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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.
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
OMG Juliet was like, oh oh, OMG were is my bf Romeo and I was like, so GET OVER IT teh rediculus bitch.
Sure, language in itself is arbitrary. But our orthography, syntax, and vocabulary are very good proxies for our education and intelligence, and decision-makers quite rightly use our communicate skills to judge these traits.
Even if using smilies in term papers merely indicated we were at the forefront of innovation in English, the inability of switch to a formal, scholarly register in the appropriate context would make us seem ignorant in the eyes of the world, and would hamstring our international credibility.
But no, that's not why we write like that: instead, it's because we're a nation of fucking imbeciles who hold education in contempt, and think of intelligence as a threat.
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...
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.
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.)
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)
Try Australia; they'll welcome anyone who passes their entrance exam, which simply consists of subduing a crocodile with your bare hands.
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
The particular issue is that we rely on grammatical and syntactic norms to make ourselves understood, particularly when attempting to convey complex structures of ideas. Trying to distinguish a gold-nibbed pen from a gold, nibbed pen, is a simple example. When you substitute your own grammatical norms, then you restrict your ability to convey ideas to those who share those norms. When you start to throw out grammatical constructs completely, then everybody - even those people that share your bespoke grammar - are reliant on context to understand exactly what you're trying to say. It might not even be possible for you to convey particular ideas, not to sound too Orwellian.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Is our children learning?
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
What part of speech is "eh?"
Punctuation!
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
You know the solution to your problem? Use proper English in IM conversations too.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm 25. Yes, yes, our history is full of all sorts of calamities and embarrassing transgressions. But after World War II, we'd addressed most of them. We had a recessions here, and red scare there. There were the civil rights battles, and various minor wars. But for the most part, society was stable and relatively prosperous. Income inequality was low, scientific progress rapid, and social mobility high. We were respected throughout the world. The late 1970s saw stagflation, but that was the result of an exogenous supply shock, not domestic mismanagement.
The shit hit the fan around 1980, when our Gini coefficient (which measures concentration of wealth) shot through the roof. The average take-home income stagnated; two incomes become required to achieve the standard of living that could be achieved before with one. Then, finally, our political process became shrill and infantilized, and we lost the ability to respect effective to public crises.
We squandered a system that worked and replaced it with something that resembles, on paper, what we had in 1929: largely unregulated markets dominated by oligarchs with a parasitic banking sector that corrupted the political process.
Unfortunately, we weren't lucky enough to get a second FDR.
"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.