When I read something poorly written, whether it's grammar, spelling, or just unclear communication, I question the literacy of the writer. To me, it's an indicator of their intelligence and education, or the lack therof. They just don't know any better - they're ignorant.
We seem to be returning to an earlier time where spelling and grammar were personal preferences or guesses. Try reading original text from the 18th century and you will notice wildly different spellings of common words. The industrial revolution brought education to many people who would not have had the opportunity in the past. Once, a good education was a status symbol and you demonstrated it with your writing and speech.
English is a particularly difficult language to write. It masquerades as phonetic, but there are many possible spellings for the same sounds. , An example is the word 'ghoti', which is pronounced as "fish": The gh as in enough, the o as in women, and the ti as in nation.
Once there were classes devoted to spelling, grammar, and composition, and the teachers corrected errors. These days many of our teachers can not recognize the errors, let alone correct them.
I think a contributor to the spelling issue is our changed pronunciation. We no longer enunciate clearly. If there is no difference between "are" and "our" when we say it, then the sentence "are work is guaranteed" makes sense to the writer.
For me, the saddest part is what we read and see in the media. Spelling and grammar mistakes abound in print. Poor pronunciation, awkward phrasing and mixed metaphors are common in radio and television programs. If our parents, teachers, peers and the media all give us incorrect examples, how can we learn?
The answer is that we don't learn. We use our spelling and grammar checking software and just rely on the answers it gives us because we assume it's right; we don't know for sure.
It's not just spelling and grammar either. Other basic skills like arithmetic are also in decline. A cashier once gave me $94 in change from a $10 bill because that's what the cash register told her to do - she didn't know any better. She didn't realize there was a mistake, so it didn't occur to her to check if she had mistakenly put in 100 instead of 10.
Spelling and grammar checkers are tools. Calculators are tools. Hammers are tools. If we don't know how to control a hammer, and just let it fall, we hit our thumbs and it hurts. If we don't know how to control our software we hurt ourselves and others with our mistakes.
I once heard one of their spokes-people on a radio show who said that if he fried a fish on his electric stove and the electricity was nuclear powered you couldn't convince him that his fish wouldn't end up being radioactive.
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When I read something poorly written, whether it's grammar, spelling, or just unclear communication, I question the literacy of the writer. To me, it's an indicator of their intelligence and education, or the lack therof. They just don't know any better - they're ignorant.
We seem to be returning to an earlier time where spelling and grammar were personal preferences or guesses. Try reading original text from the 18th century and you will notice wildly different spellings of common words. The industrial revolution brought education to many people who would not have had the opportunity in the past. Once, a good education was a status symbol and you demonstrated it with your writing and speech.
English is a particularly difficult language to write. It masquerades as phonetic, but there are many possible spellings for the same sounds. , An example is the word 'ghoti', which is pronounced as "fish": The gh as in enough, the o as in women, and the ti as in nation.
Once there were classes devoted to spelling, grammar, and composition, and the teachers corrected errors. These days many of our teachers can not recognize the errors, let alone correct them.
I think a contributor to the spelling issue is our changed pronunciation. We no longer enunciate clearly. If there is no difference between "are" and "our" when we say it, then the sentence "are work is guaranteed" makes sense to the writer.
For me, the saddest part is what we read and see in the media. Spelling and grammar mistakes abound in print. Poor pronunciation, awkward phrasing and mixed metaphors are common in radio and television programs. If our parents, teachers, peers and the media all give us incorrect examples, how can we learn?
The answer is that we don't learn. We use our spelling and grammar checking software and just rely on the answers it gives us because we assume it's right; we don't know for sure.
It's not just spelling and grammar either. Other basic skills like arithmetic are also in decline. A cashier once gave me $94 in change from a $10 bill because that's what the cash register told her to do - she didn't know any better. She didn't realize there was a mistake, so it didn't occur to her to check if she had mistakenly put in 100 instead of 10.
Spelling and grammar checkers are tools. Calculators are tools. Hammers are tools. If we don't know how to control a hammer, and just let it fall, we hit our thumbs and it hurts. If we don't know how to control our software we hurt ourselves and others with our mistakes.
The Anti-Nuclear-Anything lobby is right.
I once heard one of their spokes-people on a radio show who said that if he fried a fish on his electric stove and the electricity was nuclear powered you couldn't convince him that his fish wouldn't end up being radioactive.
Talk about not knowing the science!