I had a landline conversation with my brother. He works for Bobcat, he has 4 kids, a cool wife, a house, paid vacation, really happy... I on the other hand, write short stories and hang out with my cat. I told him I was keeping up with my word count, 1000 words a day. He told me, he hasn't written a thousand words in the last ten years...
That's very strange that a person who didn't know English very well could teach an English course. That wasn't my experience at all. Also, at my college, everyone had to take a writing intensive class. I guess it depends on the college though.
In my 4th year getting a bachelor's degree we had an assignment that four of us were to write a paper together. One of the four turned in her part and we had to re-write it for her. Not only were the paragraphs atrocious, most of the sentences were incomplete. How does a person get all the way through high school and four years of college without being able to write a complete sentence? I was shocked. And she graduated with the rest of us.
I think this is almost exactly my point in this thread. How did we get here? In an earlier post, @Robert Musil discussed the influence of email on writing. To take that one step further, I think texting and instant messaging have had a significant impact on writing. People abbreviate everything in those messages! The really sad part is, some people genuinely don't understand the difference between that style of writing and "proper" writing. I've experienced this with some of the teens in my extended family, and I truly wonder how they continue to get good grades.
Email and texting notwithstanding, those kids still go to school. If they aren't learning how to write, the schools are failing just as much as the kids are. I don't think trying to blame it on cell phones explains the phenomena. And just as @Wreybies said it was happening long before texting, with the fellow student I described, there were no cell phones at the time. You'd really have to have a measurement before and after cell phones to draw a decent conclusion.
I also have my doubts that cell phones are really to blame here. I really don't see textspeak that often outside of texts and non-professional emails. Even among the badly written professional emails (even from younger folks) I still see full words. The problems I usually see are bad word choice (than vs then, too/to/two, etc) and just poorly constructed sentences. For what it's worth.
Granted I went to college back in the stone age, but 101/102 were writing intensive courses at that time. The whole build-up was to one 5 page paper at the end. Whoop-de-do. But when your grad student barely speaks English and simply walks into class and says today you need to read pages 59 - 72, then sits to do their own HW while we read, it wasn't much of a course.
I've seen several grammar issues right here in this thread and I blame the rise of the Internet. For instance, the word Internet is a proper noun. There is only one, therefore it's capitalized. I've seen people make the excuse that there are lots of Internets, but there aren't. (When I wrote it just then, the spell-checker should have slapped me across the face, but it didn't.) Those are intranets or networks. There is only one Internet. Another is this word 'emails.' Before the Internet, we checked the mail, but we read letters. Since 'email' is derived from 'mail' which covers both singular and plural, why should 'email' suddenly have its meaning changed so it's the equivalent of 'letters?' 'Messages' is the word, not 'emails.' <rant mode off> (sigh)
There are plenty of words that follow different rules to the word they were derived from. Check a dictionary, and you'll find that 'email' is the name for a message that has been sent via email. No mention of it being informal or slang either. If someone wrote, 'I sent you an email,' it would be no more incorrect than, 'I sent you a message,' except the latter would be ambiguous and cause me to check my text messages or instant messenger. Sorry if I'm going off topic. Also I make no claims to have used perfect grammar and spelling in this forum post.
Neologisms are always a slippery affair. They don't have to answer to reason. And shifts like these do take place. The phrase good on you sounds heinous to my ears; it should be good for you. The youths of Anglophonia disagree with me. And if we're really going to go down this road, I've more than a few things to say to those who were around at the dropping of thou from the language. In and of itself a bad choice, but then to randomly take the object pronoun you and make it serve as the subject pronoun, when it should be ye. Why did that happen? That's just insult to injury. ETA: Also, every time someone writes from whence, a demon earns his horns.
I think you have a good point with this. Everyone writes now because of cell phones, and email. I try to improve my grammar as much as I can when I'm writing. I'm sure I still make mistakes when I write to people, but I make an effort not to get lazy even when sending a text. I'll type "How are you?" instead of "How r u?".
There are actually two internets, the regular Internet, and the deep internet (or the Deep Web). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_web_(search)
Funny I mentioned the Deep Web and then this article pops up on Yahoo today. https://www.yahoo.com/katiecouric/now-i-get-it-the-dark-web-explained-214431034.html
Yes, but one is not typically indexed. You can't just "google" the deep web - well not usually anyway. Anyway, back on the original topic. I find this trend becoming incredibly annoying, especially when you read a post, sign, or something else and you actually need to stop, stare at it for a moment and spend the next two minutes wondering what it is suppose to say. On a side note, I sometimes wonder if it was done on purpose. I mean, surely nobody is that bad? But then again I have seen someone try to eat a candy bar before removing the wrapper....
Here in Sweden, we have one very particular problem with the way people write. In Swedish, a ton of words are joined together as one, and you can essentially invent your own words by putting two words together. In Sweden, you don't have a steak dinner, you have a steakdinner. But people oftentimes write these things with spaces, which is wrong in our language and can give things a completely different meaning. Frozen chicken liver, if not written in one word, would translate into "frozen chicken lives".
