wouldn't write it unless forced to for a particular task.
English is becoming simpler in spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure. If people gradually agree on these changes then communication can continue or expand unimpeded.
Shakespeare anyone?
The man is held as one of the greatest writer ever (in any language) CUZ he abused the English language in ways that people never imagined it could be abused. Most of our great writers do that. Strangely, so do most small children.
I wonder if there if there could be a connection?
Note to mindless trolls and the grammar Nazis: That question was rhetorical.
Living in Chile
I would agree that language has changed in informal applications. However, it's hard enough to communicate through written form. Having a traditional reference for grammar helps to reduce the complexity because it encourages uniformity. Think of Bluetooth versus Zigbee. Unlike Bluetooth, Zigbee allows different proprietary implementations which have an end result of one Zigbee device possibly not being able to communicate with another. This makes Zigbee unthinkable for use in broad applications. It's the same issue here. Learning to write effectively takes time, patience, and practice. I'm not the best at written language but at least I make an effort. It's like these people don't give a damn. I don't have the time of day for their crap; exceptionally poor writing speaks volumes about your intelligence whether you think it should or not. The trash that these people produce should be exclusively limited to text messages, twitter, or other informal means of communication.
There's little doubt the English language has evolved and, some argue, is always evolving.
However, grammar and syntax rules for a human language are essentially no different than rules for a computer language. The rules are set to establish use and understanding.
If I, suddenly decided, that every, second word, should be, separated by, commas then, it would, make this, sentence much, tougher to, use and, understand right?
Do you, have a, newsletter?, I would, like to, subscribe.,
When people don't understand how to use contractions and instead write it the way it sounds (thanks, Hooked on Phonics!), what do you expect? How many people write "could of" instead of "could've," the contraction for "could have"? (You can substitute "should" and "would" in there as well.) How many people don't understand the proper use of "their," "there," and "they're"? How many people don't understand the difference between "its" and "it's," or "lose" and "loose"?
It's like people have said before my post. Blame the parents who's precious little snowflakes just absolutely can't be doing anything wrong. It must be the fault of the teachers for attempting to uphold standards.
OCO is Loco
As a student, I have to say that the continuing evolution of language, due in part to medium like email and text messaging, has been met with resistance by academia and grammar-purists alike. The English language alone has undergone significant transformations in the past few decades. Think of those web-inspired verbs that have sprung up, such as "googling" or "photoshopped". (Ironically, both terms are marked by Word as spelling errors.)
At the same time, the fact that there are students, even professionals, who can't use proper English when needed is a sad, sad state of affairs. Read more, you losers!
PS. Subject misspelling intended for humorous effect.
It drives me up a wall that 's', 'd', and to a lesser extent 't' are very close to each other on a QWERTY keyboard. Other typos, the spell checker will catch. But often switching one of these letters for another one transforms one valid word into another. And because the transformed words (spend, spent, spends) all look alike in visual weight, it takes careful proofreading the detect the error.
It's maddening.
Wasting minutes of other people's time to save you a fraction of a second is incredibly impolite.
Wasting mod points for this but... You're my hero. I wish everyone else looked at things this way. It would be especially nice if they taught people this in drivers ed.
Sometimes it's "it has".
The solution to that problem is adequately described by the sibling poster. Proper grammar and spelling can easily be used in all of the text-based forums you frequent, be they Slashdot, Twitter, text messages, or IM's.
Shortening "you" to "u," not capitalizing "i," leaving out periods, and so on are techniques I've frequently attributed to being a style that slow typists use to save time. However--unless, of course, you type with single-digit WPM--the amount of time saved by omitting what's usually no more than 5 keystrokes in a single sentence is so small that it doesn't even begin to eclipse the abnormally short attention spans of us internet generation folks.
That said, TL;DR: "Internet Slang" rarely saves time at the keyboard unless you're a really poor typist.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
If the point was humerous then why do you need to point it out? Good comedy does not need a laugh track and a smart comment does not need a smiley.
And there is also another point, to succeed in society you need to know when to play by the rules and when not. You do for instance NOT fistbump the judge, no matter how cool or accepted it has become.
There is a room for smiley's and that is place is the web. It does NOT belong in a term paper, unless of course it is about smiley's.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If your dumb enough to use Cuz instead of because or use lol instead of laughing then you aren't ready for University or at least not mature enough to know better.
I helped my uncle Jack of a horse.
Strider- helped his uncle jack of a horse.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
if you just realized that this story is about you.
The name of the academic institution is the University of Waterloo, not "Waterloo University".
Modding "-1, Troll" is not a proper response if you disagree with me. Try reason.
Did anyone every stop to consider that language is evolving and that it is the traditional grammar which is failing to keep up with modern society?
Maybe it's the school that's failing? NO!
Did anyone ever stop to consider that language is evolving and that it is the traditional grammar which is failing to keep up with modern society? No need to; throwing out precision and replacing it with ambiguity is not evolution. If you don't know how to use an apostrophe, and when and when not to, and don't know the difference between "ever" and "every", you are not literate. Period.
Rather than bringing illiteracy from the ghetto to acedemia, you should be bring literacy to the ghetto instead. People who read a lot of books seldom make the ignorant mistakes you made in your comment, and make no mistake about it, it is ignorance, and only ignorance, pure and simple.
Free Martian Whores!
These folks are working on solving the grammar and writing problem among students:
http://www.learninc.net/
Boomers took a look at the structure of their culture, found it lacking, and abandoned all of it. They did not like Dick and Jane, and so instead of improving upon it, they threw it out, and Chaucer along with it. It remains probably the 2nd worst case of "throwing the baby out with the bath water" in civilized history, the first being the French Revolution.
Anything not meeting an immediate earthy need was discarded. It began with "what the hell do I need with Brahms? Brahms isn't going to get me laid." Before long it became "what the hell do I need with religion? Religion doesn't dazzle me like LSD does." Finally it settled into "what the hell do I need with regulation and social betterment? There's money to be made."
How can there be any wonder that our parents' and bosses' generation is so insufferably self-centered? I find it pertinent that we talk about this within a week of J.D. Salinger's death, as his Holden Caulfield can be very illustrative in teaching us about the kind of dysfunctional, disenfranchised individual who currently runs our world. As far as the Boomers are concerned, they have defined the culture through their rebellion, and discouraged us from absorbing the kinds of things that gave context to our surroundings. We had to find them on our own. The newest generation entering college now is so detached from context that they seem to be aliens in their own world. They are idiots of course, but I don't hold them to account for it. Their entire world has been scrubbed of context.
I'm in Generation X, and I don't pretend that we did everything right either. We made mistakes, like fetishizing exclusivity, and needlessly feeding the rage of others. Yet at the end of our troubled youth, we sat down, and we wrote about it, as a way of hoping to establish some kind of context. I am slightly comforted in knowing that the next generation, if they hope to understand us any better, will at least be able to read something by Dave Eggers or the like. What worries me is that the coming generation will not read any of it, because they are not interested, and will not leave anything of their own for posterity either.
---don't make me break out my red pen.
I "just" passed the ELPE with 50%; ever since I've never gotten less than 80% on a course based mostly (or in some cases exclusively) on essay writing. I think the marking scheme for the ELPE makes no sense.
Good point. My question: how did we get all the English grammar rules we have now, considering that English itself evolved haphazardly? I suspect that it was like this: some people wrote things that were clear and easy to understand, and others imitated them. Still others observed and codified their practices into rules, then taught them to students.
If that's the case, every generation can do the same. Language is a means to an end. Writing that is confusing and unclear will tend to be less influential, and something like natural selection will do the rest.
> pot-fueled Wiccan orgy.
Tell me more.
Why are these idiots being let in? Because they get government grants and crazy amounts of personal debt that they'll gladly hand you? Not good enough. I wish I went to a college that wasn't full of idiots. I would have learned a lot more, as the classes weren't all geared to make sure that idiots can still scrape by and continue to fund the college.
And after switching from a state university to a private college, it got a lot better. Sure, but not good enough.
There has never been a time when college professors did not complain about the poor language skills of their students. So it was, so it will ever be. The handwringing fails to take many things into account.
1) A lot of language learning occurs after people leave school, as they continue to absorb written documents for purposes directly related to their careers and their lives. If you are over sixty and you have anything you wrote in college, compare it to something you've written now. You'll be surprised. When my wife was in her twenties, I was disturbed by her inability to punctuate correctly, but I never said a word about it. Over the past forty years, she simply picked it up... from context.
2) The purpose of reading and writing is to communicate. Oh, sure, it is also there to signal social status, to insure cultural continuity by making it possible for year-2010 readers to read and understand year-1776 documents, and so forth, but, primarily, it is to communicate. In all likelihood these kids are fine at communicating between themselves using written language. Their problem is in communicating with professors. They will learn. There is no single way to communicate, as they taught us in Toastmasters, the first rule is "know your audience."
When communicating with professors... or with hiring managers via cover letters... one writes in complete sentences, with a topic sentence for every paragraph.
COMMUNICATING WITH BOSSES
*Brief
*Bullet points
*Three per topic
In emails and online postings, emoticons :)
In ham radio and CB and tweets, various systems of abbreviation. And so it goes.
3) What's considered important in education changes, at a surprising rate. I was stunned to look at a 1900s high-school arithmetic book and discover that at that time students were expected to extract cube roots with pencil and paper. (You begin by grouping the digits in threes... the rest is a bit more complicated). We are always shocked that our kids don't know how to diagram a sentence. Then we go in to do a bit of substitute teaching and discover that the geometry students use axioms that we didn't use and call inorganic compounds by new names. Still, a physics student not being able to do a simple calculation in slugs and poundals? What's WRONG with kids these days?
4) And of course language changes. You read an old novel and wonder why they use a spelling like "Veg'table" or "Pleez" in a piece of dialog, because that's the way they're pronounced... isn't it? Yes, but a hundred years ago they were nonstandard colloquial pronunciations; "please" was properly pronounced as two syllables, "vegetable" as four.
One thing never changes, though. Nobody will let you split an infinitive. They always say "there's nothing wrong with it, but other people object to it, so don't do it."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
f you're too dumb to know the difference between your and you're, then you aren't ready for university. There is no excuse for anyone over the age of 8 not knowing better.
That says more of you than of Twain...
This is the kind of thing that gives the formal study of English grammar a bad name. I don't know (or particularly care) what Strunk and White say on the subject, but I had no problem understanding that the modifier attached to the most recent noun; indeed, I can't imagine why anyone would ever have thought otherwise. From what I remember of Latin (two years in high school, one in college, plus amateur familiarity with medieval and early-modern Latin materials), modifying clauses of this sort generally attach to the nearest noun there, too. I think it's sometimes different in the stylized Latin of the late Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, but surely no one imagines that a somewhat creolized Germanic language obeys the grammatical rules of a highly stylized version of an Italic language with recognizable non-Indo-European influences?
(Yes, I sometimes like to pretend that the 18th Century never happened.)
Some would argue that the proper language of any country is the language spoken by the people there. And the correct form of writing is the form that people choose, whether that is by means of exotic spelling, ideographs or petroglyhs.
Now, for a refreshingly different form of English (-ish), see:
http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/tokpisin/
"Tony Stark Takes Reigns"
Even multi-million dollar productions have errors these days...
There's no such school as "Waterloo University." It's the University of Waterloo.
Paul 1,
Susanna Kelley 0
Didn't have to take a writing examination prior to getting my Ph.D. (different school), although I did have to write a 200-page dissertation. I think schools generally expect students to be able to write by the time they get there. Still, I've seen lots of students in graduate school with pretty poor grammar skills; although this problem is more due to the fact that there are so many students in graduate school where English is not their first language.
Nothing new under the grammar sun - I already knew I know your language better than you :p If only my own was that simple...
The parent post wins the award of "most painful to read in a thread on grammar issues".
"In French canadian schools... we here in Canada keeped using... just keeps rising in French Canada... no all kids absorb knowledge the same way... the local french news... How can you educate when you don't know what your teaching?... pretty high in english schools as well... I wish we could stop this blame the students mentality for all failures... Teachers have they're part in this too... The problem I see here is that as the language degrades, so will corporations' abilities to hire people with such skills and eventually it will end up in upper management."
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I know I have poor grammar. Unlike programming grammar can't be self taught. You need to write something, get quick feedback on what you did wrong, why it's wrong, and how to correct it.
Not to be a nitpick here, but did you realize that you started with "Item One" (number written out), then jumped to "Item II" (roman numerals), went to "Item C", and then back to "Item IV" (roman numerals again)? Perhaps we could all use a little bit of proofreading,. . .
Here is a simple exercise. Answer the following prompt? Can you do it? I'll post the answer in a reply.
Punctuate the following letter. You cannot remove words or letters, not can you add words or letters. The order of the words must remain the same. You can only add punctuation and capitalization when required due to punctuation. Go ahead and copy/paste this into notepad/emacs/vi. Good Luck.
================
Dear John
I want a man who knows what love is all about you are generous kind
thoughtful people who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior
you have ruined me for other men I yearn for you I have no feelings
whatsoever when we’re apart I can be forever happy will you let me be
yours
Gloria
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
For an article that is supposed to be about writing skills, it was fairly painful to read. Disconnected sentences, two line paragraphs and citations sprinkled around like Parmesan cheese.
Yeah. Then we realized how idiotic is the concept of a language that's understood only by a single individual, and promptly discarded it.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Spell Checker Poem
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Eye halve a spelling chequer It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh My chequer tolled me sew.
-Sauce unknown
The answer is really two fold with a lesson.
Answer one:
Dear John,
I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind,
thoughtful. People who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior.
You have ruined me for other men! I yearn for you. I have no feelings
whatsoever when we’re apart. I can be forever happy. Will you let me be
yours?
Gloria
Answer two:
Dear John:
I want a man who knows what love is. All about you are generous, kind,
thoughtful people who are not like you. Admit to being useless and inferior!
You have ruined me. For other men, I yearn. For you, I have no feelings
whatsoever. When we’re apart, I can be forever happy. Will you let me be?
Yours,
Gloria
Lesson: You think Punctuation is unimportant? You are wrong. Punctuation carried the Entire meaning of what we write. We do not have voice inflection, hand gestures or eye contact as we do when we communicate vocally. In the first letter, John is going to get laid. In the second letter, John is going to get a restraining order against him. Wouldn't it be nice for John to know what he is getting into?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
I kind of agree and disagree. Someone else said "Mark Twain", but all of the colloquial speech is in quotes. I pretty much write like I talk. Not exactly, but pretty close.
Free Martian Whores!
...You sound like a helicopter parent.
Many young people idolize themselves and have no respect whatsoever for people older than them. In fact, many young people have no interest in anything outside themselves and their personal hobbies.
Personally, I blame the modern materialistic culture for this, that puts all the emphasis at the 'me' instead of the 'us'.
Complaints like this always bring legions of pompous schoolmarms out the woodwork with conflicting sets of rules and a copious amount of handwringing and finger-pointing.
The school-kid grammatical rules that everyone is complaining about here are a poor representation of the underlying mechanism we have in our brains that allows us to communicate. Those rules and intelligence do not form an equivalence class.
The ability to learn a couple of hundred of rules does not make a fluent speaker of a language, much less an intelligent speaker of a language. Every native speaker of English understands the meaning of every one of the mistakes people are citing here, and adult learners of English continue to struggle with comprehension of both standard and idiomatic English as they hang on to the leaky life raft of the rules they were taught in a school room.
Try an exercise. Read a few pages of Shakespeare without the footnotes, and report back on what it says. Then pick out of few pages of the King James Bible and diagram a few sentences. Tell us what you have learned about sentence structure.
If that seems too academic, try diagramming all the sentences in the 600 comments here.
The purpose of written language is to communicate ideas. It has never been and will never be a concrete set of rules to be followed without exception. It adapts to the people using the language. If the majority of a society decides "cuz" is a perfectly acceptable substitution for "because," and the rest of the society can understand it in use, what is the problem?
Hell, strict spelling in the English language only began because regional writings were often difficult to decipher, and it was worth the effort to standardize. English is ripe with illogical exceptions to grammar rules only in place because people that should know better insist that they must remain.
Ok, then who speaks for the teachers?
I can't help but notice that when the issues of pay and perks come up, the unions have no trouble speaking for teachers. Why do they not speak about performance as well? Are they not inextricably linked?
In reading the article and some of the comments posted here, I can't help but think back to my social linguistics class where we talked about issues similar to these. The major question that kept cropping up in the class was the question of "Who owns the language?" This was placed in the context of second language learners vs native speakers, but I definitely see parallels here. In the context of the class, the problem was that the number of ESL learners was fast increasing, with many seeing the number fast approaching the number of native speakers. The problem is that there are certain aspects in the English language which don't make much sense and where the exception is the rule. As a result in many ESL communities they use "improper" English which most native speakers looked down upon. If the exception is usually the rule, then why not simply change the way the language is used usually and make the "improper" English the correct teaching? This is a hot button topic in many primary schools around the world where English is usually a child's second language. In some cases many English teachers have switched to accepting the prior-"Improper" form as the the new accepted way of saying something.
Returning to the point, if shorthand is becoming so prevalent in the upcoming youth, whats not to say that shouldn't be the way the language should be used? The core reason most people fight "improper" popular uses of a language is simply because a change in the language would force the native speakers to re-learn the language. Basically what I'm seeing in the article and the comments is people fighting a possible change in their language.
We're talking about people who passed through basic education system here, and at least half of them also through higher studies.
The same is true for Dutch. Several leading universities (Leiden, Utrecht) have been forced to introduce a "dutch language test" for freshmen (sp?). Every student that passes the test gets an automatic pass for the Dutch course, for the other it is mandatory. Sadly, about 80% fail the test -- we're talking university education here, so the top 1% of the population!
There was a similar discovery a few years back: freshly-graduated teachers lacked in basic calculus skills such as being unable to calculate 4*5 by head. And those people were then entrusted with the task to educate the next generation :'(
Speaking for yourself, of course.
When I see "cuz" in a text, I assume the sender is too stupid to use predictive text.
Those sentiments (and that is what they are) can only be explained by their not having any idea what a scientists does and deals with.
It's not hard:
Some say that "Idiocracy" was a documentary sent back from the future, and that "The Man" needs a dumbed-down populace to keep the likes of Walmart and the current political system in business. All we know is that popular culture emphasizes dumbness over intelligence -- welcome to 2010.
... I didn't have or use these things (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) and still do bad with English and needs proofreaders (e.g., copy editors, tutors). :( I do tend to be a spelling and grammar nazi for some really basic errors (e.g., its vs. it's, they're vs. their).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
It was Isaac Asimov's opinion that the nonsensical nature of the English language is a major contributor to poor grammar and illiteracy in the United States. There are no spelling standards in our language, different letters can represent different sounds depending on the context, and grammar rules are unnecessarily complex. Asimov, President of Mensa and author of hundreds of books, thought that we should revamp the written word to spell things phonetically and do away with much of the silly grammar rules that only please those individuals so pedantic as to master them.
And whose standards are we talking about here? MLA style? Chicago? There are half a dozen different ways to place the commas in a list of items depending on the standard to which you are writing. That's why I find it hilarious when people make fun of others for poor grammar. Anyone who speaks and writes in a language as ridiculous and nonsensical as English has no right to criticize people who speak Ebonics, misplace i's and e's, or write words phonetically on MySpace.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
The rules can be archaic at times, but no less useful and necessary.
In science there are physical laws; you can't go faster than light, you can't get more energy out than you put in, etc. Writing is an art form, and in art there are no laws, only rules. In art, you can break the rules, but the rub is you have to know the rules and have a valid artistic reason for breaking them.
Art critics know the rules, and often harshly criticize the artist for breaking a rule that unbroken would lessen the impact of the art. An example is the first Blues Brothers movie, where the sax player was on a counter with his head and torso out of frame. It worked, but the critic couldn't see it.
The same goes for writing. Mark Twain was criticized for using colloquial speech and misspellings, even though all of the colloquial speech and misspellings were in quotation marks and the books would have been mediocre at best without them.
But I have to emphasize that to break the rules, you need a damned good reason to and you have to understand the rules first.
Free Martian Whores!
Jargon fits this category too. Which might more accurately describe the phenomenon of txt speak.
The first sentence of the article reads: "Little or no grammar teaching, cellphone texting, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, all are being blamed for an increasingly unacceptable number of post-secondary students who can't write properly."
"Increasingly unacceptable" - that's a modifier on an absolute, which is poor form. The author is trying to express the concept of "larger", with emphasis added. They did not succeed.
"Like" should have been "such as". "Like" excludes the named items, which wasn't the intent.
The comma after "Twitter" ought to be a dash.
Perhaps the Canadian Press needs to employ better editors.
It's "University of Waterloo", not "Waterloo University". Jeez.
To which document are you referring? MLA? Chicago? APA? Which version? APA just released their new standards. Are you referring to APA version five or six? You argue that "it's not a matter of opinion;" however, depending on the standard, you have different syntactical rules to which you must adhere.
It's like the modern saying, "I love standards, there's so many to choose from." I have a paper from my days in college, studying English, which one teacher gave an "A" and another gave the exact same paper an "F" for grammar because it really is just a matter of opinion.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
Mark Twain didn't write in the way people speak, he wrote in a way that creates an illusion that it is how people speak.
You and I know what 'cuz' means,
It's not that clear cut on its own. Puerto Rican decedents use "cuz" in the same manner as blank people use "bro".
i no rite lang iz evolvin an if u can undastand den wats the prob huh? lang is 2 comoonikate ideaz n if u git wat im sayin den its dun its job an who cares wat a dikshunary sez, ppl who r all "oh, rite proper lol" r just stuck up tards dey tink dey smart cus they can memirize sum words in a book, but der just nerds wit no life, dey wuldnt stand 5 min in da reel wurld.
No. I'm a TA at the very university in question in TFA. It's not just that they can't spell, and have no sense of grammar. They can't communicate ideas. When some of these students submit assignments, the spelling can even be correct, but I have absolutely no idea what they mean, it's gibberish. Some of the ones with problems are foreign exchange students. On the one hand, it's not their fault, they're still learning. On the other hand, we give them ESL exams to make sure they're able to keep up with courses taught in English, so they better be able to! But most of the people with English problems are the locals. They just can't communicate an idea to save their life. So, I say again, no, it's not just that their grammar and spelling suck, it's that they can't communicate an idea. Evolution or not, if you cant' communicate an idea, you need better language skills. Some of them also seem equally unable to understand English, either. They read questions and they just can't follow what they mean. So, fuck you for saying we should be writing our exams in SMS because we've made them inaccessible to changing society.
As penance, go read the comments on icanhascheezburger.com, and realize exactly WHAT you are chastising us for not accepting as FORMAL ESSAYS.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
In the words of Professor Strunk as immortalized in the classic manual of the "right way ... to put your words together": "It is an old observation that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetori. When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules."
No, jargon is domain specific, not population specific. Jargon is acceptable in papers because they contain domain-specific information. Dialect is not, because they are not aimed at a specific population. If you're still in a university (doing research or just hanging around?) then I'd advise you to drop in on some psycholinguistics lectures; you'll probably find them interesting.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
They probably did teach this in Driver Ed. However, like the lessons taught in English class, everything is forgotten the minute students are no longer required to know it for a test.
There's nothing wrong with that language, but nevertheless people expect schools to teach the formal/orthodox language, however arbitrary it may be. If someone goes to school and is unable to express the same meaning as a smiley within constraints that don't include smileys, then something has gone wrong. The schools certainly aren't telling parents and taxpayers, "Oh we just teach leetspeak in the core curriculum; Formal American English is an elective class."
If a data structures class gives out an assignment that is supposed to be written in Fortran, and you turn in code written in Ruby, you should get an F. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with Ruby, but you've got to show you can do it in Fortran. A programmer needs to learn what to do if they're ever faced with a do-it-yourself situation, and a writer needs to learn what to do when they're faced with a situation where formal language is needed. Advocate a society which does not have those constraints, if you like, but you damn well know we don't currently live in it.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
pooran" ....
there. ancient anglosaxon. says "Sun's brightness is common to rich and poor".
languages are living things, by their definition. they evolve. and evolution comes from people. in some time, 'cuz' is going to be accepted as another form of because. just like how sun took place of sunnan. that is the way of things. and no amount of elitism or grammar nazism or jacobinism is going to change it. for, how the language evolves is decided by the people en masse. few things are less democratic. had you been speaking with the 'proper' english you have now back in 1750, you would be despised and ridiculed as some commoner speaking a lowly common accent. however those days' common lowly english is today's formal english. because languages evolve.
people should get used up to this fact.
Read radical news here
I saw a lot of this in my freshman "English" class, and I find there are 3 reasons why this happens.
1) Natural language change. "Because" shortens to "cuz" because it's a high frequency word with an unstressed syllable. "Like" and "I mean" tend to get used in ways I find analogous to the Ancient Greek "men" and "de" discourse particles. Overall, this is not a bad thing (no matter what anyone says: it's a fact of Language and if it didn't happen we would all be speaking Proto-Indo-European), but it is not good paper writing (at least not yet).
2) English teachers don't know English grammar. Is it that surprising? I learned more about English in one year of high school Latin than in all my years of "Language Arts" classes, and it's simple why. One learns Latin from the ground up: you have to understand the way cases are used and the way verbs are inflected in order to read anything. In English, we have very little inflection, and much of it is on the pronouns. Furthermore, one does not "learn" a native language, one "acquires" it, which is to say that the process is different. You don't actively think about the rules of grammar when you start speaking: your brain does these mental gymnastics for you. This is why it's not accurate to say that these students have "bad grammar." I'm sure what they say is grammatical in their own idiolects, otherwise they wouldn't say it. But English teachers should be able to explain how the grammar of formal English, the paper-writing register, works by convention. That is, they should know when to use "who" and when to use "whom." But none of my past English teachers could tell you the difference between those words, and that is a huge problem.
3) ENTRANCE ESSAYS. Obviously this is a problem that pervades the writing styles of these kids, so presumably they did not just forget how to write after they got accepted to uni. So either somebody else wrote their essays (which should be considered cheating and grounds for immediate expulsion if discovered), or somebody let them in even though they write like that. If you want to blame anybody, it's the application readers I'd question first.
Esoteric reference.
It is an evolving, living communications medium. If the English manuals can't keep up, that's not on teens and tweeners, that's on the manual manufacturers. Just another dying industry like the cd-pressing industry. Get used to seeing a lot of :-) in your world, or be prepared to cope with a :-P
Now get off my lawn you kids!
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
This article is useless. Has anyone doing the study looked at the actual demographics of Waterloo students? A large proportion of their student base consists of a combination of: 1) Foreign students 2) People born in Canada (for the citizenship) who grew up in Hong Kong, only to come back to Canada for high school (thus appear as local students in University) 3) People from China and Hong Kong who moved to Canada for high school, and obtaining citizenship in the process (thus attaining local student status in University) Anybody from Toronto would be very familiar with groups 2 and 3. It should also be noted that groups 2 and 3 tend to socialize with others from the same group; this is never in English.
Let me add in the original bit that I quoted... So that we've got some context here...
To which document are you referring? MLA? Chicago? APA? Which version? APA just released their new standards. Are you referring to APA version five or six? You argue that "it's not a matter of opinion;" however, depending on the standard, you have different syntactical rules to which you must adhere.
So it looks like we're talking about spelling, pronunciation, silent consonants... All of which would be documented in a dictionary. Granted, there are a few different ones out there... But they largely agree on things like spelling and pronunciation.
If you want to talk about specific styles of writing, that's fine. But that isn't what I was referring to.
Generally speaking, your professor will dictate what style to use. Or, failing that, the department will. Or the college will have a standard. I know that when I went to school it was noted in the syllabus for any class that involved heavy writing...
Further, the various writing styles generally refer to how a paper is formatted and documented. How you format a citation, what kind of spacing to use, a reference page, a title page... Things like that. They don't generally dictate which rules of grammar or spelling do or do not apply.
"Because" is still spelled "because" - regardless of whether you're using MLA or APA.
It's like the modern saying, "I love standards, there's so many to choose from." I have a paper from my days in college, studying English, which one teacher gave an "A" and another gave the exact same paper an "F" for grammar because it really is just a matter of opinion.
If nobody actually dictated a writing style anywhere, then I would suggest that you could probably dispute your grade successfully. Assuming, of course, that you actually used a specific writing style and didn't just make it all up as you went along.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
It doesn't even have to be that extreme. Many of the routine emails at work have atrocious spelling and grammar, and I can't help but wonder if the bosses (who tend to be a bit older and have some kind of education) don't notice that too.
I can't imagine an upper level manager writing messages like this. So, not being able to write means a hard career ceiling.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Bad drafting can be expensive. Here's a bit of the 'million dollar comma' story from a few years ago:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20061026/185156.shtml
"... basing the ruling on just the comma alone (a comma which we doubt the original lawyers really paid attention to at the beginning). However, the story is about to get a lot more interesting. Rogers is appealing, and they claim that they have a second version of the contract written in French that makes it much clearer that the purpose of the original clause is ..."
That appeal in the end succeeded--because the French version of the contract was unambiguous:
http://www.slaw.ca/2007/08/22/rogers-wins-comma-contract-dispute-with-bell-aliant/
The teaching moment can be taking someone's ambiguous text, that could have been read three or four different ways, each of which would have different consequences if someone signed that agreement -- and breaking out each possible meaning, then asking the writer whether any of those alternatives captures the intended sense.
Good writers will know which one they meant. Those who don't even know, well, it's a new age, man.
Then you misunderstood. The most recent noun for the modifying clause in question was "Christian", which was part of a phrase modifying the most recent noun "client". The clause "that she spent the last three days at a pot-fueled Wiccan orgy." was intended to modify the subject of the whole sentence ("Someone"). It was not the Christian client who went to the orgy.
'texting' will be the death of the English language as we've known it.
Or to put it another way:
Quick! Get those generators hooked up to Twain, Hemingway, and Shakespeare! When they start spinning, we'll have all the energy we need.
... my son's fourth grade teacher routinely says, "Me and Dick and Jane," or "Dick, Jane, and Me," instead of "Jane, Dick, and I."
I'm getting resistance from my kids and their friends when I correct this. "Me and him" so grates on my ears!
In Liberty, Rene
he abused the English language in ways that people never imagined it could be abused. Most of our great writers do that.
To effectively abuse the rules of grammar, you must first be master of them. Generation txt has skipped a critical step.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
... and you'll get a book deal.
The problem with English "grammar" is that it doesn't work. Fifty or a hundred years ago, the study of English grammar was taken seriously because it was believed to be a description of how the language worked. Once computers started processing English text, that belief was destroyed. Parsing of English sentences using a grammatical rule set just didn't work.
A few decades later, parsing of English is better understood. Microsoft Word's grammar checker really does parse sentences. At one time, Microsoft Research offered a tool which plugged into Word's parser and displayed the sentence diagrams it uses internally. The tools for this require Bayesian statistics; they're not based on rigid rules.
Research linguists have a handle on the parsing problem now. But the methods that really work aren't useful as teaching tools for students. So the teaching of "grammar" has lost its underpinnings.
Incidentally, in English there are only four main types of "open class" words: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Then there are about 150-300 "closed class words" (opinions vary, but a common list contains 288), which have to be treated as special cases. Parsing is driven almost entirely by the closed class words. (This is why "Jabberwocky" works.) Closed class words are added to English very slowly - the last one was "Ms." But that's not how students are taught grammar.
I'd wager it's a losing battle when even professors use the phrase "sort of like". Can the gray pot still ridicule the kettle for being black?
If your post is representative of your writing, all I can say is that I sincerely hope that your Doctorate isn't in English.
I, II, C, IV... really?
Horrid use of white space.
Sure, I'm guilty of plenty of poor grammar and spelling, but I never claimed to be an English teacher or a doctor.
Posting anonymously as I'm sure that some of these stones I'm throwing are going to bounce back on my own glass house. Yup, I'm a coward.
should of
could of
would of
Basically I'd rather have gooder spelling then poor grammer,like i could care less wether you could pacifically point out any errors, where you really listening in class?
So being considerate of the French is a reason to waste 2 seconds of my life? Fuck you, sir.
The problem I see here is that as the language degrades, so will corporations' abilities to hire people with such skills and eventually it will end up in upper management.
In that case, when all of upper management thinks it's the norm, they would probably seek to hire those who use it throughout the organization, right? And so, in an effort to be hired, would students not *demand* to be taught English in this way, forcing even English teachers to eventually yield or find new careers?
This would then seed the entire workforce with those who speak/write this way. And when it's become prevelant throughout the organization at all levels, would it not *become* the norm? And, by extension from organization to country/world, would it not also become the norm if the large majority of writers considers it so?
We may simply be seing the next phase of phonetic/literary evolution in progress, as has occured through out history as long as humanity has possessed a written/spoken language. After all, I'm sure people today certainly would not consider the very small people who know and can speak/write in original Old English from the dark ages to be "the norm" with current phrasing. Heck, even a realatively more recent transition in the late Colonial period of America saw us give birth to a whole new "English Language" that is seperate from proper Queen's English to the point that we need lessons to be able to bridge the gap and prevent misunderstandings in mixed crowds.
ZOMG, from TFA:
Hehe, the editor corrected the deliberately quoted and misspelled "definately".
Apparently editorial skills are rather poor nowadays, too.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
"When I went to high school in the '70s I was never taught grammar in English. I learned grammar from Latin classes."
Budra was taught to read and write using whole language rather than phonetics - not a good way to go in his books.
I find this part interesting. In French canadian schools, we blamed the bad grammar back in the 80s for using phonetics instead of the more traditional methods. As I was told back then, they stopped using it in France because it didn't work while we here in Canada keeped using it for some 10 years and sacrificed an entire generation as far as grammar goes.
Needless to say, we're no better off today then we were back then as the failure rates of students just keeps rising in French Canada.
I feel that the problem is that we want to find a one size fits all approach and forget that no all kids absorb knowledge the same way or at the same speed.
Phonics is used to teach people to read, not write. Phonics teaches people how to convert a printed word to a spoken sound. It's really just a get off the ground solution. Once students can successfully read printed text, they still need to be taught all of the rules of the language they are learning.
Whole language tries to solve the "one size fits all problem" by slowing the education process down enough so that the weakest students in the class are able to pick up the subject. This results in the majority of the class becoming bored because of the slow pace. Instead of creating teaching methods like whole language out of the belief that learning is "too hard," why not look at what teaching methods were is use prior to the decline in performance? Remember that there was a time in history when students learned things in school. Teaching kids to use "invented spellings" won't do them any good in the long run. Whole language teachers deride the concept of practicing by calling it wrote memorization or dull repetition. Think about anything you have learned yourself. Hasn't practicing made you better at it?
There was a time when parents would expect students to study and practice in order to do well. Today a student fails a test the parent is more likely to call the teacher and try to get the grade changed than they are to push the student to study more. Probably one of the worst things that has happened to education in the last 20 years is the creation of the "soccer mom" and all the my child is perfect how dare anyone criticize my child attitudes that have come along with it.
A quick search in the local french news turns up a fact that did not get pointed out in that article. The new and current test in French universities points to a failure of over 50% for the teachers. How can you educate when you don't know what your teaching?
I suspect this failure would be pretty high in english schools as well.
It's rather interesting that no one's bothered to point any fingers towards teachers. I wish we could stop this blame the students mentality for all failures. Teachers have they're part in this too and they need to acknowledge it.
I have to agree with that. Most problems don't have only one cause. Here is Massachusetts back when they initiated the MCAS tests that students needs to pass before graduating high school, there were also tests that teachers had to pass. I remember hearing one news story where over 50% of the teachers didn't know the difference between the words eminent and imminent. Ok, maybe they sound similar, but give me break.
The Internet norm of ignoring punctuation and capitalization as well as using emoticons may be acceptable in an email to friends and family, but it can have a deadly effect on one's career if used at work.
"It would say to me ... 'well, this person doesn't think very clearly, and they're not very good at analyzing complex subjects, and they're not very good at expressing themselves, or at worse, they can't
There are a number of factors to consider when using UW as an example. UW's best and largest programs are computer science and engineering, not arts. These tend to attract students that didn't do particularly well in high school English classes. Furthermore, the school has a large number of foreign students who seem to find learning English impossible. While only 6.9% of students are studying on a student Visa, there appear to be a larger group of people who are recent immigrants and finished some of high school in Canada without actually learning English properly.
Setting aside issues specific to UW, part of this is to blame on poor high schools, but plenty of them do teach grammar. My high school certainly did.
The University of Waterloo should also stop accepting students who get below 75% in English. Prospective students tend to get poor marks in English while letting math and science marks raise their average.
s.clementmonkey@sympatico.ca, remove the 'monkey'.
I did the same thing, and am now in technology b/c I couldn't afford to live on the salary universities offer to teach people to write.
Fortunately I also have enough math to be useful.....a lot of my classmates didn't have that as a fallback and are starving.
"Truth is what works" -- William James "It works!!" -- o-dark-AM comment
Have a little respect, that's our former Prime Minister, Jean Chretien, speaking.
Forrester: You should never start a sentence with a conjunction.
Erhardt: And to help you remember all these grammatical rules, we're sending you a short, called "Your friend at the end". It's got all kind of great information like how to properly formulate sentences!
Forrester: Conjugate this, boobie!
Erhardt: Enjoy!
Bow-ties are cool.
You're obviously not Canadian, nor are you familiar with the Canadian education system. A "university" in Canada denotes a certain (high) standard of learning, unlike, say, our neighbours to the south.
... although many universities have colleges, but now I'm confusing myself.
In Canada, for instance, there is a great difference between "universities" and "colleges"
I really know of no way that one would be able to purchase a university degree in Canada. I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but it would be almost impossible. It would be much easier and less expensive to purchase one from another country.
www.clarke.ca
the next genaration, can write just, fine thank u :) lol i sprinkled on extra comas for extra flavour ;) now wears my degree???!!!
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.
"30% of freshman university students fail a 'simple English test' at Waterloo University (up from 25% a few years ago.
This doesn't necessarily mean that students are not writing as well as they used to. Could this be better explained by changing demographics at this particular university?
For example, perhaps the schools in the area are becoming worse. Or maybe more students are applying to the university due to an economic down turn. Or a manufacturing plant laid off area workers. Or maybe the change in SAT scoring adjusted the threshold of people who think they can get into the school. Or maybe more people are feeling empowered to go to school than there were in previous years.
Sarah Palin, anyone?
Seriously. Look up the text of her conversational speaking; it's completely incoherent. In her defense, even though hers is worse than average, normal conversational speaking doesn't usually translate very well to the written word.
Actually, if you're talking about academic publications, I would bet that the typical foreign (non-native speaker or English) reader would have no more, perhaps even less, trouble understanding modern SMS-influenced grammar than a typical middle-aged, non-academic native speaker of English (myself). Why? Because such people have probably picked up all their informal English from their peers -- fellow grad students who are young and tech-savvy.
There's no arguing your main point that using "cuz" in an academic paper is a very bad idea, but I think you're underestimating the ability of non-native speakers to pick up informal language. The French speaker can figure out a phonetic transform in English-as-a-second-language just as well as the native speaker.
I frequently read English-language e-mails/postings by Japanese, Turkish, and Brazilian people and they use "pls" and "ur" and the rest all the time. Conversely, I occasionally read Portuguese (my third or fourth language) on net forums, and figuring out abbreviations like
"vc" for "você" is quite simple.
By "the modifier," I meant "the phrase. 'who just happens to be a devout Christian.'"
Say What?
There are many ways to draw parallels between the west (particularly the United States) and Rome, but this is not one of them. The evolution of vernacular is nothing new to any civilization, but the speed at which it is occuring is. As a culture, we place an unusually high value on proper grammar -- at least we used to. I've noticed this culture shift for a long time. It's not going to kill our civilization, but it will cause a clash similar to how geek culture created a second set of rules for the workplace. I've heard from many engineers that they've had awkward interviews for excessively dressing up. There's currently two brands of office culture which are co-existing, eventually either one will win or (more likely) one's dress and mannerisms will be used to define whether one belongs to the business class or "brains" class.
I see shorthand popping up more and more often in office emails. It's already used regularly in instant messages, and I'm not motivated to call anyone on it. From time to time, I feel strange using proper grammar and typing words out. It won't be the end of our civilization, but it will make things difficult for people who can't adapt to the culture shift.
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
IMHO, affixing some kind of rigid standard to spoken language is the lazy way --
This, however, isn't about the spoken language. It's about the written language. They are not synonymous.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
The level of math that we let HS students graduate with is comical. Our schools self adjust to measuring math achievement based how far they managed to get in the past.
But the distance that is gone in math isn't the real problem. The problem is that people have no clue as to how to apply math in real life. When numbers get big people stop thinking, if someone has an 8 megapixel camera, people dont have a clue what the resolution is going to be, unless through experience. If you mention a 24 megapixel camera, knowing the resolution of the 8 mp might be a clue, but only if prodded.
You cant teach math in a vacuum, it will bore the students to tears and they'll let the skill atrophy, If your just teaching Writing and math, they are writing and calculating NOTHING. These skills need to be taught, but used in a broader framework where science, history and the arts are used in concert to bring these skills to fruition, so that a person can grasp just how bad the science is in bad sci-fi.
cuz for me it's only about getting some good sci-fi..
Storm
Ahh, could you give those of us who are concerned about our grammatical capabilities some information on ways to improve? Such as books or tutorials.
Who gives a crap about grammar? F7 my friends. Id rather spend my time studying Hyper-V or brusing up on my binary. My boss does not care about my grammar as long as I dont sound like an idiot.
"Been researching industry and what they claim as best practices. This one we need to follow."
"interesting... they are asking for this at the customer level or just promotion?"
"Had a brainstorm on this. Will call in a few. Also no reason we are not sending out shopping cart abandoners(?)."
"Can you add in any 3 images and make something similar work below so I can see how you did it. This is their VB code (???) and I have no idea how to truly read of if this is the best format for multiple images driven off of multiple variables."
Perception is the thin dividing line between reality and fiction.
That was my thought when I saw "Waterloo University" in the summary. About 25 years ago, a friend of mine dropped out of her third year of University in Toronto, mainly because she didn't believe her English was good enough. It was her second language, and she was fluent as far as I could tell. I tried to argue that she was above par, but she'd already decided, and she was nothing if not decisive. A couple years later she was managing two fashion stores in downtown, and was appalled to discover that locals couldn't manage enough correct sentences to complete a job application.
In my experience, Canada has a very low standard for English in high school. The attitude is pretty much that everyone should have a high school diploma, and the bar is lowered accordingly. So school ends up being about babysitting till the kids can be ejected as junior adults, presumably to some union job, or to become a university's entrace problem. It doesn't sound like much has changed.
Don't get me started on this shit. I went to high school from 1994 to 1998, during the golden age of IRC--and the dawn of widespread use of all-lowercase sentences lacking punctuation, leetspeak, emoticons, and other such things. Call it a precursor to the texting that would come many years later.
I managed to make it all the way through college and grad school getting mostly A's on written papers, where I paid meticulous attention to grammar, spelling, punctuation, and just the whole report making sense.
When I was a _senior_, I had an Information Studies professor dock points off other students' papers for improper grammar/punctuation/etc, sending students into an uproar. I was 21 fucking years old, a high school graduate, less than a year from my BS, and surrounded by students who think they shouldn't be expected to write coherent sentences! AAAAAAAAAARRRRRGH!
For what it's worth, even when I text today, I do my best to write proper sentences with punctuation. :-)
That's all. I just wanted to call you names for focusing on someone's grammar - an irrelevant indicator of the quality or intelligence of a person.
As I understand, the rule we are discussing is that when a clause is restrictive on the antecident noun it is not parenthetical and so you should not use commas. When it is not restrictive it is parenthetical and so can be struck off with commas. eg from Strunk (from memory, not verbatum);
My eldest daughter, Mary, is an excellent musician.
My cousin bob likes to light fires.
So because the eldest daughter could be expected to be singular and unique the antecident noun is well defined and giving her name doesnt actually further define the noun. Although it could be possible to have multiple eldest daughters to several different women I think we should think of what the reader can reasonably expect. Remember the point of this is to improve comprehension by highlighting the start of unnecessary information. Where in the second example, cousin is not unique and so bob is restrictive and serves to define the noun and so is not parenthetical. Thus we leave off the commas.
Hope this helps, kesava.
i can haz degree now ?? i passed ur classez and now i can gradjuate lol :)
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Try reading "The Last of the Mohicans" by James Fenimore Cooper. The language is incredible (though criticized by Mark Twain for being overly formal). There are short portions with French dialog (and no translation), so I have to think that the author assumed the reader understood French. Were people better educated in 1826 than now? I was also shocked to find that the abridged version I read as a child was quite toned down from the real thing. I felt like a child reading a grown-up book for the first time. I read it three times! Sorry, but our present language is dumbed-down and illiterate.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Mark Twain, anyone?
No thanks, I just had lunch.
The enemies of Democracy are
Get a damn job and pull yourself up by your bootstraps
"I can't imagine an upper level manager writing messages like this. So, not being able to write means a hard career ceiling."
I can. I've seen it. Part of an education company. At least they didn't create and edit the books....
I am a student at University in the Uk and am nicknamed a 'Grammar Nazi' as I cannot abide bad punctuation and grammar. But I can understand why the majority of my friends cannot spell words correctly or use apostrophes in the wrong places. English lessons in the Uk never teach you anything other than creative writing and comprehension. I was one of four students out of the 300+ in the year that opted to do Latin at GCSE level and it was only here I learned sentence syntax. The majority of students my age will have never been taught when to use apostrophes or when to use there, their and they're.
This isn't a failing of the students, its a failing of the education system.
Except from when they use text talk. Now that's just plain annoying.
Also, I think that it's and its should be changed so that they match every other use of an apostrophe.
Who here could pass a grammar test of Middle English?
By and large, the distinction between the middle versions of language and the modern versions of languages is around the time of the invention and proliferation of the printing press which widely changed how information was distributed and consumed. This has become and is still considered the norm.
Now, with instant short messaging becoming a reality, new, more abbreviated ways of communicating are becoming the norm as it is no longer necessary to pen out a long letter to communicate to someone at a distance... even email is becoming a bit passe for casual conversation. Thus, people's standards of communication are changing and that is bleeding over into other areas. The context of communication is changing, not the content.
It is sad that this may cause a lessening in what people would consider a more formal structure of communication but that is just an authoritarian and stodgy viewpoint I believe. I do believe that proper written grammar has its place and should be taught to students but it should also be stressed as seperate from the more casual forms of communication.
"I get their essays and I go 'You obviously don't know what a sentence fragment is. You think commas are sort of like parmesan cheese that you sprinkle on your words'," said Budra.
"I go"???
So, is he, like, teaching them Valley-speak to replace their IM-speak? I'm like, so sure!
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
At least I am not the only one who thought 'cousin' as another meaning for the abbreviation 'cuz'. I wish I had mod points for you sir.
~Zehaeva
Okay, I think I'll have a go at disagreeing with this.
Nobody writes while adhering to grammatical rules well enough for their sentences to compile. The best natural language parsers have a precision and recall of around 90%, meaning that the most sophisticated grammatical rules that we're able to write down after about eighty years of study still get one in ten phrases wrong. Furthermore their exact match rate is closer to 50%, meaning that most sentences are misinterpreted. The standard corpus for evaluating parser performance is the WSJ - hardly a publication in which I would describe the writes as ignorant (and yes, I know I twisted what you said there).
Returning to the subject at hand, you appear to be claiming that when KJV was written, writers were still refining the grammatical rules of English and shortly after this they settled on some rules which are now set in stone. This is, frankly, nonsense. If you look at the writing of perhaps two hundred years ago - well after KJV - and use that to build a formal grammar of English then there is no way this grammar would be able to accurately parse well written modern text.
To take one specific example, consider the split infinitive which two hundred years ago was considered a breach of grammatical rules due to the strong Latin grounding in education at the time. Nowadays it is widely accepted that English is a different language to Latin and splitting the infinitive is perfectly acceptable.
English, including written English, is a _natural_ language, meaning it evolves. The syntax that defined English last year will not precisely define it this year and with the advent of faster and cheaper means of publishing (e.g. SMS, Twitter) it is to be expected that the rate of change will increase. That's not to say that I'm happy about it - I think live would be much easier if computers could reliably interpret everything that we write - but I accept that it is the case and the grammar rules written a hundred years ago (or even last year) are little more than approximations of how people write. When a sentence is written in violation of those rules (such as "My bad."), you can argue that the sentence has incorrect syntax, but when many sentences sharing the same grammatical structure are written then the only reasonable conclusion is that the rules are incorrect representations of English.
My goal when writing is to make it as easy as possible for readers to understand what is written. This means that while it may be syntactically acceptable for me to continue a sentence as long as I want, adding prepositions and inviting the reader to attach them as they see fit, and continuing on tangents freely, I do not do so because I am more interested in being understood than in adhering to rules that I doubt most readers have studied. Occasionally I am lazy, and my posts to Slashdot are a good example of this, with ellipses used instead of coherently structuring my thoughts. Again this is not invalid grammar, any non trivial grammar will permit a rule such as S -> NP (S) VP, but it is poor form since it leads to a less comprehensible essay. And my apologies for such a long-winded post, something which I also believe is another sign of lazy writing.
Finally an argument you did not make but I will refute directly just case you were thinking it: writing a grammar in which every valid sentence is marked valid is a trivial task. The problem is writing a grammar that will reject every grammatically invalid sentence. Syntacticians have an irritating habit of saying that anything remotely challenging must be resolved using semantics, leading to such absurd interpretations as "The I are of a" as a valid sentence (roughly: the I'th acre of plot A).
I believe the cultural factor behind the work-averse attitude of today's youngsters lies directly with the fact that schoolwork is much harder and time consuming than Real Work. At least, that's been my experience. My job involves sitting in front of a computer--at home no less--for a mere 8 hours every day. I don't have to get dressed up, I don't have to do any homework, and my knowledge of trivia (specifics of certain time periods in history, English literature, rarely-useful-in-the-real-world mathematical formulas, etc) is never a factor. Not only that but my career advancement doesn't rely on passing a barrage of broad-spectrum tests on a quarterly or yearly basis.
Even if I worked in an office with a dress code the results would be similar: From the perspective of a child, Real Work doesn't appear to require much effort at all. In fact, just being present seems to be enough to get paid (and in some places I've worke I must concede that actually *is* all that's required for many positions).
If "kids these days" are hard to get motivated for absorbing trivia and performing rote tasks we have only ourselves to blame. I've said it before and I'll say it again: One has only to point a finger at the preceding generation to discover who is to blame for "kids these days."
-Riskable
"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"
I don't think that stands to reason, but I'm willing to be persuaded if you can explain your assumptions.
I would assume that an increasing total number of students with a fixed total number of universities would result in an equal distribution of students in each of the increasing-sized classes.
Of course, that is based on a fixed number of universities. There, my assumption is that any increase in universities is outrun by the increase in population.
I have no facts to back up my assumptions, which is why I'm willing to be persuaded.
Wish I had some points for you.
Support SETI@home
I'd mod you up, but I already commented. "Rah, rah, go America!" and "Rah, rah, America sucks!": same lack of meaning, different social group. The latter form of mindlessness is pretty silly for Americans to parrot, however. So much of modern political thought is at the level of rooting for your favorite sports team, without any consideration for what the candiates might actually do once in office. Hoping for your own country to fail to justify the ideas popular with your team is just an extension of that, I guess.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'm part of the generation in Ontario that went from localized teaching to province forced curriculum, with yearly revisions for roughly 8 years. This was back in the late 80's and 90's. The same generation that now has kids, or in some cases are going back through for college/university now because of the current economic situation. The system change was a mess, odd as it seems I still have no real concept of proper punctuation, grammar, or anything like it. I know I'm better after a 3mo course, but it's still pretty bad. There's an entire generation of us who had schooling like this: "Gr3/4/5, grammar/spelling/etc" Either you got it or you didn't, and it reached higher up towards middle school. Following years, you were expected to know it once the new system came in, there was no backtracking, no extra help.
I had plenty of people in my class who struggled with the entire grammar/punctuation bit. I know that these days they're a lot softer on the whole teaching thing, but here in Ontario where this is from the current education system is a joke. On top of that, I can't see a point in knowing 'why' you need it. When the article says there were no grammar lessons in high school they're right. I think we had 1 day per year in grades 3-7.
Blaming it on twitter and such? Nah. This has been going on for years, the programs here simply fail at what they are meant to do and the ministry of education(Ontario) is out of touch. One reason why there's been such a large upswing in homeschooling and private schooling here. About half the kids on my street are home schooled, another third are in private the rest are in public. And the ones who are in public get extra lessons from the parents who home school.
Om, nomnomnom...
It would be more noticeable to the people using it if more of them actually were interested in understanding what other people are saying.
It boils down to blaming the tool or blaming the tool. I'm in favour of blaming the tool.
Burden of clarity has been posted here before, today is my turn.
At the high school level, much of the educational process involves jumping through hoops. Students making it into Waterloo have obviously done something right. Top departments there have entrance requirements in the CMU bracket. I recall a year in the 1980s where the median GPA out of high school for entrance to Systems Design Engineering program was 93%. More than a few of these flunked the English assessment test.
Who created the hurdles where you could gain entrance to an elite program such as that and then flunk a basic test of composition and grammar? The adults. And somehow, every generation, the adults get stupider. I have a friend who went to an engineering school in Ontario in the same time frame who had an instructor who promised the class "you'll all thank me later for learning how to neatly hand-letter your engineering blueprints". Twenty years later, it's still too soon to tell. Maybe "later" meant at some point in the aftermath of peak oil and the evacuation of Bangladesh.
If you train your muscle memory to generate "cuz" when you mean "because" it's not the easiest thing to suppress in the heat of the moment when they spring the assessment exam on you in your frosh week. Stopping to correct your hands will interfere with your composition process, which will also be graded negatively.
Another fallacy in play here is Paul Collier's"bottom billion. Fifty years ago the bottom billion was a quartile. Now it's much less than that. Meanwhile, the bell of the income curve has shifted significantly to the right. So despite the fact that the bottom billion has made little progress, there's reason to be optimistic about the bottom quartile.
Notice the effect doesn't show up in an elite university whose intake funnel has not widened to the same degree as the post-secondary education in general.
Clive Thompson on the New Literacy
For the record, I've posted that link before. A rare data point in a sea of whinging is worth posting twice.
Lunsford is interviewed about her own writing process at How I Write which is an excellent resource for those us who would rather walk around the office with our fly undone than pen "your" as a verb in business correspondence.
At 90wpm I'm about 90% at fielding your/you're, their/there/they're, it/it's on the fly. At that speed, I have a poorer track record on than/that or dropping negatives (the last part of the trace to fill in) and the ed/ing problem, which comes to the fingers so swiftly the hands outrace the mind.
I recall that Knuth once brought in Mary-Claire van Leunen as part of a minicourse in mathematical writing, for which I found a fragment: Mathematical Writing by Donald E. Knuth, Tracy Larrabee, and Paul ...
IIRC, she gave one piece of advice I've never been brave enough to try: compose an essay using a crayon to gain insight into your mental processes. That would certainly throw a wrench into my autonomic nervous system. I'm sure it would illuminating if I survived the process with sanity intact.
That's effectively what Waterloo did when I was there: handed me a speed crayon (Bic pen) and wondered why my composition process suffered. I was one of those young people who just weren't as good as my predecessors.
I see your point, but how exactly would you phrase that sentence so as to be both perfectly precise and minimally sesquipedalian? Programming languages must produce clunky phrases in the pursuit of clarity, but human languages should leave some room for prosody.
Somebody needs to mod the parent up. (And, no, I'm not lazy--I'm a linguist, and we care about studying the way language actually works, not the way a handful of people think it "should.")
Language does change. Every generation interprets language a bit differently from the previous generation, and over time these changes add up. It's why we speak Modern English instead of Middle or Old, and it's why we have English, German, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Frisian, Scots, Icelandic, and other Germanic languages instead of some sort of modern Proto-Germanic. It's why we have Germanic, Italic, Hellenic, and other Indo-European languages instead of Proto-Indo-European. (You might be able to take this farther, a la Nostradic Hypothesis, but I think the evidence is sketchy for connecting most major language families.) In any case, it's clear: language changes.
"Standard" varieties (which are somewhat artificial to begin with--they're partly just an arbitrary list of rules people have proposed of "do's" and "don'ts"), however, are usually much slower to change. For example, until the last century, speakers of Chinese (which today is actually a diverse collection of varieties that are often called both languages and dialects) spoke in their vernacular (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.) but wrote in the standard language--Classical Chinese. It took centuries for the standard written language to change; they were almost completely different by this point. We're obviously nowhere close to this point with English, but I think it illustrates the point that language does change, and that it's neither good or bad. It just happens. For languages with standardized writing, the written language is often much slower to change, but it usually happens eventually--or, alternatively, you wind up with two essentially different languages. (I'm not saying this is bad, either, but I'm just noting an observation.) There is nothing to fear.
R.Mo
pot retreat or death by boning they both hold promise your ideas are interesting I would like to subscribe to your blog
Nobody writes while adhering to grammatical rules well enough for their sentences to compile.
No, they don't. It's a very good thing that the human mind is more flexible than the average compiler.
Returning to the subject at hand, you appear to be claiming that when KJV was written, writers were still refining the grammatical rules of English and shortly after this they settled on some rules which are now set in stone.
That isn't the claim I was trying to make.
I was attempting to point out that we had words for why the KJV reads oddly - namely that it was written in Early Modern English. Just as something written in German is going to look a bit odd to an English speaker.
I also pointed out that spelling had not been completely settled at the time... Spelling, these days, has largely settled down. I pointed out the preference for idoms even older than the KJV itself... And I pointed out that there were issues translating from Latin to English. I never said anything about grammar.
English, including written English, is a _natural_ language, meaning it evolves.
Yes, it does.
The syntax that defined English last year will not precisely define it this year and with the advent of faster and cheaper means of publishing (e.g. SMS, Twitter) it is to be expected that the rate of change will increase.
Agreed.
I accept that it is the case and the grammar rules written a hundred years ago (or even last year) are little more than approximations of how people write.
Agreed.
When a sentence is written in violation of those rules (such as "My bad."), you can argue that the sentence has incorrect syntax, but when many sentences sharing the same grammatical structure are written then the only reasonable conclusion is that the rules are incorrect representations of English.
Maybe.
Again, we're not talking about how people communicate face-to-face... Or with a txt message... Or on a Facebook post... We're talking about something fairly specific - college-level writing for exams and essays.
German, French, and English are all perfectly valid languages. There's nothing wrong with any of them. But if you're going to a school in America, taking a class in English, and turn in a paper written in German you can't expect a very good grade.
You need to use the appropriate language for the task at hand.
"My bad" might be perfectly acceptable in a quick memo to your co-worker explaining that your patch killed the server... It's probably not so acceptable in an email to a client who wants to know why their server was down and they couldn't collect money for several hours.
The problem here is not that the language is evolving... The problem is that these students do not know the proper language to use when writing for a college exam or essay.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
of loosers.
I think the point is that currently the language is "de"-volving.
Ugh, I almost managed to get to the end of this thread without blowing my stack. Who the hell mods up this kind of drivel?
Your comment captures the thoughts of middle-aged people all around the globe and all through time--speakers of every language in every literate culture believe that their language was "correct" or "at its peak" one to two generations ago. They decry the laziness or moral decrepitude of the young generation. They extend this criticism to art, architecture, music, and all other human forms of expression.
This has always been the case. When the waltz first became popular in America, it was considered tawdry and unclean. When people started pronouncing "knife" without the initial [k]-sound, their parents thought they were butchering the language. (Yeah, we used to say that word with an initial [k]-sound.) Ancient Latin speakers published books saying "don't say it this way, say it that way, because this is how our language is supposed to be". Spanish speakers wanted their future tense to be spelled cantar he and not cantaré, recognizing its periphrastic etymological root.
Try spelling it that way today. Try pronouncing "knife" with a [k]-sound. People will raise their eyebrows. Not because the words are wrong, but because the standard is cultural and, hence, arbitrary.
The critics in these examples were as ignorant and wrong then as you are now: you fail to perceive the subjectivity of your viewpoint. And every time I hear this crap I die a little bit inside.
Yes, the American education system is profoundly broken. Yes, literally thousands of children with shitloads of potential are being flushed down the pipes each year. Stupid parents, stupid system, stupid policymakers, whatever. But languages do not "de"-volve. They change.
Languages exist as a mapping from mostly arbitrary vocalizations and gestures into the semantic web of the experiential universe of the speakers, which in turn is influenced heavily by anthropological, cultural, and personal variables. These variables are subject to tremendous change across geographical, socioeconomic, ethnic, gender, political, occupational, generational, and temporal barriers (to name just those that came off the top of my head).
The fluidity and rapidness of language change are a direct result of the arbitrariness of this mapping, the fact that all those variables are in constant flux, and probably the fact that children are evolutionarily inclined to distance themselves from their parents' generation.
In other words, just cause you speak languages doesn't mean you know how they work. That's tantamount to thinking you know how the ocean works cause you swim in it sometimes.
English will survive just fine in all registers, including academic papers, in spite of the changes it will go through.
Even if we change the way we spell "through". (Horrors!)
At this point, is our decline even reversible?
After reading Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, among other things, I think the answer is No. It is not just America that is in decline (which is all that's meant by decadence) but the entirety of Western civilization. It is one man's prediction, but he happens to be an accomplished historian with an in-depth knowledge of our culture. He weaves a historical narrative whose force is hard to ignore.
It's not a doomsday thing, as it must by necessity be replaced by a new culture. Many of us will likely be around for the big changes ahead, which means that we can have a hand in shaping the new culture.
I highly recommend the book to anyone with even a modest interest in history. Even if you disagree with the hypothesis of this culture's end, it's a very thorough and educational look at our civilization.
Your brain is not a computer.
I think maybe you should reconsider your superiority in this whole reading comprehension thing. If you re-read what I have wrote you will hopefully be able to realize at no point did I actually chastise your school. I merely offered an interesting counter question. I played the devils advocate for a moment. Some times it is fun to toss around odd ideas. Now on the other hand I am now questioning your personal ability to comprehend what is written. As someone who was a TA just a few months ago maybe you should reconsider your qualifications as TA.
sesquipedalian ... prosody ... Look at the big brain on demonlapin!
People who intentionally misconnect modifying clauses for pedantic effect aren't worth your attention. Let them argue with The Hand.
Log on to Facebook and pick some random college dudes and duettes, and ask them to friend you. Most of them will oblige.
Now marvel at the incredibly unintelligible friends feed you will start to see. It's fascinating. So too is their willingness for their friends to friend you, even though nobody knows who the hell you are.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Actually the comment about "it's" and "that's" is your failing. Although it is acceptable to shorten "it is" to "it's" it is not required. The same thing is true for "that's" and "you are". About the "ever" and "every" do not pretend that you are important enough for someone to check their writing for. Its ironic and hypocritical when morons like you try and correct individuals and still make similar mistakes like this "you should be bring literacy ". It is very funny and showing about society that the people who supposedly know grammar the best (English majors)often end up working at Burger King or the like.
I think it's funny that an article talking about commas being "sort of like parmesan cheese that you sprinkle on your words" uses too many commas itself.
Are there any literate people in upper management anywhere? Everybody VP-and-up at $GIANT_CORPORATION when I worked there couldn't even write in complete words, let alone complete sentences.
People with advanced degrees are generally viewed with suspicion on the right, and the degrees themselves are usually denigrated by technical people as "worthless" (for some reason).
In many fields the subject matter has been dumbed down and the grades inflated to the point where the degree is truly just a piece of paper with your name on it (there are many reasons, I can elaborate if you wish). In CS, for example, you have either a degree from one of a vanishingly small number of respected institutions or you have nothing. If you can actually get them honestly talking (rather than simply interviewing off a script before passing you on to the real interviewer), most recruiters will confirm that. They put the degree requirement on the page simply to cut down the number of resumes they must review, but they don't consider it to be a statement of actual qualification.
The value of a college or university is (for some fields, yours may be different) in the few remaining hard core courses, in the exposure to other fields you'll get through options (and the high-level English requirement), in a solid recommendation from an impressed teacher (who, you can be sure, has contacts in local industry), and in the many other networking opportunities you will find therein.
Agreed completely. What most people call "Grammar" is in fact the rules for manipulating English that they were taught in school to be correct. Those in turn are based on what is considered acceptable English by the Education system in their area. Most of those rules were in turn shoe-horned onto English because they originated with Latin. We used to be taught about the various cases for noun declension in English, but the truth is that most of those cases have entirely disappeared from the language, and only vestiges remain (and even those are disappearing).
Pronunciation is similarly defined. Its entirely arbitrary and based on social standards more than actual definable truths. What is acceptable usage in England will differ considerably from Canadian or US pronunciation, and of course vocabulary. All of them represent standards, but no one is truly correct. Its a matter of convention which one you apply.
Thus in England, correct pronunciation is based on comparison to "Received Pronunciation" (basically BBC English) I believe. Rules for grammatical formations are also so defined. This is what is taught in the Education system as being correct. Different standards are applicable here in Canada, and down in the USA of course.
As many people have pointed out above, African Americans have created their own dialect (more likely multiple dialects) of English language usage that has different rules, and deviates from Standard English as defined in the USA. Nothing makes Standard English inherently superior to African American variants though. Both can be used to communicate effectively, its just that the Standard version is, well, a Standard.
Basically, if you speak a language natively, you really can't speak it incorrectly. You may or may not speak according to the excepted Standard, but you can't really be incorrect either.
As for the use of punctuation such as commas in written language, that's purely a convention as defined by standard usage, not some absolute truth.
All that said, I agree completely that when dealing with academic papers, the authors need to be able to adequately express themselves in the accepted Standard English, including grammatical constructions and pronunciation (when you consider Oral presentations etc).
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Of course we know what 'cuz' means. I mean, it's obvious ... right, cuz?
Just going to comment on the ELPE itself. Currently (at least for Engineering students), you just have to pass the ELPE before you graduate. You're allowed one rewrite per year. The ELPE itself is a fairly standard "standardized essay" similar to the essay section of the SAT. You just walk in and pick a topic from a list, and start writing. That being said, among my friends and fellow students, we're all fairly sure that your ELPE score has little to do with your actual English proficiency. Genuinely good writers have scraped by with just barely passes, while incomplete essays with middle school vocabulary have passed with 80s or higher. In other words, its just like the SAT essay section. It doesn't test your essay writing abilities. It tests your ability to write standardized essays.
Now, that's not to say that there isn't a problem with the english proficiency of Waterloo students. While looking over my friends' resumes, and editing work from groupmates, I have found myself dismayed at what sat in front of me. Now, strictly speaking, most of the writing wasn't "wrong". Just bad. I'm sure part of this comes from being in the engineering program. It's a fairly widespread belief that many engineering students are in engineering partly because they suck at writing, and didn't want to deal with long essays to get through university. And to their dismay, engineering programs are full of writing. I can remember a classmate yelling in dismay when we were assigned to write a full technical report. "BUT THEY TOLD ME I WOULDN'T NEED TO WRITE IN ENGINEERING!". And Waterloo has a LOT of engineers. And math students. Who are also more or less in the same boat.
No, this claim is wrong. AAVE does have subject-verb agreement in the present tense; for example, while He working is grammatical, *I working is not, and you must say I'm working or I am working. That's a grammar rule that restricts the admissible forms of the verb depending on the grammatical person of the subject--which is precisely what subject-verb agreement is.
Are you adequate?
true true... and i would argue that text message lingo is more akin to spoken than written. clearly the kiddies are not being taught the difference.
Anybody who's studied linguistics can tell you that that statement is nonsense. The names of verb forms are not descriptions of what they are for. More generally, labels are not definitions, so you can't reason from the non-technical meaning of a technical label to its meaning (it's a fallacy of equivocation). More importantly, the forms of a morphological paradigm are normally multifunctional, so you can't talk of the "meaning" of a form of the verb in isolation from the specific constructions in which the form occurs.
Not to mention the other problem that you have, which is that you simply don't know the import of the example that GP chose. As pointed out already, it's the habitual be construction of African-American Vernacular English, i.e., a grammatical rule in AAVE that's not present in Standard English.
Are you adequate?
This is important-- my dad is a history professor at a community college and is seeing more students recently than he has in the past-- a significant spike even over the prior semester. He's suspecting the down economy is sending a lot of folks back to school while jobs aren't available.
He noted the exact same thing you did-- many of the students he's seeing really aren't cut out for higher education. They just happen to be there due to economic (or maybe societal?) pressures.
+1 Disagree
Wasn't he the guy who wrote my scanner drivers?
Don't you mean "it's entirely arbitrary"? :-) LOL!1
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
While it's true that labels are not always definitions, I'd love to see you try to define the tense of "be" in the original example using the grammatical rules of Standard English.
And no, you're not allowed to fall back on AAVE. The original statement was that "I be working" is understandable but incorrect grammar. That's not the case in AAVE, so it seems reasonable to imply that they were talking about Standard English.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Why would they have any familiarity with informal English at all? Indeed, the English-language requirement in their graduate program (if they indeed have an English requirement at all) would be the ability to read formal English, not informal. And why would they be tech-savvy in such as way at to make them familiar with SMS or informal English? I'd say that that is unlikely to be a requirement of their program at all.
Paragraph breaks: learn to use them.
Alas, the asteroid will be here long before this makes any difference to society, rendering the entire argument moot.
'Definitely' is always spelled with an 'a' -'definitely'. I don't know why
Uh-huh.
I think he accidentally added some spurious apostrophes. In reality, he's autistic. Def-definitely autistic. Definitely autistic.
The Purdue Online Writing Lab has good resources. The old free edition of the Strunk and White is useful but olde-fashioned. You might also read "Politics and the English Language" by Orwell, flawed but useful.
I wish I had a fall-back like that. I can't tell you how hard it is to convey the need for a fall-back to my students who want to be the next great writer. They just can't understand--as I couldn't--that reality applies to them as well.
Yes. I did realize that.
I recall getting points marked down in all my classes (including science classes) for misspellings, and I am stunned by the fact that somehow proper spelling and grammar is not considered something that anyone other than an English teacher should be concerned about when grading.
Speaking as a TA, whenever I look at a hand-in, I offer constructive criticism (in red ink) on all aspects of what I'm handed in (to the extent of my ability). This includes language---i.e. spelling, grammar and choice of words---LaTeX and of course the substance of the assignment.
However, I only grade (i.e. give pass/pass-minus/resubmit) based on the substance, because the hand-ins are there for them to demonstrate an understanding of what they've been taught, not what they have not been taught.
That's not because I don't value clear writing, proper spelling or nice typography. It's because I feel it's not what I'm there to help them learn (that's just a side benefit).
Someone who fails to distinguish between formal and informal writing may have difficulty distinguishing formal and informal behavior
Exactly how much of the variation in social savvy can be predicted from language skill? Has anyone collected that data?
If students can't even handle the colon, how will they ever learn to use the semi-colon? A more elegant punctuation mark from a more civilized age.
I agree. It is all about parenting. When I was little my Mom corrected any grammatical mistake I made no matter what the situation. It took me forever to get the cases of personal pronouns straight. My 6 year old son already has better grammar than many much older kids because I always correct him. Since I do it nicely, he loves it. I guess I'm lucky that my son has a love of language. Someday I'm sure that his friends will become much more of an influence and he will learn texting language and the slang of his generation, and that's just fine because he will be able to switch to real English when he chooses. Parents with poor grammar will pass it on to their kids unless their kids are unusually motivated or in a first rate school.
I think that poor grammar is a symptom of sloppy thinking. Sloppy thinking is at the root of our society's problems. The various political demagogues (thanks spell checker!) would never be able to get away with the lies and fallacious arguments they spew if most of the country were well trained in rhetoric or formal logic.
Here is the point I would like every parent or potential parent to hear: If your schools are not doing the job and you can't afford better schools, it is YOUR JOB to fill in the gaps. I guarantee that my son will be well versed in logic before he finished high school, because he will get it from me.
-- QED
"Cuz" is perfectly acceptable in an SMS. It is not in a paper. Someone who fails to distinguish between formal and informal writing may have difficulty distinguishing formal and informal behavior in other situations and end up telling your major client, who just happens to be a devout Christian, that she spent the last three days at a pot-fueled Wiccan orgy. (Or tell your other major client, who happens to be an LGBT activist, that she thinks all homos should be put to death by stoning.)
Why can't a generic "someone" be a he?
I have a spelling checker,
It came with my PC.
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss steaks aye can knot sea.
Eye ran this poem threw it,
Your sure reel glad two no.
Its vary polished in it's weigh.
My checker tolled me sew.
A checker is a bless sing,
It freeze yew lodes of thyme.
It helps me right awl stiles two reed,
And aides me when eye rime.
Each frays come posed up on my screen
Eye trussed too bee a joule.
The checker pours o'er every word
To cheque sum spelling rule.
Bee fore a veiling checker's
Hour spelling mite decline,
And if we're lacks oar have a laps,
We wood bee maid too wine.
Butt now bee cause my spelling
Is checked with such grate flare,
Their are know fault's with in my cite,
Of nun eye am a wear.
Now spelling does knot phase me,
It does knot bring a tier.
My pay purrs awl due glad den
With wrapped word's fare as hear.
To rite with care is quite a feet
Of witch won should bee proud,
And wee mussed dew the best wee can,
Sew flaw's are knot aloud.
Sow ewe can sea why aye dew prays
Such soft wear four pea seas,
And why eye brake in two averse
Buy righting want too pleas.
-- Dr. Jerrold H. Zar
This is nothing new -- let's see, 30+ years ago when I was studying computer science my brother was a teaching fellow in the history dept.of a well known and highly respected university. His students would turn in illiterate essays that used ascii art then as well, e.g. using up-arrows instead of "increasing" and the like.
Sure, pseudocode is good for getting ideas across to other human beings and developing a rough idea of program flow... But it isn't going to compile. And it doesn't matter how much you argue that programming languages evolve over the years and get new features added and whatnot, your pseudocode still isn't going to compile.
Google "executable pseudocode". I think the Python community have worked pretty hard on producing a good pseudocode interpreter...
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }