To be concerned about poor spelling, grammar and punctuation in the English language ?

[vienna1981]

This is something I notice when, for example, I read reviews on Trip Advisor or even some emails and notices from the management at work.

I admit, I am one of the lucky ones. I never had any significant trouble with English throughout my school days and I know that some folk struggled. But we've always had dictionaries for spelling queries, computers have spellcheckers and Word can't resist sticking its oar in if you're writing a letter.

What's gone wrong ? Bad teaching, general sloppiness or has our intelligence nosedived in recent years ?

BTW, my favourite howler is 'your' when the writer means 'you're'. So often seen.

But OP, even your two contributions to this thread aren't perfect.

Go on OP, tell us how many times you checked your posts to make sure there were no silly mistakes?
:-D

It grates on me too, but with a very dyslexic husband I can't really say anything. I do wish people would turn off autocorrect though, it just makes things harder to interpret.

I'm very concerned about the English language.
What concerns me more on MN are the smug arseholes whose only contribution to a thread is to point out any errors in an OP. There's a special place reserved in my own private hell for them.
Obviously that doesn't apply when the OP is whining about standards whilst scattergunning their own posts with grammatical/lexical errors. Then it's open season.

The English language will sort itself out and adapt; it always does. It has always been an evolving beast. It is my thought individuals use the language at the level they need and no more. For example, if you are writing scholarly articles you'd need a very high command of the written word; if you are a labourer, perhaps not quite so much. However, the language itself will bend and stretch to accommodate all its users. That's why it's survived so long and is spoken so widely.

I think standards have definitely slipped since the birth of the text speak generation and I think more young people than ever lack the required levels of concentration or commitment to read a whole book. But I also think there have always been many, many people for whom literacy is a real challenge. For some it's because of dyslexia or poor working memory/attention span and for others it's just that they were never taught properly or didn't consider it important enough to listen and learn.

I think we just notice poor literacy much more since the internet. People who didn't have the confidence or the ability to write stuff down with a pen on paper just didn't bother to communicate in writing, or if they did, it didn't receive the mass audience it does now. The internet has changed that. People bash out their thoughts on forums or facebook and the terrible spelling or poor grasp of punctuation is right there for all to see.

People who are profoundly dyslexic can now make themselves fairly clearly understood with the help of spellcheck, even if it isn't a technically perfect piece of text. So when we read something with what seems like annoying minor grammar and punctuation flaws and we think 'poor speller, terrible grammar' that person might have actually achieved some kind of masterpiece of written communication in comparison to what they been capable of using a paper and pen.

I am sympathetic to dyslexics but I am irritated by perfectly capable people who are just too lazy to care enough to do a job properly.

LeaveMyWings I'm sure it predates the wide availability of mobiles because when I arrived from the third world country where I learnt to speak and mostly learnt to write English I was shocked by the low spelling standards of my classmates. I discovered by speaking to other recent immigrants that that wasn't an isolated incident.

It was my first inkling that all was not well in the English education system which I had high up on a pedestal at that point. Then followed various education campaigns which emphasised going back to the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, so maybe the problem is due to previous education policies and may be on the turn.

I was never formally taught grammar so whilst I think my basic grammar is okay, I know it is not perfect. You can pick up a lot just by being interested, even if you weren't taught these things.

Only yesterday a member of management at my office, a woman of very high education, sent an email saying that a new team "would be lead by [Joe Bloggs]" - oh dear.

no excuse for the use of 'of' instead of 'have'
that does not make any sense and I see it everywhere
just because they sound vaguely the same does not mean they ARE the same meaning

The decline in literacy began with my generation. I am 50 this year and at secondary school the only English we did was some sort of creative writing thing. My mum's friend, an English teacher at my school at the time has said 'We failed a generation'.
Whilst things have definitely improved since then, there still seems to be an all-pervading mentality of Brits revelling in their own mediocrity. How often do people wear an 'I'm rubbish at....' badge of honour? It's odd. Certainly anywhere else in the world an incapacity to use one's own language is not seen as anything other than the disgrace it is.

Dyslexic friends of mine have also said that they need things to be written correctly to decode them, and I rarely see any SPaG errors from them.

I think there's an apparent slip in standards only because we see so much of other people's writing on social media. Before Facebook and Mumsnet, we wouldn't be exposed to very much writing from outside our immediate social circle. Now we see it all the time.

ThenLater My mother's generation (she was born in 1925) wore being "rubbish at maths" as a badge of honour, and the refusal of the British to learn other languages ("just speak loudly in English and Johnny Foreigner will understand") goes back longer than that!

I am the same age Then and I agree. From memory we were taught punctuation but not the rules of grammar and how to apply them. It was also an era of experimental 'progressive' teaching methods that did more harm than good.

My spoken and written grammar is pretty good because I read a lot as a child so I picked it up naturally. Clear communication was important to me so I paid attention, but I still struggle with the theory and the terminology of grammar IYSWIM. I generally know what's right and wrong, I just can necessarily explain it using the correct grammar terminology. If faced with a sentence like this, for example:

A noun or pronoun is in the subjective when it is used as the subject of the sentence or as a predicate noun. A predicate noun follows a form of the "be" verb, and it renames the subject of the sentence. In the following examples, nouns and pronouns in the subjective case are in orange.

I'd probably come over a bit faint and need a lie down.

As for the person who wrote 'would be lead by…' led is the past tense of lead but read is the past tense of read so that's an easy mistake to make and a pretty common one. Some highly intelligent (but often maths-brained) people still struggle to remember all these annoying anomalies in English. English is my stronger area but even I sometimes have a mental block and have to resort to google when I doubt myself.

I'm 34 and we were never taught grammar and punctuation properly in school. Amongst my peer group (judging by Facebook!) those of us who went on to higher education seem to have a reasonable standard of spelling and grammar now - probably mostly self taught. Amongst those who left school after GCSEs, the standard of spelling and grammar seems to have slipped dramatically. Presumably because there was never a solid foundation there in the first place due to a poor curriculum. Also, I suspect that before the relatively recent rise of social media, most of them had little cause to write at length and so fell out of practice.

Also, there is at least a generation of adults now who were never taught to read using a system of phonics. That means that many might have slipped through the net who simply remembered words by sight and have no ability to break down and decode unfamiliar words. This must make spelling whilst writing very difficult without having to constantly double check the more difficult words are correct.

Highly literate people are few and far between - not only is actually quite complex, but there's also a pretty huge bank of knowledge required, and much of it is anomalous.

Not everyone has the knack for it. Nor should we expect everyone to. I, like many people, am not good with numbers but I'm rarely exposed. As pp have said, with the advent of the Internet - and the written word being THE means for communicating with friends and ruthless strangers - if you're lacking in the skills required, you can't hide it.

your definateley not bein Unreasonable;

Why would expect good grammar on Trip Advisor? You're either posting a review in a fit of righteous anger or trying to remember what everyone are on the Thursday night at the excellent bar and ensure you're downloading a picture of the hotel bathroom rather than the crotch shot of a dubious pair of speedos you spotted after too much Sangria.

*ate

Not too mention new technology has stoopid small keyboards making typos away of life.

I don't think it's all that important. If you work is some hoity toity posh place then yeh but if you shovel shite on a farm or work in a lorry garage like I do then frankly nobody gives a fuck about ur ps and qs.

i have dyslexia no idea how to use grammar/punctuation are they the same thing?

spell check does not always work as words often look simlar.

its intresting to look what some dyslexics see for some people the letters seem to merge into each other or move. some see the letters back to front. ect.

i think its ok on a thread like this as its a discussion. but if someone is on a thread nothing to do with spelling/grammar and someone gives someone a hard time about it then i think thats really sad and makes that person look rather silly.

People using the internet forums tend to type like they would text leaving a review on trip advisor (spelling) isnt the same as a professional document, I cant get worked up about it.
Personally i have quite big gaps in my education so grammar is beyond me not everybody is capable of remembering where an apostrophe goes.

1 of my dds managed to pass her advanced higher English exam this year she has sen needed a scribe and cant spell it was content not spelling they looked for