To think that spelling & grammar arent used at all anymore?

[Emmielu]

I understand that some people find spelling, grammar, reading etc difficult & to be honest i thought that was common these days but the more i look on my news feed about friends' status' & how hard it is to read what they have written because the spelling isnt good the more i think is it now down to the fact that shortening the words or making the words out how you think it is spelt is the norm?

For example, DD brought home a book that had been around all the children in her class. Kids took the book home with a teddy, parents write in the book to say what they did that evening or day. DD & i were reading through the comments and i struggled to read a few of them because the spelling was confusing and one of the comments made no sense whatsoever. Sausages was spelt "sassages", himself was written as "hiself". Am i being unreasonable to also feel very tempted to correct friends on facebook on their mistakes? Or am i strange?

P.S. Dont take this as a nasty post. I genuinely want opinions and thoughts. Not to be shot down.

I love MN sometimes.

Think "needs cut" is Standard Scottish English.

LRD, have we discussed literacy practices before? My thesis had a lot about the relationship of codicology to literacy practices.

Fabulous! Codicology!
Before I had my baby, I imagined Mumsnet to be a site where semi-literate frumps hung out, discussing purees. How wrong I was!

I seem to remember you told me about your thesis before. Click on enough threads about grammar, eventually you come across another medievalist procrastinating.

I'm now wondering when exclamation marks come in, and question marks. They must be pretty recent compared to a good old ampersand.

I am semi-literate, btw seo, this is just the wonders of spellcheck you're seeing.

FeministDragon (great name)
You may be semi-literate but you don't bleat on about purees much so you have still confounded my pre-baby expectations

P.S. I just typed that while spooning puree into baba's gob so maybe I need to take a hard look at myself.

Impressive typing/feeding skills you have there, then!

I get irritated by posts not making any sense at all and when teachers make simple spelling/ grammitical errors. Apart from that I try not to judge (well not too badly anyway).

Have you read Malcolm Parkes' punctuation book, LRD?

There must be something about the word grammar and its derivatives that's ideal for foxing would-be pedants!

'I'm confident that my main problem is the grammar'

Your confidence is misplaced

Debsbear - live by the sword, die by the sword.

FemDragon - well, I was mumsnetting while baba was napping then she woke and wanted fed (Scottish Standard English construction there) so I fed her and typed between spoonfuls. She's playing with her dad now. And I am going to stop this post right now before it genuinely does turn into one of these frump-posts-about-purees.

I honestly think that if you required a random sample of the UK population from 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940, 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980 and 1990 to write a paragraph commenting on current affairs you'd see the most appalling badly spelled gibberish (though admittedly with very little txtspch). What we see now is people who wouldn't normally write anything except a card at Christmas being plunged into a society that is far more text-based than it ever was in the past.

But it's only a hypothesis and it's very difficult to prove.

Yy, dilys. There's probably a corpus project there somewhere! Quite possibly higher levels of complete illiteracy in the past too.

Pause and Effect or the newer one? I have a soft spot for Pause and Effect cos of the title.

I think btw that every society is full of people complaining that standards of literacy of dropped, it's all the fault of literacy becoming more widespread, and aren't these errors shocking and liable to lead to the downfall of humankind?

(channels John Trevisa moaning on that the Black Death cause a rise in literate English-speaking idiots and the destruction of Good French Literacy)

Dilys
To a point I think that's true. However I think standards of literacy have plunged. When my parents were kids, most people could read and write by the end of primary school. That's not the case now. It could be due to many changes - lack of discipline, abandonment of corporal punishment in schools (not suggesting for a moment that corporal punishment was a good thing), the growth of yob culture, the herd mentality that paints academic achievement as uncool, even the decline in churchgoing (and I'm not religious).

I hate to say ... but if that was true, seo, your parents must have lived in an area with very high literacy. If you look at people who've come back as adults for remedial literacy teaching, the numbers are pretty high.

Of course, you've got to take into account that quite a few people who these days will go to mainstream schools, might not have donne so 40 or 60 years ago - I remember chatting to someone at my gran's church who admitted she never actually learned to write, but she was so good in school, and it was the war, so no-one actually noticed until after she was married.

Thanks habbibu, I will read that. xx

Hi Dragon
It was Scotland. I think the education system there was excellent, but it's not now.
I heard an interesting explanation for why literacy levels were historically higher in Scotland. In the Church of Scotland a person could speak directly to God, so it was important that they could read and understand the bible. Priests in the Anglican Church were middlemen, as it were, between the people and God, therefore the priests could unravel the mysteries of God for the people. Hence there was less imperative for the ordinary people to be able to read the bible for themselves. The Scottish schools were often (always?) linked to the church.
Or something like that....

Oh, I like that idea. And of course the Scots never had Wycliffe and didn't have a century and a half of suspicion of people reading the Bible, before the reformation.

You're right anyhow I was thinking of England and generalizing.

Mmm, not all Scots were Church of Scotland - there's probably a hugely politically incorrect research project to be done testing literacy by religion, and whether religions which emphasise the importance of a personal relationship with the Bible are associated with higher reading ability.

Well. the pre-Reformation people in England who did read the Bible for themselves and who asked questions were probably high-born - your Katherine Parrs and Jane Greys, or middle-class people.

You'd really have to have an objective large-scale study to see whether literacy standards really have declined. Reported memory really isn't reliable enough, and you don't know how much people slipped or were pushed through the cracks...