To think that grammar/spelling standards are not what they were?

[Meandmarius]

I'm mid 30's and have noticed that most of my friends/peers are able to distinguish between 'your and you're', 'where, were, we're' and using the words 'have' and 'of' correctly.
I've noticed that in younger generations there just doesn't seem to be the same standard anymore and I wonder why that is.
Not saying for one minute that my own sp. and grammar is perfect - it isn't. I just wonder if there is as much emphasis on it nowadays as there was back in the day..

No, me neither. I hope someone will be along later...

I do love a linguistics debate. And history of English language.

fare - poor grammar isn't necessarily another matter. Lots of dyslexics struggle with grammar just as they do with spelling, because it is to some extent to do with organization/sequencing, and those are characteristic dyslexic weaknesses.

Ooh, as if by magic here's tunip. Thanks for that link

Ãhém

x-post. Because it took me so long to type two special characters....

It's an issue but it is annoying that spelling and grammar get all the focus when maths skills are as bad, or more probably worse (across all ages), and nobody ever seems to advocate improving standards of maths. Maths is immeasurably more important than English for understanding things like getting the best deal, doing supermarket shopping, pensions, and organising your finances. It's ironic so much fuss is made over the budget every 6 months when so few people have the maths skills to make an educated comment on it.

A lot of so called 'poverty' is simply caused by people with bad maths skills being unable to budget correctly and wasting their money on stupid things and not being able to hang on to money for 5 minutes without spending it on something.

Also it seems to be fashionable to brag that "I can't do maths, hahaha"... yeah you're an innumerate moron, what's funny about that?

True, fare.

farewell I don't know a lot about dyslexia but as I said before, though my job is involved with good spelling and grammar, there is more than one way to skin a cat so I'd be looking at other skills too. But the jobs market is particularly, er, challenging atm.

zwischenzug you make an excellent point. Interesting too that parents and teachers tend to pick up on early problems with reading and spelling and dyslexia is fairly well catered for. Dyscalculia is virtually unrecognised. So much so that the spell check tells me I have spelt it incorrectly ! (I haven't)

Agree zwis. I probably wouldn't call them maths skills but they are. I'd be impressed by someone who could do a deal, work out a contract or handle a budget. That's the person I'd want. Lots of people can't do that.

I think it's getting more recognized.

I think there is a reason for the difference, though. Written language is a technology. Our brains didn't evolve to do written language, they evolved to do spoken language. It is predictable that a subset of the population won't have quite the right skills for written language. I am less convinced that arithmetical skills are something like that.

But then, I'm partly saying that because there's a school of thought that true dyscalculia is very rare, and much dyscalculia could be diagnosed as dyslexia (the benefit being that the same remedial teaching might help). That's only my personal feeling though.

I think it's interesting that I've seen people suggest a child who writes numbers backwards (for example) might be 'dyscalculic', whereas I think ten years ago that would have got the lay response 'oh, maybe s/he is dyslexic, mine does that with letters too'.

Reason it matters to me is I had a student who had a diagnosis of dyscalculia, which may well have been good, but it made him convinced he couldn't possibly have any need for help with essay writing. He did need help! Lots of these problems go together, I reckon, and we should be tackling all of them together.

I'm not certain I agree. I read somewhere once that early humans who lacked language developed the idea of scratching symbols into the ground and of course using hand gestures. I'm not certain that we developed language long before an ability to judge distance/size/sequence/magnitude. People with dyscalculia have difficulty with the building blocks such as judging size, distance and magnitude.

That's interesting - and of course animals communicate with symbols too. I just feel it is qualitatively different, using written language and using arithmetic.

After all, we know dyslexia isn't as commonly diagnosed in each language as the next, so I think this argument does have to be specifically about written language now, and not loosely about visual symbols.

I mean, it is fascinating, isn't it, that much of geometry hasn't changed since before the birth of Christ, whereas some bits of punctuation didn't exist even a few centuries ago.

I take your point about judging size/magnitude, though.

Language must constantly evolve, we come into contact with other languages through immigration and travel. Many of the words we use everyday are French or have derived from Latin. My grammar is horrendous despite reading so much. Has the use of grammar changed over time ? Reading Defoe is hard work, reading Marx even more so. I find that the more I read the more distance there is between the written word and the spoken language. I would feel very silly speaking exactly as I write !

Oh, sure. I am not in the least arguing against language evolution, nor suggesting we should write as we speak or speak as we write.

Grammar has changed a lot over time, syntax even more, I think.

Yy, grammar changes, but much more slowly than vocabulary. I think the speaking and writing link is very context-dependent; but I think it's also one of the things that forensic linguists use to check the veracity of statements, etc.

Yes LRD, it's sentence structure that I think I may have the most difficulty with. Switching between what I am reading, what I read on MN and speaking. I struggle to read some of the posts on MN at times because some people use syntax that makes reading particularly hard work. I admit sometimes I give up. I don't judge but I miss out on the point someone is trying to make.

Yes, I find that a lot. I find it with speaking too - there's a woman I like very much, who always speaks in massively long, complicated, clause-laden sentences and I feel very dim with her because I genuinely struggle to follow it.

My own sentence structure isn't good. My grammar's fine, but my syntax is appalling.

(If that can even be true ... I think that's the right terms, at least.)

hab - that's very cool about forensic linguistics.

I have dyscalculia. I do not have, and have never had trouble with essays. I am not dyslexic. In fact my spelling and grammar skills are excellent.
I also have A level maths. I had the questions read to me and my answers were verbal. I'm capable of doing the maths but I cannot read the numbers correctly nor get them onto paper in the correct order.
Interestingly, it is almost thirty years since I took my A level, so it is obviously something that has been recognised for a considerable period of time.

I have one friend very similar to yours. It seems to stem from anxiety and lack of confidence in speaking.

I have another friend who is desperate for work. I am flagging and need help. It would make sense to offer her work but I know I would spend all my time proof reading. It's not her fault, she had a dreadful start and dropped out of school. I do think though there is a class issue because she writes as she speaks and doesn't acknowledge a difference between formal and informal language. Is that class or education ? or lack of exposure to different situations and expectations?

I didn't mean to offend, and I'm sorry if I did, or if you think it's inappropriate to speculate.

I am just wondering about fashions in diagnosis, which I think do exist, and have nothing to do with incidence of a particular disability, but do have a lot to do with how that disability is percieved. Personally, I've been diagnosed with specific learning disabilities three times, and each diagnosis has been different - and it makes me wonder, for someone like my student who was adamant that he was dyscalculic so no help with essays would be useful ... would another ed psych have diagnosed him with dyslexia instead? After all, a lot of the characteristics are the same, though obviously a lot are different too. They are spectrum disorders.

I don't know if dyscalculia is rarer than dyslexia, I was just wondering out loud whether there's some reason why people more often make a fuss about spelling and grammar than numbers, as zwis points out.

It is fascinating what you say about needing to have the numbers read to you ... that is really interesting.

mini - oh, god, not her, no! She's incredibly confident and erudite, but she does speak almost as one might write, really. I'm about 90% sure her sentences are completely grammatically correct, but they are just far too long and complex for me to follow. Interestingly, her mum is German, so that might have an impact.

I do know what you mean about people who conflate formal and informal language, though.