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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."
Disclaimer: I am German. While we have our own share of problems, I like living here but the one year I lived in the US I liked that, too.
Just one minor inaccuracy: the cost for university depend on where you live, and can range from 0-500 Eur + fees per semester. (I pay around 600)
The article fails basic orthography. It's the University of Waterloo, not Waterloo University ...
The test mentioned in the article places students in one of a graduated series of writing courses (at least it did in 1987, when I went there).
And now, a professor in Pennsylvania, I get papers riddled with "cuz", "u", and God knows what else.
OK, I can't resist, I'll start us off. From TFA:
AHHHH!!!! It's percent not per cent!!
British English vs. American English. From Wikipedia: In British English, percent is sometimes written as two words (per cent, although percentage and percentile are written as one word). [...] The form "per cent." is still in use as a part of the highly formal language found in certain documents like commercial loan agreements (particularly those subject to, or inspired by, common law), as well as in the Hansard transcripts of British Parliamentary proceedings. While the term has been attributed to Latin per centum, this is a pseudo-Latin construction and the term was likely originally adopted from the French pour cent.
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!
Of course you don't mean "free" as in beer. Most of your tuition is paid for by the good taxpayers of Germany who presumably view a well-educated citizenry as an overall win relative to the cost involved.
I do mean "free" as in beer. Free beer is given out to make a party better, however said beer needs to either be purchased or produced, which costs money, man-power, etc. Free education is given out to make society better, although teachers need to be paid, books need to be bought, etc. I agree, though, that it's about priority. I went to a public university (University of Arizona) in the US. With a tuition of about $3,500 per semester for in-state students (roughly 5 times the €500 fee here), it was one of the cheapest universities you could find in the state. However, when the money got tight, the state opted to slash the education budget but continued to happily fund the fourth largest jail system in the world, something that, IMO, makes no sense. People in jail must be fed, clothed, sheltered etc by the State. People in college require assistance for a time, but eventually come out more educated and more capable, which would seem to be more helpful to the economy than funding a wack job sheriff who likes to drive a tank around poor neighborhoods to intimidate people.
I feel like the general idea of university is cheaper here as well. People don't shell out hundreds of Euros per semester on books they don't want or need but nonetheless are required to buy because the prof or department has a sweetheart deal with a publisher. People live in modest student housing that costs around €190 per month with utilities and internet included rather than renting out houses and filling them with kegerators and big screen TVs. I see advantages and disadvantages to both systems, but I really think the US could learn a thing or two about saving money from paying attention to how things are here.
That may be true. However, when you're writing a message calling out grammatical errors in something written by someone else, you should reread it before sending to avoid Muphry's Law. And yes, I reread this post several times but that doesn't guarantee I avoided Muphry's Law myself.
Whenever I have to write either "its" or "it's", I have to stop and remind myself that the normal apostrophe rules are essentially reversed.
No, they aren't reversed.
Where is his brain?
Where is its brain?
It is my ball.
It's my ball.
Although I agree with the sentiment, the BSA was likely never a strictly secular program. I can't say for sure about the first few months after its creation, as it was a private organization from February 1910 through April 1910, at which point control was taken over by the YMCA, emphasis on the C for Christian. The Scout Oath includes the line "To do my duty to God," and thousands of packs, with hundreds of thousands of members, are organized by churches.
Again, while I disagree with the anti-gay rhetoric of the BSA, it's important to note that this is a case of secular society attempting to "hijack" a semi-religious program.
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
If you try to deconstruct that sentence, it really has no definite meaning. You're using the infinitive form of the verb, which means you really haven't defined a definite time for the statement.
No, it has a perfectly definite meaning, because it's a perfectly grammatical sentence in Black Vernacular English. "Be" is used to construct the habitual present tense. This isn't discarding verb conjugation, it's using an additional conjugation that you don't happen to have in your own dialect. Note that if you replace this particular construct with what you think is a "reasonable conjugation" (say, changing "I be working" to "I am working") you'll misunderstand the sentence.