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I try to avoid these types of threads due to the self righteous rants over grammar. Yes, I think people should try their best but some have difficulty due to a learning disability. My husband has dyslexia and was tortured as a child over it. As an adult, occasionally some dill weed feels the need to point out his faults. He is a whiz at math and makes a good living off his math ability. I have fairly decent writing skills and will never achieve the amount of income he enjoys. Using proper grammar is not an indication of intelligence. It is simply training.
I try to avoid these types of threads due to the self righteous rants over grammar. Yes, I think people should try their best but some have difficulty due to a learning disability. My husband has dyslexia and was tortured as a child over it. As an adult, occasionally some dill weed feels the need to point out his faults. He is a whiz at math and makes a good living off his math ability. I have fairly decent writing skills and will never achieve the amount of income he enjoys. Using proper grammar is not an indication of intelligence. It is simply training.
I think that's pretty much been discussed, and no one feels that a person with a learning disability can be faulted for not writing "properly".
This IS a Writing forum, and so it is appropriate to discuss poor writing in this venue. Your husband is quite welcome to trash me in a math forum, as the part of the brain that comprehends algebra and geometry seems not to have formed in my head.
It's laziness and carelessness that bother some of us. There is way too much poor writing out there to blame it all on a learning disability, unless an entire generation or so has suddenly become learning disabled.
Again, I chalk it up to lack of reading, partly because it's not just poor writing skills I'm observing, but poor comprehension skills and the inability to follow logical lines of thought in conversation.
I make my living reading and writing contracts. Improper grammar and punctuation in a contract can cause a host of problems and endless court battles over the interpretation of a document. I sure hope our educational institutions are turning out some people who realize the importance of proper grammar and writing skills. Otherwise, eventually, no written documents will make sense anymore.
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I make my living reading and writing contracts. Improper grammar and punctuation in a contract can cause a host of problems and endless court battles over the interpretation of a document. I sure hope our educational institutions are turning out some people who realize the importance of proper grammar and writing skills. Otherwise, eventually, no written documents will make sense anymore.
Thank you.
I do something related for a living--bid documents and requests for proposal. Yes, such errors can make a huge difference.
Originally Posted by Sunnysee It's the internet. Millions of us have been hooked up to the thing for at least fifteen years. (we were a bit late to the party, hence I chose the number 15)
Chat rooms and a lot of forums scroll very quickly and the hot issues we discuss go at a rapid-fire pace.
I suspect with the younger generation that texting has made this sloppiness that you dang straight I allow myself, also to get even worse. It's the message that matters and if the message is pristinely typed, but not "timely" then the effect and often the inspiration to say what I said, is lost.
It is NOT the internet. I think the internet and texting have made it worse but I definitely remember taking a silly little office job at a university back in the mid '80s and being appalled when a grad. assistant came in with a pile of term papers to correct.
We sat there and didn't know whether to laugh or cry because of the glaringly stupid grammatical and spelling errors. They were the same ones that we are complaining about now, just the same.
Apparently the schools had stopped teaching spelling and grammar. These kids who were freshmen in the mid '80s were born in the mid '60s (give or take) and would have gone to school in the '70s.
The whole revolution as to what was "relevant" in education took place in the late '60s and must have been in effect in the 1970s when these kids should have been learning in school. That's also the time period when students started to be able to get credit for silly courses like (oh, name something really silly.....watching movies or something) and the usual required courses were dropped from the curriculum. Education was dumbed down. I don't know what the schools are teaching now but I would hope that at some period they woke up and returned to basics like READING and WRITING. I agree with you that trying to decipher this written gibberish is annoying and confusing.
Originally Posted by Sunnysee It's the internet. Millions of us have been hooked up to the thing for at least fifteen years. (we were a bit late to the party, hence I chose the number 15)
Chat rooms and a lot of forums scroll very quickly and the hot issues we discuss go at a rapid-fire pace.
I suspect with the younger generation that texting has made this sloppiness that you dang straight I allow myself, also to get even worse. It's the message that matters and if the message is pristinely typed, but not "timely" then the effect and often the inspiration to say what I said, is lost.
It is NOT the internet. I think the internet and texting have made it worse but I definitely remember taking a silly little office job at a university back in the mid '80s and being appalled when a grad. assistant came in with a pile of term papers to correct.
We sat there and didn't know whether to laugh or cry because of the glaringly stupid grammatical and spelling errors. They were the same ones that we are complaining about now, just the same.
Apparently the schools had stopped teaching spelling and grammar. These kids who were freshmen in the mid '80s were born in the mid '60s (give or take) and would have gone to school in the '70s.
The whole revolution as to what was "relevant" in education took place in the late '60s and must have been in effect in the 1970s when these kids should have been learning in school. That's also the time period when students started to be able to get credit for silly courses like (oh, name something really silly.....watching movies or something) and the usual required courses were dropped from the curriculum. Education was dumbed down.
I don't know what the schools are teaching now but I would hope that at some period they woke up and returned to basics like READING and WRITING. I agree with you that trying to decipher this written gibberish is annoying and confusing.
I believe you are correct about the time frame. I graduated from high school in 1976. I was a good speller because I was an avid reader, I believe, and even as a child in school I was appalled at how badly some people spelled things.
After high school I went to an intense secretarial school where we were drilled on grammar and punctuation. Whether the documents you had taken in dictation and then transcribed were acceptable for your grades or not depended upon them being perfect. A comma out of place could make the letter "unmailable" and therefore not count toward your grade.
At that time, I realized how much I had NOT been taught during my elementary and high school years!
I believe you are correct about the time frame. I graduated from high school in 1976. I was a good speller because I was an avid reader, I believe, and even as a child in school I was appalled at how badly some people spelled things.
After high school I went to an intense secretarial school where we were drilled on grammar and punctuation. Whether the documents you had taken in dictation and then transcribed were acceptable for your grades or not depended upon them being perfect. A comma out of place could make the letter "unmailable" and therefore not count toward your grade.
At that time, I realized how much I had NOT been taught during my elementary and high school years!
Thank you for validating what I had thought.
I went to school earlier than you did and we had spelling books and spelling tests throughout elementary school. I think the quizzes were on Friday with the new words being taught on Monday.
By high school we were all given lists of twenty vocabulary words which we would be quizzed on every week--spell the word right and use it in a sentence.
It's wasn't considered that big a deal--just a few minutes a week.
We had lots of grammar in junior high and we practiced writing in the form of writing made up thank you notes. One time we all had to write real thank you notes to some company that had installed a beautiful red velvet curtain for our school stage. We wrote little notes to people in the hospital too--I remember one kid, when writing to (a school janitor?) who was in the hospital, added, "Any pretty nurses?" Well, that was a hit!!
You get a lot of your spelling and grammar just from reading and we read a lot of books together as a class, read IN CLASS to make sure you really read it. Sometimes one kid would read it out loud while the rest of us followed along--it forced you to look at the words while having them read to you and it made it sink in.
Kids today aren't reading, I don't think. When I was in school the teacher would read aloud to the class even when we were perfectly old enough to read for ourselves just to make sure everyone was exposed to reading and got to see how much fun it is.
I'm concerned about what kids see in print today because what they see tends to stick in their minds. It's up to us to take a Sharpie and fix as many glaring errors as we can. YES!
I went to school earlier than you did and we had spelling books and spelling tests throughout elementary school. I think the quizzes were on Friday with the new words being taught on Monday.
By high school we were all given lists of twenty vocabulary words which we would be quizzed on every week--spell the word right and use it in a sentence.
It's wasn't considered that big a deal--just a few minutes a week.
We had lots of grammar in junior high and we practiced writing in the form of writing made up thank you notes. One time we all had to write real thank you notes to some company that had installed a beautiful red velvet curtain for our school stage. We wrote little notes to people in the hospital too--I remember one kid, when writing to (a school janitor?) who was in the hospital, added, "Any pretty nurses?" Well, that was a hit!!
You get a lot of your spelling and grammar just from reading and we read a lot of books together as a class, read IN CLASS to make sure you really read it. Sometimes one kid would read it out loud while the rest of us followed along--it forced you to look at the words while having them read to you and it made it sink in.
Kids today aren't reading, I don't think. When I was in school the teacher would read aloud to the class even when we were perfectly old enough to read for ourselves just to make sure everyone was exposed to reading and got to see how much fun it is.
I'm concerned about what kids see in print today because what they see tends to stick in their minds. It's up to us to take a Sharpie and fix as many glaring errors as we can. YES!
In my opinion, not reading to your child, especially in the preschool years, amounts to child abuse. Well, maybe not quite, but it's lazy and it's wrong. The teachers can tell which children have been read to, too.
My daughter loved Shakespeare (which I don't--she's SUCH a geek) and she got very upset when, as a senior in high school, her class read The Merchant of Venice and the class took turns reading the parts. Most of the kids read the words in a drone tone, no expression, not getting into the story or the characters and not being able to pronounce half the words. My daughter actually went to her teacher and said, "can't you teach these kids how to READ?" (I winced what I heard that--what a b*tch, hehehe.) The teacher said, "They are seniors in high school. If they haven't learned to read by now, they never will."
After they finished the book, my daughter said the teacher asked if there were any questions, and the class mannequin raised her hand and said, "What does 'verdict' mean?" My daughter said she had to sit on her hands not to slap her.
I try to avoid these types of threads due to the self righteous rants over grammar. Yes, I think people should try their best but some have difficulty due to a learning disability. My husband has dyslexia and was tortured as a child over it. As an adult, occasionally some dill weed feels the need to point out his faults. He is a whiz at math and makes a good living off his math ability. I have fairly decent writing skills and will never achieve the amount of income he enjoys. Using proper grammar is not an indication of intelligence. It is simply training.
As the other poster said, and as I wrote in my first post here, nobody is judging those with learning disabilities - nor those who spoke another language first. And I also never said it's an indication of intelligence, since I know very intelligent people with poor spelling & grammar. My complaints are more directed at those who are simply lazy (or didn't pay attention in school), and the teachers who aren't focusing more on this stuff. I fully realize that different people have different strengths/weaknesses, regardless of their level of intelligence... I'm not a stupid person in general, but I can't learn science or remember historical dates to save my life!!
P.S. One thing I disagree with in your comment, is the statement that it's "simply training." While one can learn spelling & grammar through training, there are also people who have a natural ability. Just as your husband has a knack for math, I've always had a knack for writing!
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