Grammar, spelling, and other language skills in the 21st century

Raymond1000 said:
Bladsmth, there are many variables here. A huge one is changing expectations.

For most of human literacy, illiteracy was the rule. Only a small fraction of the population was literate. That was okay because there was little need. The peasants and the working poor were frankly illiterate. You don’t need your letters to follow a plow or carry a hod.

In the fifties our schools worked fairly well. But they didn’t aim everyone at college. You could make a living—and raise a family—working in some trade. Most men did. Who cared if they flunked bonehead English?

Today we assume every child should go to college. That’s the way high schools behave, anyway. Now you need to prepare a huge population of bonehead English students for university.

Study the health of high school athletes. Now study the athletes and the high school couch potatoes. No behavior has changed, but the second study shows dispiriting results.

When you look at apparent educational devolution, factor in this social change.
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Not acceptable.
We are in an industry/trade that has a public image problem that dates back at least to the roots of the switchblade laws if not before, and we are trying to promote our trade as a craft and an artform. Promulgation of illiterate gibberish and gutter argot does nothing to advance positive public perception of the artisans engaged in our craft; indeed it counters it, presenting us as a band of proto-Neanderthals and demeans our trade to the level of shanks and other instruments of murder and social decay.

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I don't think we assume every child should go to college, I believe we should educate them to their highest level to prepare them if they want to go to college. Unfortunately we end up pushing them along "to keep up with their peers". That is unacceptable. What is the use of having a child in the same grade as his peers if he can't do the work? What is worse, being held back a year because you couldn't complete a course to the level expected or having your university application rejected because you have the skill level of a ninth grader?
 
When I was a kid we didn't have "courtesy passing" one of my schoolmates flunked Kindergarten even! I almost flunked a grade for not doing the work, we had competitive games and people were chosen last on teams. Now they have "games" where nobody loses, retarded kids are "mainstreamed" when I was teaching college at a major school I had to get permission from the Dean and the Ombudsman before assigning a failing grade, and schools get sued for millions if a kid gets bullied on the playground (I got bullied incessantly until 9th grade when I fought back and beat up the captain of the Varsity football and basketball teams twice in two days ((he thought the first time was a fluke)) and it made me stronger) if somebody cannot communicate effectively, we should help them rather than mollycoddle them and tell them how special their unique flavor of windowpane glass is.

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This is a very interesting thread Greg! :)

Larry, maybe... just maybe, that young lady really does have sweet pee and she's just letting the world know. ;)

I don't need an English professor to tell me that I've adopted some bad habits while writing. There are a few things I do while typing that I know are grammatically incorrect, like using "....." to signify a pause. I have come to a point where I type just like I talk. However, I do attempt to articulate my thoughts and present them in a way that others can comprehend them.

Since I realize I never compose a perfect post, I can't be too harsh towards others. However, posting something with absolutely no capital letters, no punctuation, and "text speak" comes off as extremely lazy and sloppy.


On a much broader note, I do worry about where communication is going in general. I grew up in a small town and it was pretty much expected that you would smile and say hello when you walked by someone on the street. Nowadays, it's MUCH more common for a person to stare at their cell phone while they pass you.

Recently, Angi and I dropped off Erin at a friend's home. There were about 8 teenage kids in the living room... ALL were staring at their phones. I said, "You guys are probably texting each other, aren't you?!?" Not surprising, all but 2 of them were!!! :eek: :rolleyes:

It makes us wonder how in the hell people will communicate in the future. I don't see that as progressive in any way.


The ironic flip side to all of this can be seen in Angi's son. He is incredibly smart, and he SPEAKS with nearly perfect grammar and form (most of the time) and with so many other kids his age (18) communicating the way they do.... he usually sounds very nerdy. This thread is making me realize I should be championing him for his efforts. :)
 
sunshadow said:
Not acceptable.
We are in an industry/trade that has a public image problem that dates back at least to the roots of the switchblade laws if not before, and we are trying to promote our trade as a craft and an artform. Promulgation of illiterate gibberish and gutter argot does nothing to advance positive public perception of the artisans engaged in our craft; indeed it counters it, presenting us as a band of proto-Neanderthals and demeans our trade to the level of shanks and other instruments of murder and social decay.

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How am I committing the “Promulgation of illiterate gibberish and gutter argot”?

I never said that was our only problem. I never said school hadn’t changed, and in some ways for the worse. I never said life online wasn’t affecting language. I never advocated illiterate gibberish.

I said it’s a complicated business. A difficult, stubborn, refractory problem. A complicated problem is hard to fix if you don’t understand what’s going on. Shrinks talk about overdetermination. That means some presenting sign or symptom has more than one cause. When a problem has many causes, you cannot fully fix it unless you address all—or at least most—of those problems. America’s educational system is highly overdetermined.

Consider a kid who is born to work with his hands. Say he loves working on cars. He is not well served by a curriculum designed to get someone into college. What he needs is education that advances his interests. A class on dealing with automobile computers will grab his attention. So will automotive engineering. Teach him enough English to write businesslike estimates and a polite “Sorry, your widget is backordered” note. Teach him basic small business practices. Give him theory in class, combined with apprenticeship for credit in some garage or machine shop. These things relate to his concerns. More than that, they honor his interests. So he wants to learn them.

Mind you, plugging such career track classes into an educational system designed around teaching to the multiple-choice test will not work. It’s not a solution in itself. It’s still a worthwhile thought experiment because it addresses one of our educational problems.
 
Raymond1000 said:
How am I committing the “Promulgation of illiterate gibberish and gutter argot”?

I never said that was our only problem. I never said school hadn’t changed, and in some ways for the worse. I never said life online wasn’t affecting language. I never advocated illiterate gibberish.

I said it’s a complicated business. A difficult, stubborn, refractory problem. A complicated problem is hard to fix if you don’t understand what’s going on. Shrinks talk about overdetermination. That means some presenting sign or symptom has more than one cause. When a problem has many causes, you cannot fully fix it unless you address all—or at least most—of those problems. America’s educational system is highly overdetermined.

Consider a kid who is born to work with his hands. Say he loves working on cars. He is not well served by a curriculum designed to get someone into college. What he needs is education that advances his interests. A class on dealing with automobile computers will grab his attention. So will automotive engineering. Teach him enough English to write businesslike estimates and a polite “Sorry, your widget is backordered” note. Teach him basic small business practices. Give him theory in class, combined with apprenticeship for credit in some garage or machine shop. These things relate to his concerns. More than that, they honor his interests. So he wants to learn them.

Mind you, plugging such career track classes into an educational system designed around teaching to the multiple-choice test will not work. It’s not a solution in itself. It’s still a worthwhile thought experiment because it addresses one of our educational problems.
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My statement was that by not addressing illiteracy and promoting proper communication skills all of us who feign a blind eye are committing the promulgation of illiterate gibberish and gutter argot. You are right that there should be legitimate shop classes and trade schools in our educational system, you are right also that not every child who enters Kindergarten is cut out for Harvard, however all children in America should be educated enough to be able to assemble a proper sentence with a properly spelled basic vocabulary (I am not expecting that everybody be able to spell or even know the definition of Kakistocracy, although that is what we are headed toward at a swift pace) and simple punctuation.

My wife is an official of a school district where over 85% of the students qualify for reduced price or free lunches and that is often the only solid meal that many of those kids will have. The teachers in those classrooms are doing a heroic job trying to instill basic skills in their students against overwhelming odds. Every time society says that it is not necessary for those students to learn how to communicate, that drives one more nail in the coffin that is being built around those students' future and adds 10 more steps to the mountain those teachers must try to carry those students up. Sooner or later even Sisyphus tires.

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sunshadow said:
My statement was that by not addressing illiteracy and promoting proper communication skills all of us who feign a blind eye are committing the promulgation of illiterate gibberish and gutter argot. You are right that there should be legitimate shop classes and trade schools in our educational system, you are right also that not every child who enters Kindergarten is cut out for Harvard, however all children in America should be educated enough to be able to assemble a proper sentence with a properly spelled basic vocabulary (I am not expecting that everybody be able to spell or even know the definition of Kakistocracy, although that is what we are headed toward at a swift pace) and simple punctuation.

My wife is an official of a school district where over 85% of the students qualify for reduced price or free lunches and that is often the only solid meal that many of those kids will have. The teachers in those classrooms are doing a heroic job trying to instill basic skills in their students against overwhelming odds. Every time society says that it is not necessary for those students to learn how to communicate, that drives one more nail in the coffin that is being built around those students' future and adds 10 more steps to the mountain those teachers must try to carry those students up. Sooner or later even Sisyphus tires.

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Page,

May I suggest that by not addressing illiteracy and promoting proper communication skills all of us who feign a blind eye are committing the promulgation of illiterate gibberish and gutter argot is rather, well, harsh? I’m no teacher. I’m no school administrator. I make no public policy. I have my own concerns, none of which involve enlisting in the grammar police. Come to that, I think playing grammar police is singularly useless.

That’s not to say I don’t do what I can. The daughter of a friend dropped out of high school in favor of home schooling. High school was wrecking her. It took her months to decompress before she even started self education.

Come the day, she asked me to help with her college application essay. Writing a grammatical sentence was not this girl’s problem. She was, for her age, a damned good writer. That doesn’t mean she didn’t have plenty to learn. I spent hours editing the thing, and discussing it with her by telephone. Here’s an example from her essay. (In her original text, this was all one paragraph.)

When I first left school, I was passionate about linguistics and had been for some time. I had already taught myself a good portion of the International Phonetic Alphabet, as well as various things about linguistic theory and the structure of language. For quite a while after I left school, I pursued my passion for linguistics with a single-minded devotion that left little room for anything else. I loved having the freedom to simply immerse myself in something that fascinated me so much, but at the same time I was constantly aware that I could not simply study linguistics and nothing else forever. I needed to study math and science and history if I intended to go to college, and at that point I simply could not see how my passion for linguistics would ever expand to any of those subjects.

My mother, however, promised me that if I just gave it time, I would find a reason to study something beyond linguistics. At the time, I don’t think I quite believed her, but I was willing to give it a little more time. And with time, I did develop other interests, all stemming (however indirectly) from my initial interest in linguistics. Linguistics led to languages, languages led to culture, culture led to anthropology and psychology which in turn led to biology, which led to chemistry. And everything led straight to statistics, which in turn helped me realize that no, I don’t actually hate math at all, and maybe I might give physics a second shot. The real miracle of it, for me, is that every single class I have taken since I started home-schooling relates to every other class in some way. They hold together in my head not as individual subjects, but as a cohesive whole, in a way that nothing in public school ever did.

Please note how she experienced real education. She successfully learns stuff that bears on her interests. Growth in learning and personal growth feed back on each other. This style of learning is miles away from modern teaching to the test.

These were my red pixel comments about that paragraph.

This stuff about learning to learn is excellent.

There is still room to tighten things up. E.g., in this sentence: “My mother, however, promised me that if I just gave it time, I would find a reason to study something beyond linguistics.” what is the word “however” accomplishing? What does it add to your clarity and meaning?

The people who read these essays do it all day for weeks or months at a time. Make the reading easier for them. Paragraphs were invented for a reason—part of which is to give the reader a change to take a mental breath before moving on to the next section. The long paragraph above divides neatly into 1; Statement of problem and 2; Resolution of problem. When you’re writing makes it easier for them to sort that out, they will think well of your essay and of you. That betters your chances of getting in. Parenthetically, you face the same problems when your SF novel lands on a publisher’s slush pile.

When you edit your stuff, learn to play the words in your mind as a stream of information. Then ask, “Am I making this information easy for the reader to absorb? Can I do it better? How hard am I making the reader work?” Of course good fiction demands a contribution by a good reader. I’m not saying you should spoon feed them everything. I am saying that when you challenge a reader, you should do it deliberately rather than because you were careless with your prose.

Give me someone who is interested in and capable of good writing, I might be able to help. If I have the time. If I have the motivation. I don’t do that much work for strangers, for the hell of it.

Tell me it’s somehow my job to tell ignorant yahoos that they should study grammar because it’s good for them and I’ll ignore you. I am not personally responsible for the grammatical ills of the world.
 
It is entirely possible that I am a grammar-curmudgeon. (I've been accused of much worse; I choose to not invoke an "n" word in this discussion.) Having been raised by an oft-published poet, and taught to appreciate a basic clarity of thought, I have certain standards about such matters.

I do not suffer fools gladly, and I'm loathe to do business with people who can't be bothered to find the space/period/comma/caps/enter keys. That sort of behavior is, quite plainly, an insult to anyone who's spent any time at all learning to speak or write; and even more of an affront to those from whom such nincompoops might request answers or guidance.
 
Bill Glasser wrote a book titled "Schools Without Failure" , it is a good read for those who are interesting in encouraging each to do his best.

Back in my law enforcement days I was chosen to be the liaison officer for the major minority community in our jurisdiction, some could not speak English, for others it was a combination of English and Spanish. At first I could not understand what they were trying to communicate, then I met a well educated member of that community and through his help I learned that those who spoke in our meetings had some very valuable information that would be valuable to our effort. Since that time I do my best to understand what they mean to say. I feel that we were successful, but getting the rest of our department to understand was much more difficult.

Today I read seeking to understand the meaning of what folks say rather than how they say it.

My first wife was an English major, she would read the newspaper and circle all errors she could find in red, but when I asked her what the article said she did not come close to comprehending the message.

I believe we need to do our best to understand and never label another as a failure.

The last super bowl was a great game, naturally one had to be in first place, but it was a great game and I appreciate both teams equally.
 
Excellent points, Ed. By no means am I a grammar all-star but try to communicate clearly and do my best in the spelling dept. I don't always run my posts through a spell check but reread for clarity and flow. For the most part, I write exactly the way I speak. I see errors in folk's posts all the time but if the author is genuinely making an effert to communicate, I can follow along without a problem. I draw the line when I see a total lack of punctuation, capitals and general flow. There are a few members who have valuable things to say, but do it in a way that makes it damn near impossible to follow. Admittedly, I view verbose, flowery, over-the-top-walls of text with equal disdain. It is bad enough listening to a drawn out monologue, let alone having to read though an entire epic that essentially mirrors what the person just before them stated in one sentence.
 
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I think this wraps it up :D


tough.jpg
 
Funny and relevant

[video=youtube;OonDPGwAyfQ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OonDPGwAyfQ&feature=relate[/video]
[video=youtube;pKyIw9fs8T4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKyIw9fs8T4&feature=related[/video]
 
Things started to change in the mid fifties. The child psychologists [whatever that is !] determined that a child is a very fragile thing and if given a TEST ,it would be a trauma never recovered from. I got this in a spelling class and my spelling today is less than desirable. A PREtest was given then a week later a REtest was given with the same words .A TEST was never given ! Students of course wold never study for the first but study only the words they got wrong for the second. It was the only negative experience in an otherwise excellent education. By the late sixties the educational system had collapsed .
Here on the forum I use precise words and sentences because I'm communicating technical information .Everyone here must learn the proper words .
I'm also involved with emergency radio communications and there too precise wording is very important. I remember an airliner crash because the pilot said 'I'm low on fuel' instead of the proper 'I have a fuel emergency'.
 
Thank you . It's irrespective or regardless."I could care less" is one of my pet hates. It's right up there with the great malapropisms such as "cup of cino" & the difference between affluent & effluent. Tautology is another blatantly obvious way of adding too much verbiage to your language in the guise of intelligence.
With that in mind I would not worry too much about txtspk. If they want to talk to you they will. This is simply a fashionable way to communicate with peers of the same age. It will eventually disappear along with other outmoded "annoy your parents" devices such as "solid", "wicked", "cool"&"sick" & ridiculous baggy pants .Read Bill Brysons tale of the Okracoke Islanders -their language is U.S. English it contains words & phrases not heard in England since the 16th Century-that my friends is the evolution of language. [video=youtube;eJ_dn42Z-no]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ_dn42Z-no[/video].
Great thread.
Cheers

bladsmth said:
She could not be worse than my late aunt. She would correct letters people sent her in red pen, and send them back with notes about the right words they should have used. It was not a surprise that she died with very few friends.

One of the things I found when doing her estate was a card from Issac Asimov. He was thanking her for catching an error in his grammar. She had caught an error where he used the word irregardless, when the proper word is regardless.( irregardless actually makes no sense)
She used to proof read books and articles for authors, looking for such things. I know she knew Issac Asimov, but don't know if she proof read for him.

Her other big peeve was "I could care less." which should be,"I couldn't care less."
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bladsmth said:
She could not be worse than my late aunt. She would correct letters people sent her in red pen, and send them back with notes about the right words they should have used. It was not a surprise that she died with very few friends.

One of the things I found when doing her estate was a card from Issac Asimov. He was thanking her for catching an error in his grammar. She had caught an error where he used the word irregardless, when the proper word is regardless.( irregardless actually makes no sense)
She used to proof read books and articles for authors, looking for such things. I know she knew Issac Asimov, but don't know if she proof read for him.

Her other big peeve was "I could care less." which should be,"I couldn't care less."
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Those are things that annoy me too. :(
 
I can't stand it when people say "same difference".

My father regularily screws up the english language. Like when my daughter wore a pretty dress and he called her "the ball of the dance". Or when his eye doctor told him he had "macular conception". He also doesn't believe in "prenatal sex before marriage" and loves a good "quarter horse steak".

All true... I can't make this stuff up... I should have wrote a book.
 
I know that the language evolves with time and generation. If you listen to speeches made in the 40's and 50's, people spoke rather tightly and clear stresses on syllabus. You can get accents from different regions of the U.S.A. A southern twang is definitely noticeable, but how about a Californian accent versus a Minnesotan? It's there, and it is changing the language as time passes. Words change meaning over time. The connotation can even have a full shift. Such as the word "Horny" originally was an adjective that described excessive behavior toward anything, such as a collector of poetry would be a horny poet, but time has changed the connotation to a sexual meaning and has thus become the word as we know it today.

What is annoying is incorrect use: Your, and you're. There, Their, and they're. Are and our. No commas. Missing paragraphs. Lack of a period even. A majority of youth today are practicing incorrect grammar and language skills for the ease of communication via text message and that is shown in their formal writing skills. I don't expect someone to know and apply the 16 different applications for a comma, people need to know how to correctly form a sentence if they want a future with a career, not a job, a career.
 
I once read a passage about capitalization and its importance. When reading through text, we were taught at an early age that keywords were capitalized... names, dates, first letter of a sentence. These stand out in the text, separating thoughts and providing anchors. They allow us to "skim" through a paragraph and still pick up on the vital info.

Hand drawing mechanical engineering and architectural plans (Yes, with a real pencil... remember that?) ruined my handwriting. Everything I write is in upper case "single stroke commercial gothic".
 
One has to wonder why there are so many words in the English language that sound EXACTLY the same, but have radically different meanings. The aforementioned example of "their", "there" and "they're" is a great one. "Oar", "ore" and "or" is another. "Two", "to" and "too" is another... not to mention "tutu".

It's as if we designed the language to be confusing, so that only native speakers can discern the true meaning of what we're saying.

It's easy to understand why some people give up and abandon all the rules.

As an interesting aside, I read an article once that stated the human mind is so aqile with regard to language that it can read through mistakes almost as quickly as it can read through correct text. By way of example they showed a sentence in which every word was misspelled, but the first and last letters were correct. It was amazingly easy to read. This is not to say that spelling is unimportant. Obviously, when a single pronunciation can yield numerous meanings, spelling (and punctuation) becomes the one way we differentiate which of the meanings is meant. However, it should be noted that spelling isn't really AS important as some people make it out to be.

By way of example, I point out the fact that on this board a LOT of folks (including some responders in this thread) get the use of "there", "their" and "they're" wrong. Yet still, it's simple enough to read what they have written and understand which word they REALLY meant to use. So why are we pedants so fussy about the spelling? Stated simply, because we're language snobs. :)
 
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