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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."
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?
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?
as long as i can remember, the next generation has always looked worse than the previous generation. mostly because they did thing differently. generation X was said to be lazy 15 years ago because they sat around with their computers all the time instead of working in a factory
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.
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.
Some say, that Idiocracy was a documentary sent back from the future
Other than having electrolytes, you know what the scariest thing about Idiocracy is? Every year that passes since it's release, that future seems not only more possible, but more probable.
My fiance thinks the future will be a combination of Wall-E and Idiocracy, but whatever...it's not looking good -_-;;
Living With a Nerd
I think the point is that currently the language is "de"-volving.
It's ok to create new compound words for new ideas and technologies. It's ok to have colloquial words included in the official language because everybody uses them. It's not OK to simply encourage laziness and sloppiness under the pretext of an evolving language. Maybe fast food restaurants prefer to use a sign that says "Drive Thru" instead of "Drive Through" because the sign is smaller (and therefore cheaper). That's no excuse to use the word "thru" in a thesis.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"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?
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).
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?
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)
I am an American, you neanderthal. How likely is it that I'm just spewing anti-American "propaganda" for propaganda's sake? It's rather telling that you'd rather hear good news than reality: when you see that happen, you know a company or organization or country is not long for this world.
I indict this nation because I love it, or more specifically, I love the ideas it was founded on, and what I've read it used to be like. What I resent is that I was born a generation too late to appreciate that cultural flowering, and that I'm around to see morons like you squander what should have made us the happiest, wealthiest, most enlightened people to have ever lived.
Fuck you.
So it's a bit of a cheap shot, but I can't help but quoting this sentence from your post, which later on complained about grammar:
As for the substantive point, I think the lack of good teachers is a bigger problem than a surplus of bad ones. It isn't like there's a long line of great teachers who are unable to find jobs, sitting impatiently behind this mass of horrible teachers that the union won't let us fire. Teaching is simply not a profession that attracts the best minds, for a mixture of reasons that mostly involve its relatively low status, relatively low pay, and poor working conditions (K-12 education is as much babysitting as teaching).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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
This is more anti American propaganda and I'm entirely against it.
I'm guessing you've never actually travelled outside your own borders; or if you have, never alone.
There's a saying, better to be thought of as stupid than open your mouth and confirm it... if you don't like stereotypes about USA citizens then you're far better off not confirming them.
People learning English as a foreign language get taught proper grammar and only learn the vernacular later.
People in England learn the street language and never get taught the grammar.
In online chat it's comical how often you can tell the 'Continental European speaking English' as opposed to the 'Native Brit or Irish person' purely from their superior grammar and spelling. That's particularly true for the younger age groups.
Problem is that all kids are prepared to pass those stupid tests and outside them they know jack shit
Hence the current Facebook protests that an exam asked questions that they hadn't been specifically taught the answers to. A comment quoted on national news was "that's 6 months of attending lessons wasted."
This worries me. People shouldn't be taught the test answers, they should be taught the basics in the subject and how to learn. The whole UK education system appears to be increasingly broken, and that (even more than the Government putting us into record debt) threatens the viability of the nation for the next few decades.
(Add it to the national debt and we're basically fucked.)
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.
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
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
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!
Err... Don't you think that's a bit, well, histrionic?
First of all, let's look at baselines and samples and that sort of question. If we administered a test to college freshman in 1910 and compared the results to college freshman of 2010, we'd be mortified if we looked at the percentage that passed some benchmark. But suppose we ask the question "if we took the top N students from each era, what percentage would meet some arbitrary level of proficiency". Now take N to be the number of ALL college freshman in 1910. 2010 would kick 1910's butt, because there are VASTLY more people going to college today.
That's clearly a test obviously slanted toward 2010. But comparing raw percentages is a test obviously slanted toward 1910, and has less rational justification.
Now, let's look as sampling. Suppose we administered the test every year for five years to some institution, and nothing fundamental changes about the world. Would we expect to get 30%, 30%, 30%, 30%, 30%? Of course not. It'd go up and down a few percentage points. It might go something like 30%, 24%, 23%, 29%, 25%, even if nothing had changed.
The fact that the test went from 30% to 25% over the course of several years immediately tells us that the numbers don't reflect a change in the overall population of students. The world does not change quickly enough to produce those kinds of dramatic swings in the population. The difference might well be statistical noise, but we shouldn't ignore *other* kinds of changes, ones not reflecting the state of the entire world. This could be a change at one institution.
If Waterloo wanted to raise the score on its test, it could simply alter its admission standards. Colleges are constantly tweaking their admission standards. This year we want more students with athletics, or performing arts backgrounds. We're switching from formula A to formula B in scoring. We've changed admission committee chairman. All kinds of things happen. That's not counting the fact that Waterloo has *competition* that's trying to take the best students away.
Even if we administered this test to all freshmen everywhere, and knew there was a systemic population decline in the ability to achieve a passing grade, that wouldn't necessarily mean the end is nigh. We'd have to administer a *battery* of tests covering a wide variety of skills. Maybe composing in standard grammar has been deemphasized (obviously a bad thing) and replaced with more education on critical reading (obviously a good thing). We could fix this if we wanted to by deemphasizing critical reading (obviously a bad thing) and emphasizing standard grammar more (obviously a good thing).
What does the test measure anyway? The ability to compose according to one arbitrary standard of what English grammar ought to be. As useful as being able to conform to the standard dialect is for the individual, it's not the only useful skill there is, or even the most useful one to society. I'd be more concerned about declining math ability in the population, provided we could define that reasonably and measure it accurately.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
And don't you think it's in your interest to live in an educated society? Education is intellectual infrastructure.
Are you the kind of person who would oppose a highway because some big-government bureaucrat would take your hard-earned tax dollars and plan the route without you?
Compared to the US, German universities are essentially free.
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.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it."
- H. L. Mencken
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
You know what is the most terrifying? I'm a foreigner in England and found that I know grammar and spelling better than most of my English friends. We're talking about people who passed through basic education system here, and at least half of them also through higher studies. If you ask them about grammar, apostrophe rules or spelling they will just say they never studied this. Nobody ever though them this. Then you wonder why all this is in total shambles.
Problem is that all kids are prepared to pass those stupid tests and outside them they know jack shit. There are exceptions, but general population is similar to Idiocracy one.
That's the funny thing. Many of the dumber grammatical errors you see on Slashdot are made by people who are evidently native English speakers. They're things that should have been corrected in grade school, like problems with "your" and "you're", or "their", "there" and "they're". As they occur in trends like many other mindless activities, the latest one is "loose" vs. "lose".
The tests and their failure to guarantee competence when passed is a natural result of the exaggerated and undue emphasis that schools place on memorization by rote. If you had a perfect photographic memory, you would breeze through most any modern school curriculum. That doesn't mean you'd actually understand what you have memorized or be able to adapt that knowledge to different situations.
We have created something of a Catch-22 or self-fulfilling prophecy: the standardized test dictates what the students are taught, so according to that test the students have learned. Nowhere in this do you find a regard for whether they have any real mastery of that knowledge. They're just being taught to regurgitate information with no real understanding and I could teach a parrot to do that. Writing in particular is generally a creative process. It has mechanical elements but does not really lend itself to mechanized repetition; it's not like operating a machine. It's no surprise to me that this is where the incompetence is most evident.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
"Some say, that Idiocracy" (parmesan comma)
These commas may be the result of the international adoption of English as the "lingua franca". In German (and possibly other languages), that comma would be correct. Many non-native English speaking and writing people learn from online conversations, which are often informal and written in an oral style. They learn from each other and so some of the rules in their native languages cross over into their English and into other people's English.
'its', the 3rd person singular possessive pronoun, does not require an apostrophe
That's an irregularity which can be real problem for non-native writers as well. The possessive form is normally created by appending apostrophe-s, so it's only natural to write "it's". The collision with the short form of "it is" is not apparent, especially when you use a formal writing style and avoid these short forms.
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?
You're confusing breadth with depth. We certainly have a higher overall literacy rate now, and that's admirable. It's probably due to a greater focus on rural and special-needs education.
But literacy is non synonymous with the kind of education that leads to prosperity and innovation. It's a prerequisite for success, sure, but alone is insufficient. I think you discount the possibility that in making education more accessible, we've also made it shallower, more mechanized, and less helpful for those on the right side of the bell curve, who are the ones who actually move society forward.
We keep delaying the onset of maturity, pushing what used to be high school curricula into undergraduate schools, and what used to be in undergraduate programs into graduate ones. As a result, we've made higher education increasingly expensive and inconvenient.
Gee, as a fellow American, I'm disgraced to live on even the same continent as you, much less be involved in a society to which you contribute. I'm glad to see you posted AC; perhaps you were trying to avoid incurring the wrath of the "god damn coward" of a teacher you claim to have threatened - no irony there.
Please, don't ever reproduce.
For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
Good teachers were purged in the 80's then again in the early 90's when the last hold outs from the old guard (pre baby boomer) who believed that their profession was about teaching and not about cultural and social indoctrination were forced into retirement, sidelined or outright maligned.
It's all very boring. Good normal people won't go in en-masse because the teaching profession is chock full of psuedo-science and slightly unhinged useful idiots. They figure that out during Uni and get the hell out. No normal person wants to go into a classroom full of children 5 days a week completely disarmed and without any sort of authority and real disciplinary regime to back them up ("contracts" I LOLed as a teenager). Anybody who actually does attempt to teach outside of the mandated and bizarre "whole child" policy guidelines are very unpopular individuals and go no where in a hurry.
My most memorable teachers were the ones who would bark at the trouble makers (me included) and mean it. They no longer exist, even the most conservative private schools don't do punitive discipline anymore.
Allegedly a child can do no wrong.
Weep for the west.
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.
As a current student at the University of Waterloo, I only had to pass the English Language Proficiency Exam. I did not have to take any writing courses after the exam. However, I think there are some supplementary courses available if you do fail. Personally, I think they should be failing more than 30% of the students. Some of the writing I have seen from my peers is horrible! (I don't think being in Engineering is an acceptable excuse for not being able to write coherently)
You're not so hot yourself. You used a colon to enter a list, but then didn't use semi-colons to separate the items. Moreover you used three bracketed additions to a single sentence. By my reckoning, you've even got a "parmesan comma" yourself in the third bracket; the structure of the sentence suggest to me that "I'll overlook the emoticon since..." is the more correct usage--not that the sentence makes much sense anyway.
Basically, grammar is less a formal series of rules for better writing, and is more a formal series of rules for petty "one-upmanship" among writers. That's the primary reason people ignore it; it's too subjective. Spelling is different as there is generally a binary answer people can't harp on once it's done correctly. You don't really get spelling Nazis. But Grammar is an eternal struggle in which generations of good writers have had to hack, chop and staple their prose with correctly place commas, colons, dashes, quotes and brackets; and yet they still don't have the equivalent to expressing themselves yourself--quickly and easily--using a '^_^'.
Emoticons are not a sign of poor grammar. They are a sign of the stagnation of grammar in the hands of its professional custodians, and the corresponding vibrancy of the written word in the hands of an innovative population. JRR Tolkien riddled the Lord of the Rings with punctuation marks. He could count himself lucky if most people noticed one in a thousand of them. Punctuation is not as important as some people think it is. And grammar is too subjective to bother with when writing.
May the Maths Be with you!
"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.
If formal documents are written according to a certain set of rules while the average teenager write as he or she sees fit then it is clear that the average teenager is the one who is wrong. Many of the "txt speek" words and grammar constructs are either oversimplified to the point where a word has many possible meanings or, in the case of grammar, is mangled to the point where it is either extremely context-sensitive or simply unreadable. When you add numerous typos due to pure laziness ("wat gsu men u odn unsterna?!! lrn 2 raeed ckocglnbi faget!!1") the end result is not only unreadable but also completely without any kind of consistency, learning how one person communicates in "txt speek" rarely aides in the understanding of "txt speek" written by another individual.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Oh, and it's telling that history education in high school (or at least my high school) stops after World War II. Basically, the message is "we won and lived happily ever after."
Ostensibly, the curriculum stops there because time needs to be set aside to prepare for the New York reagents exam. But that's a flimsy excuse: we could have simply spent less time on the rather less important 1870-1890 reconstruction period. Really, the apprehension surrounding the idea of teaching politically-sensitive history was palpable, and I'm sure everyone was relieved to not have to delve into Vietnam.
Remember one simple fact: the skill set required for someone to get a Ph.D in any given field has very little correlation with the skillsets required for such tasks as dressing oneself, attending to personal hygeine, or speaking in coherent sentences. The only "skills" required to get a Ph.D are (a) access to enough money to exist as a student for the requisite time, (b) the ability to regurgitate what your professors wish to hear, and (c) the ability to attach oneself to a previous Ph.D recipient long enough to have one's hand held through the process of writing a thesis.
I know too many Ph.D's who cannot tell the difference between its/it's, there/they're/their, and other simple homonyms. These people also have absolutely no concept of the value of money and are more than willing to give a passing grade to papers and assignments that contain similar grammatical mistakes as mentioned by TFA and the parent post.
As regards Idiocracy, while hyperbolic, it definitely does call attention to a growing concern for Western society. The lowest-intelligence portions of our society increasingly sit as dependent breeding stock, suckling at the teat of government social programs generationally whilst producing an overabundance of mentally deficient young who then perpetuate the cycle. Diseases perpetuated only by reckless or ignorant behavior that should have no foothold in a modern society are instead coming back in force, due to these idiots insisting that "well there will be a cure in the next 10 years so I don't have to worry" (actual quote from one of these morons who passed on HIV to one of her kids in the womb).
Well-meaning idiots bemoan the "failure" of the education system while refusing to make the basic changes necessary to reform it. Enforcing classroom discipline and removing troubled and disruptive children have become impossible. Properly stratified classes that truly challenge and educate the best and brighest children, while placing the lesser intellects into properly focused remedial programs, are seen as "discriminatory" if a given district strays too far from the racial numbers that racial supremacist agitators want to see. In the name of "diversity", all children are instead randomly tossed into classrooms that move at the pace of the slowest idiot, causing the education of the truly intelligent to be stunted. In most cases, creativity and intelligence - two innate talents that should be encouraged at all costs - are instead actively stifled by jealous teachers who are themselves the dimmest bulbs of their own generation (remember, the average IQ of college students in Education-related degree programs is lower even than Communications or Physical Education programs). Entrenched, unqualified individuals (tenured teachers and teachers' unions) insist that an unregulated and unfocused "more money for Education", rather than properly spent money combined with the elimination of unqualified individuals and proven-ineffective teaching doctrines from the system, is the solution.
And of course programs proven to nurture intelligence and leadership are then attacked as well. Scouting has been under attack for decades, a true shame since it encourages young men and women to go out and be active in their community and grow into thoughtful citizens, as well as teaching life skills such as planning schedules, reacting to emergencies and maintaining a budget. Programs like the Young Democrats and Young Republicans have all but vanished, a true shame since these programs did much to teach young men and women to engage in civil disagreement (as well as community engagement and good citizenship!) rather than the partisan hackery that is all young children learn today from television shows. Music and fine arts programs have been vanishing all over the country, victims to both the "more money for test scores" problem and the growth, overadulation and overfunding of "sports" (specifically, football and basketball) which rely more on the physical grotesqueness of one or two "team stars" than an ability on the part of players to react to different situations as a team.
That can be really dangerous though. In all of science, engineering, medicine, history, and philosophy it is important to be extremely precise in your wording in order to properly convey ideas. If you don't teach people the necessary language tools to do this early on then they will have a much higher barrier to enter these fields and we will have even more trouble pushing innovation forward.
*I'm sure a lot more fields that I can't think of at the moment.
Latin was not dramatically more precise or expressive than English, properly used.
That's my basic problem with where language seems to be going with the apathetic/ignorant. They are simply less expressive. It's very clear, if you spend time trying to communicate complex or nuanced ideas to these sorts of people, that they are simply unable to keep up.
There isn't any one culprit, and I really hesitate to blame texting/chatting for the decline. More, it feels as though as a society we are no longer challenging individuals to think. Consider how the news gets presented these days: black and whites, sound bytes, many commentators taking up extreme opinions to sell the story, etc.
I think at least one finger deserves to be pointed at those of us who are educated but become jaded or apathetic about the system. Change is still possible. If it isn't, there's no way of knowing, so we may as well continue working towards it.
That's assuming that the only purpose of grammar is understanding. Maybe it isn't. There is a lot of ambiguity in our language, and an unbelievable amount of implicit information. In other words: The vast majority of information that you need to understand these sentences here is not actually contained within them.
Compressing language to the highest density that still allows comprehension also has the side-effect of increasing ambiguity and reducing clarity. It works if both parties share enough implicit information that they can construct the rest, and the medium allows for immediate correction of errors. The problem is that this is not true in all circumstances, so if you make it your basic modus operandi, you set yourself up for failure in everything but texting with your friends.
There's no harm in knowing slang, or Internet shorthands, or 1337-sp34k, etc. etc. But there is in not knowing anything else.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Scouting has been under attack for decades, a true shame since it encourages young men and women to go out and be active in their community and grow into thoughtful citizens, as well as teaching life skills such as planning schedules, reacting to emergencies and maintaining a budget.
That's quite a screed you've got there. I agree with some of it, and find a lot of it a little shrill. This bit I quoted kinda stuck in my craw though. I agree that programs *like* boy & girl scouts of america are a good idea. The problem for me is when the scouts shot themselves in the foot by trying to defend anti-gay policies.
I know that isn't an attitude I want drilled into my kids. No thanks. We have enough of that from our fathers. The molesters you have to look out for are almost never the out gays. It's just more gay-bashing clothed in the appearance of thinking of the children.
Maybe you should get involved with the scout leadership and get the thing on track again. It sounds like a paramilitary christian training camp to most people, I think.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
To their great joy, communication worked well between them even without this fancy 'grammar' grown-ups brag about.
Plenty of flamewars get started due to miscommunication when someone either says something that they don't mean to say, or tries to compress an idea too much and winds up making a vague statement that can be interpreted in different, or even conflicting, ways. It's easy enough to do this with "correct" or formal writing.
Poke around in the comments section of YouTube and you'll find that this new mode communication isn't really working well, even for the people who use it regularly. It would be more noticeable to the people using it if more of them actually were interested in understanding what other people are saying.
As you imply in your last paragraph, if someone wants to simplify grammar, it needs to be done in such a way that functionality is not lost.
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
Sometimes it's "it has".
And that's not a problem.
Some idiotic grammatical prescriptions, such as those against splitting infinitives, beginning sentences with conjunctions, and ending them with prepositions, are nonsense. They don't clarify the language.
As Winston Churchill famously said, "this is something up with which I will not put!"
the skill set required for someone to get a Ph.D in any given field has very little correlation with the skillsets required for such tasks as dressing oneself, attending to personal hygeine, or speaking in coherent sentences.
That reminds me something that a professor told us in Cryptography 101. "Anyone that doesn't know that there are 24 letters (Greek) deserves to fail". There are some things that you just need to know to be able to function properly in a society. These include speaking, writing and simple math, regardless of your area of expertise.
It may be 7 digits, but at least it's a semiprime
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!
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.
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.
The U's are necessary, it's the extra n's, e's and roaming c's in 'unnessecary' you have to watch out for.
Jonathanjk.com
Sorry to nitpick, but the primary requirement for a PhD is to contribute something original and of value to your field, whereas lower degrees such as a Master's only require you to demonstrate a high level of skill. I like to remember that when I come across somebody with a Doctorate; taken apart from their other achievements it's not much more or less than a certificate saying that they did something original and useful at least once in their lives.
That's either damn cool or practically irrelevant depending on the situation.
.evom ton seod gis eht
the skill set required for someone to get a Ph.D in any given field has very little correlation with the skillsets required for such tasks as dressing oneself, attending to personal hygeine, or speaking in coherent sentences
That's utterly false. Only the most Mickey-Mouse universities would award a Ph.D to someone who couldn't effectively write a dissertation or academic paper. The ability to effectively communicate is critical for academics and they are, in general, very well-spoken individuals who can clearly express ideas both within and outside their area of expertise. Good scientific writing requires clear, concise and understandable grammar.
Gud luck gettn' funding w/ bad grammar ;-)
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
If we're talking about money spent on education, then it most certainly does as would any other thing the government spends a lot of money on. The US has only five percent of the world's population, but roughly 25% of the world's prisoner's. I think that raises some serious questions. Are we Americans *really* that much more dangerous and violent than the other people on this planet?
Not all crimes need to be punished with jail time. Locking people up makes you popular with some folks and will get you votes, but does it really make sense to lock up a non-violent drug offender rather than help him or her out with a treatment program that will allow them to get their life back on track and become a productive member of society again? I never said anything about letting violent wackos from drug gangs out early, but rather expressed dismay at the growing prison complex in Arizona.
I'm not sure what your experience with the situation in Maricopa County is, but Sheriff Joe and County Attorney Andrew Thomas are polarizing figures. The people who like them, really like them. The people who don't, really don't. Maricopa County has more pending death penalty cases than Harris County, Texas which has sent more people to the execution chamber than any other county in America. Setting all ethical issues aside, these kinds of tactics cost lots and lots of money and haven't proven themselves to be any more effective in terms of stopping recidivism. There comes a time when you have to wonder why the people in charge are asking for so much power and using so much force.
According to Wikipedia, an ad hominem attack "is an argument which links the validity of a premise to an irrelevant characteristic or belief of the person advocating the premise." My calling Arpaio a wack job was based upon the methods he employs, including dying the prison underwear pink, driving an armored vehicle around poor neighborhoods to intimidate people, and buying a .50-cal machine gun shortly after 9/11 with the claim that he would use it to shoot down aircraft that looked suspicious. Those are all wacky and those are all fair game. People need to wake up and realize that such things are nothing more than hollow publicity stunts being paid for by the taxpayer.
I guess they were just victims of context
Aren't we all?
Living With a Nerd
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.
All of those reasons you listed are why my wife and I will be homeschooling our 1-month old son when the time comes. My stepdaughter is in public school now, and they continually convince me that I do not want to trust my son's education in their hands. As it is, we try to supplement her education so that she doesn't fall behind, especially when the teacher doesn't have time to go over papers with her.
I will be more than thankful when we move out of our current district and into one that will hopefully have better teachers than she has now. And she'll be in a school that isn't proud of the fact that 85% of the students can't even afford lunch.
I'd argue that grammar is essentially less blatantly obvious syntax. Look at your example, "I be working." You claim that's still perfectly understandable, and it might be in this case because a lot of people tend to misuse it the same way. But 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. Hell, you haven't even stated clearly that there is no definite time.
It's understandable because it's a simple phrase, and we can substitute a reasonable conjugation of the verb when we hear it. It doesn't necessarily follow that similar bad grammar will be easily corrected by the listener in more complex constructions, nor does it mean that every form is just as correct. You can't just discard the entire concept of verb conjugation without losing some fidelity in the message you're delivering.
As for snobby and elitist, you don't walk into a music academy, sit down at the piano and play Chopsticks, and expect to be taken seriously. The same goes for communicating with people who have spent time learning the nuance of the language. The distinction between various words and verb forms arose because it let people communicate more precisely. You can't just walk in and claim, "I never bothered to learn these so I'm going to assume they don't matter, and by the way, you guys are snobs," because you don't like the fact that language has precision.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Well-meaning idiots bemoan the "failure" of the education system while refusing to make the basic changes necessary to reform it.
Most of the grammatical solecisms we see here are not so much a failure in competence as a writer, but more a failure in reading. It is the latter that does most to instil by example what we might consider "proper" usage of our language. I'm not saying that rules should be set in concrete (that just won't work), but meaningful syntax isn't that hard to learn. While lots of kids, or indeed adults may spend hours sitting at a computer, playing on the internet, this doesn't really qualify as concentrated reading. What they are actually doing is little more engaged than mindless channel-hopping on a TV.
The majority will rarely read much beyond the first sentence of an article. For example, I have a friend who has multiple university degrees, and who is CEO of a successful public-listed company. I have found that if I have a series of points or questions requiring a response via email (he won't use IM), the best way is to go about it is to send a series of single-sentence emails, with the content in the title. What niggles me most about this is that although he realises I am taking the piss out of him, he makes no effort to address the issue.
So, getting back your sentence that I quoted, I see little point in taking aim at the education system which has absolutely no control over students' reading, when it is really society that is at least tacitly encouraging everybody to boil down meaning into bite-sized gobbets. Watching a movie (however rewarding) is not a replacement for reading a book.
If people are to become competent writers, they must first become competent readers, and they can only do that by not regarding reading as a chore. I was brought up to consider reading to be fun, or something I could/would do when being lazy. That is where the education system might do well to pitch its resources.
Shakespeare... if he was sitting one of these courses, he'd probably fail by the same criteria
Doubtful, since Shakespeare actually knew the language, and could use it. He used slang and nonproper words for literary effect, and not because he didn't know any better. These students don't actually know English, Shakespeare did, the comparison is false.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
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.