Lauren Clark (FGCU): Grammar and Slipping Education Standards

Dosent this bohter u?

I know most of you can read that, but what I want to know is how and why there are people who have graduated from middle school and still cannot manage to get many simple grammar rules down. I know, I know, I’m a grammar nazi, for lack of a better term, but going through all these blogs makes me seriously frustrated. I’m not sure if it’s a lack of emphasis on our educational system, or just the fact that people today can simply type into Microsoft Word and every spelling error will be automatically fixed, so they have no incentive to try to get it right the first time, but the little effort seemingly put into the grammatical quality of these blogs makes me upset. I mean, it’s to take the grade of your final exam, don’t you want to put your best work out there?

Of course, this isn’t a new issue. Grammar is obviously a tough subject, and apparently so is spelling, but there’s a difference between someone typing a “j” instead of “h” and someone who looks as though no one ever taught them about their, there, and they’re.

As I began to think about this blog, however, I thought about recent times and the amount of typos we see all around us. I’ve seen signs on buildings spelled wrong. Notifications I’ve gotten at work had misspellings by my manager (and yes, I did go into the office and let him know). I mean, what is happening to our society’s integrity?? I’m not sure if this is something that has been a continual occurrence in the past few decades, but I feel as though we have let the importance of proper spelling slip below the importance of how to make your Facebook default look “so cute” with Picnik or whose relationship just ended over the internet. Obviously, the world isn’t going to end because our last president couldn’t say “nuclear” and because we have typos in our textbooks (again, here and there is fine, but I have one that has at least 4 or 5 per chapter, ugh!), but come on, have some pride in the integrity of your work! Someone invented Spell Check for a reason, and Microsoft Word is pretty good at spotting most of those sentence fragments, but as far as “too” and “to”, and “a lot” vs. “a lot”, come on world, it’s not that tough. If elementary school children can figure it out, so can you!

This entry was posted on 9. April 2009 at 07:39 and is filed under Introduction to Sociology, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.