Amen, sister
From CNews (emphasis mine):
Little or no grammar teaching, cellphone texting, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, all are being blamed for an increasingly unacceptable number of post-secondary students who can’t write properly.
For years there’s been a flood of anecdotal complaints from professors about what they say is the wretched state of English grammar coming from some of their students.
Now there seems to be some solid evidence.
Ontario’s Waterloo University is one of the few post-secondary institutions in Canada to require the students they accept to pass an exam testing their English language skills.
Almost a third of those students are failing.
“Thirty per cent of students who are admitted are not able to pass at a minimum level,” says Ann Barrett, managing director of the English language proficiency exam at Waterloo University.
“We would certainly like it to be a lot lower.”
Barrett says the failure rate has jumped five percentage points in the past few years, up to 30 per cent from 25 per cent.
“What has happened in high school that they cannot pass our simple test of written English, at a minimum?” she asks.
Even those with good marks out of Grade 12, so-called elite students, “still can’t pass our simple test,” she says.
Poor grammar is the major reason students fail, says Barrett.
“If a student has problems with articles, prepositions, verb tenses, that’s a problem.”
Some students in public schools are no longer being taught grammar, she believes.
“Are they (really) preparing students for university studies?”
At Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, one in 10 new students are not qualified to take the mandatory writing courses required for graduation.
That 10 per cent must take so-called “foundational” writing courses first.
Simon Fraser is reviewing its entrance requirements for English language.
“There has been this general sense in the last two or three years that we are finding more students are struggling in terms of language proficiency,” says Rummana Khan Hemani, the university’s director of academic advising.
Emoticons, happy faces, sad faces, cuz, are just some of the writing horrors being handed in, say professors and administrators at Simon Fraser.
“Little happy faces … or a sad face … little abbreviations,” show up even in letters of academic appeal, says Khan Hemani.
“Instead of ‘because’, it’s ‘cuz’. That’s one I see fairly frequently,” she says, and these are new in the past five years.
Khan Hemani sends appeal submissions with emoticons in them back to students to be re-written “because a committee will immediately get their backs up when they see that kind of written style.”
Professors are seeing their share of bad grammar in essays as well.
“The words ‘a lot’ have become one word, for everyone, as far as I can tell. ‘Definitely’ is always spelled with an ‘a’ -’definitely’. I don’t know why,” says Paul Budra, an English professor and associate dean of arts and science at Simon Fraser.
“Punctuation errors are huge, and apostrophe errors. Students seem to have absolutely no idea what an apostrophe is for. None. Absolutely none.”
He is floored by some of what he sees.
“I get their essays and I go ‘You obviously don’t know what a sentence fragment is. You think commas are sort of like parmesan cheese that you sprinkle on your words’,” said Budra.
Then he’s reduced to teaching basic grammar to them himself.
He says this has been going on now for the 20 years he’s taught college and university in B.C. and Ontario-only the mistakes have changed.
He too blames poor—or no—grammar instruction in lower schools.
“When I went to high school in the ’70s I was never taught grammar in English. I learned grammar from Latin classes.”
Budra was taught to read and write using whole language rather than phonetics—not a good way to go in his books.
“We haven’t taught grammar for 30-40 years…(and it) hasn’t worked.”
“It’s not that hard to teach basic grammar,” he says.
Ontario’s Ministry of Education says grammar is a part of both its elementary and high school curriculum.
Cellphone texting and social networking on Internet sites are degrading writing skills, say even experts in the field.
“I think it has,” says Joel Postman, author of “SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate,” who has taught Fortune 500 companies how to use social networking.
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 … ‘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.
“These folks are going to short-change themselves, and right or wrong, they’re looked down upon in traditional corporations,” notes Postman.
I’m afraid of leaving an incorrectly written comment.
I’m really surprised that a “lack of reading” wasn’t blamed.
Yes for this post. Best ever.
Sean – people are reading, it is just a matter of what, but I agree that serious literature is seeing declining readership from the younger generation, while self-help books seem to be the rage.
My only question is: What about reading the self-help book of grammar?!
Well, you could really see this coming. But I don’t understand the notion that grammar hasn’t been taught in 30-40 years. I learned grammar, complete with the horrendous “diagramming sentences” stuff. I graduated 25 years ago, true, but my sister was eight years behind me and schooling hadn’t changed much by then. Then again, my sister’s writing is atrocious, so maybe that is a bad example.
I think this goes beyond texting, gaming and emailing though. There has always been colloquial English and slang, and yet we always knew better than to use it in professional writing. Are these kids really that stupid?
I’ve recently heard that teen blogging is way down. While I generally think that is a good thing, it’s that much less writing practice.
I think Jaime in Las Vegas is right that the underlying phenomenon is that decorum-defining boundaries are disintegrating. But in defense of these kids today (with their hair and their clothes and their sexting), I would say more.
Email writing is a condensed and abbreviated form of communication that I believe linguists sometimes call ‘telescopic’ writing, similar in some ways to writing in newspaper headlines, signage, and product-use instructions. The highly constrained nature of such prose often requires the use of certain facilitating conventions. In emails, the emerging conventions seem to include the use of emoticons, which efficiently
(if not subtly) transmit the writer’s mood and intent. Such markers are not necessary in face-to-face communications or in long texts, from which several clues about the author’s state and perspective are usually easy to glean. I have noticed lately that in both corporate and wider professional circles emoticons are quite readily accepted, at least among peers. Indeed, without them, as a reader I am sometimes left wondering whether a passage might be a joke, sarcasm, understatement or hyperbole.
Like some others who went to high school in the seventies, I only learned grammar in Latin class, not really in English classes. In graduate school in the eighties, I briefly taught grammar to undergraduates. So I’m about as old school as anyone still alive. Apart from the occasional “R U there?”, I almost always use full sentences with proper spelling and punctuation in emails and text messages. But I spend a considerable amount of time composing and checking them. This might be time that could be better spent surfing for porn or reading your blog. Everyone is in a hurry today, and the critics in British Columbia may be mistaking haste combined with perennial freshman stupidity for a new kind of problem. Maybe it really isn’t a problem, but just evolution.