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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.
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?
I once had a freshman student write in a paper, "The bathroom smelled in a way that is not relevant to life."
tl;dr
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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
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.
What part of speech is "eh?"
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.
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.
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.
Hai, I can haz degree?
"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.)
What percentage of freshman students at UW are from Hong Kong?
Just sayin', is all.
[citation needed]
Actually foreigners usually make a greater effort to ensure accurate language. Sometimes they might just not "get it" due to huge semantic differences in the languages, which is why they might say things in a strange way from time to time. But mostly the sloppiness and laziness comes from the native speaker.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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)
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.
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.
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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!
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
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
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!
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."
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.
Exactly.
We already have words for a great many things. Nice, specific words that mean almost exactly what you're trying to say. But people don't bother to learn these words... And then try to convey meaning by using a different word, or mashing some other words together.
An example from my own life...
One of my co-workers was trying to describe where his arm was sore after moving furniture over the weekend. He said that the "top of the upper part" of his arm was sore. Not the shoulder... Not the bones... "the muscle... on top, like when you flex..." He demonstrated, and pointed at the sore muscle. His biceps.
Or how about all those lovely people who say "literally" when they really mean it figuratively, but just want to emphasize the statement.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
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
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.
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
Off topic, but the use of "thru" on a thesis reminded me of something from my dissertation.
I used the term "thusly" in my prospectus, as in "So-and-so explained the effect thusly:" followed by a long quote. The most esteemed (and elderly) member of my committee said, "Look that up before you use it."
I discovered that "thusly" was first used by British satirists to mock the speech of people who were trying to sound intelligent. Its use was promptly adopted by academics.
I learned my lesson and changed it to "thus".
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Nevermind that this creates a compilation error!
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
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?
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.
"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.
Mod parent off-topic. This thread is about inability to write, not inability to read.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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 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.
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.
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
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.