Does anyone else find recent graduates very lacking in grammar and spelling skills?

[headtohead]

I manage a team where every year we have a graduate intake. It’s a technical role (think construction industry). All of these people put in decently written CV’s and interview well.

In a lot of cases though, when it comes to them starting the role it’s pretty clear that they are hopeless at writing simple emails. Their spelling and grammar is atrocious, they have no understanding of setting out a letter or a mail, they cannot use commas and full stops, nor do they use capitals at the start of sentences.

We need to write succinct, technically accurate replies to customers, they write as they would talk about the subject. ‘You can’t use that brick there’ - no explanation to customer of what the correct product is and why etc. Just like a child would write a sentence.

It’s not just the recent intake that are like this, I’ve noticed it over the last few years. I’m constantly rewriting their replies or helping them to word things in a better way. They totally reply on spellcheck but that will often change the word to something totally different but the writer simply does not see it as they don’t know how it’s spelled in the first place.

These are adults with good degrees, how did we lose so much written English ability? Is anyone else noticing this?

I think the main issues are these:

• A lack of teacher marking in secondary school (I’m reading through DD’s books and spotting the regular spag mistakes then getting her to make a list)
• Reading not competing with phones, and the accepted pedagogical wisdom on reading not catching up. There’s a belief you should not ‘force’ reading but I don’t think it’s a fair fight between a book and an iPad. Both my kids have half an hour of reading built into bedtime and it’s usually the only reading they do. But they are at least reading half an hour a day and they do enjoy it because once the reading starts, the book takes over
• Autocorrect means they never take the stabilisers off. All you have to do is have a bash at a word and your computer will do the rest. It will correct your/you’re or there/their/they’re

A lot of the Gove educational reforms were daft but the one I did wholeheartedly agree with was a SPAG test for trainee teachers. You can’t possibly teach kids SPAG if your own isn’t up to a good standard.

I did a part time law conversion degree when I was in my late 30s and did the LPC (solicitor qualification)in my early 40s. I had already worked for 10 years in professional roles at that point as had most of my part time cohort so it was somewhat baffling when we had to do several hours at law school every week on ‘business writing’. We were covering the absolute basics of how to write concisely with good grammar and structure etc.
Our tutors told us that law firms were complaining about the quality of recent graduate hires’ writing skills so had pushed for it to be a mandatory part of the qualification.

No legal skills were taught. Instead we learned not to start client emails with ‘Hey’, and sign off with ‘Cheers’. How to construct a sentence and what paragraphs meant. When to use their, they’re and there. How to use the active over the passive voice and not to split infinitives.
It was utter madness but given I now hire said grads I can see why it was needed. No ability to write concisely and clearly. No order. Meandering sentences with superfluous words that don’t make a point. No clear sentence or wooly paragraph structure. My standard feedback is “what does this sentence mean”. “What point we are trying to make here”.
Rather than taking that feedback and changing the sentence to make sense to the reader they just respond to the comment with “… it means [x]”. I say “can you rewrite the sentence to make that clear” and they call up to say “I don’t know what you want me to do”. I explain and they write my exact words.
If I don’t have the time for coaching on basic writing skills I rewrite and ask them to read it to compare and contrast. I’ve had feedback like ‘oh yeah it’s just a different style they said the same thing.’
No, mine made sense to the audience, yours didn’t!

No, we don’t. The students are told (again this is central rather than department policy) that they can use AI for coursework but it must be declared. However, this is total nonsense because nobody is going to declare that they asked Chat GPT to write the entire essay and then just edited it to make it sound a bit more original. The only thing we have is Turnitin, which checks for plagiarism but wouldn’t catch AI-written assignments. We rely on staff getting a “sense” that it might have been AI generated but we have been told that we have no way of proving it, so pointless to pursue. The one way we do have of catching people out is that ChatGPT “hallucinates” references, ie cites fake sources. Then we can challenge the students on that. However, the ones with an ounce of intelligence will go through and check that the references are correct and we don’t have time to check every reference in any event so many slip through the net.

There is considerable skill involved in being able to pick out relevant information and put it together in an essay and structure it appropriately so that it is informative and persuasive. Using chat GPT, even if you only use it for a “basic” structure that you then edit, totally removes that and that’s how you end up with people who can’t even structure a basic email. You see people on here saying they use ChatGPT for everything, including just writing messages to friends. It always sounds so contrived as well. I do believe it’s causing a serious dumbing down of the population.

Really? Do they not do creative writing coursework anymore or anything else that requires them to write without prompts?

I’m a mature student at uni and I am quite surprised by how hesitant everyone is to get started on literally any assessment. Some have been asked to stop emailing the professor asking what questions will be on exams!! But these students range from 18 to 50s and some of those most nervous are in their 40s. So I’m not sure such fear is generational - I think it’s more associated with the era we are in.

That’s interesting. Most of my students are younger - we have very few mature students. But I can understand it from someone who has been out of education for a long time I guess. I have definitely noticed in recent years (it wasn’t like this 10 years ago for example) a paralysing fear by students that they will get it wrong. I can say to them til I’m blue on the face that it doesn’t matter or that there is no right or wrong answer. They still hate doing anything where there is no template or guide or model answer for them, including for very basic things. The response by management has been to insist we provide them with model answers 😩

Why is that relevant?

My peers are the same… so far, 9 weeks into the year, we’ve had them rallying everyone together to get a mock exam for our first exam. It’s multiple choice! Then they’re asking over and over for example questions for the other exam and example answers… it’s a science degree. If they give example answers they’ll have answered the exam for you because it’s not subjective and there’s only 6 topics that could come up and 5 questions.

I don’t know how the lecturers cope tbh. At my university a decade ago we’d discuss topics in depth over a bottle of wine with our course leaders and were expected to come up with the questions for our own essays. I was only a teenager back then but even I was treated like a competent adult comparatively .

@Glowingup I agree with you that you it’s a skill to construct a decent essay, do dc learn this though? I did English A-Level and think that really helped me.

I do use Chatgpt occasionally when I have to write a formal email as I’m not very professional day to day! I always need to edit it a fair bit though.

I work with a young woman who uses commas instead of full stops,
I’ve tried telling her but she genuinely doesn’t see what she’s doing wrong,
This is what it’s like,
I don’t know what to do about it,

Do you mean at school? I hope they do, and I do think schools are a lot hotter on banning AI use. At uni though it seems that stuff they did do at school goes out of the window and they seem stressed and overwhelmed eg by having to write two essays in three weeks (even though they will have had to do this at school and also sit multiple in-person exams).

On my course, we do teach essay-writing skills in the first year but it used to be that students came to uni knowing how to write an essay. Certainly when I went, nobody was telling us how to write because they assumed we already knew how to. I also did English and it helped a lot, as would any humanities or arts based A-level.

@Glowingup yes at school. My eldest has only just started secondary.

I have definitely noticed in recent years (it wasn’t like this 10 years ago for example) a paralysing fear by students that they will get it wrong. I can say to them til I’m blue on the face that it doesn’t matter or that there is no right or wrong answer

The is the case with all my kids and part of it stems from their being very much a right answer and a very rigid marking scheme in some schools. The worst affected was the one who sat GCSEs during covid, they were producing work, given random tests without chance to revise or were expected to self teach. Every piece of work was a possibility for the assessed exam grade, the stress was horrendous.

My son is struggling with this, some of his DSA software contains Ai and most of his peers are using ChatGPT. They are all supposed to declare but have been told by lecturers that any declaration at all will result in a panel interview, so no one is declaring. I'm guessing it's bullshit as the uni hasn't put that in place as a formal rule, the lecturers don't want to deal with Ai.
DS is too worried to use his software, so is disadvantaged.

Yes. I am in Canada rather than the UK but I am seeing the same thing here. My friends in the US have also commented on this.

I think it is mainly down to two things. Changes in educational philosophy, and lack of reading.

My three older kids were home educated for the first parts of their schooling, which means that I taught them to read and write. They vary in their interests and abilities but are all solid readers now, though they don't in fact read nearly as much as I did at the same ages. But te biggest differernce from their peers is their handwriting is quite good and they can also write and read cursive.

My youngest, at nine, has gone through the public system, in quite a nice, very small school, but there is a marked difference in how she has been taught to read and write. I saw the same thing in the few years pre-covid when I was working pt in a literacy program at a public school. Reading strategies seemed to be understood by many children as a guessing game. But the writing - oh my! They spend almost no time teaching how to print, and no cursive at all. The children formed the letters any way they wanted. They often used unlined paper, to make it "easier" for them. Capitalisation was random.

The idea seemed to be that eventually they would figure it out. Many of the children I was tutoring, however, had hit a wall. Writing was so time consuming and awkward that they could only do a few sentences before they were tired. And they had to concentrate so much on the mechanics of the physical writing process that thinking about what they wanted to write was not happening. Spelling - well, there seemed to be zero attempt to have them spell things correctly, which I suppose isn't strange if you won't even bother to teach them how to form letters in an efficient and readable way.

The thing is, this wasn't just laziness. It was some kind of bizarro teaching philosophy. The young teachers had no knowledge of things like books for practising letter formation, copywork, or dictation, which have been the building blocks of developing fluent writers for a few hundred years at least. They considered these ideas to be horribly old fashioned, but I suspect the real issue was that most of them could not seem to get a class of children to sit in their desks and work for 15 minutes, much less 45 for a lesson and practice.

Add to that the lack of reading and writing I see in the older grades - the grade 12 academic English students read one modern novel in the course of the year - and all their work is online - and no surprise they can't read or write.

But why should this be?

What are children spending their time on that is more a fundamental part of education than reading and writing?

There is considerable skill involved in being able to pick out relevant information and put it together in an essay and structure it appropriately so that it is informative and persuasive. Using chat GPT, even if you only use it for a “basic” structure that you then edit, totally removes that and that’s how you end up with people who can’t even structure a basic email. You see people on here saying they use ChatGPT for everything, including just writing messages to friends. It always sounds so contrived as well. I do believe it’s causing a serious dumbing down of the population.

I think this ability was already under stress with students googling questions and topics. There has been much less need to find several print sources, find relevant information, synthesise it and form hypotheses, and then structure and argument. For whatever reason, once they have the ability to search very specifically for what they want, it becomes more of a copy/paste kind of thing.

I suspect it's part of the reason we are seeing so much political polarisation. Many people who are on the face of it highly educated are simply unable to either take apart or synthesise arguments.

What age is grade 12?

Year 13

My 2, now adult DC went to the same school and had the same teachers. They read the same books at home.

DD's spelling and grammar is terrible. Her emails contain the usual 'should of' rubbish etc.

DS's writing is pretty perfect.

Difference is, DD is a social media addict. DS does not do social media at all, not even Whatsapp or Facebook.

I blame SM.

My DS (16yrs) has excellent grammar and spelling ability because DH is a stickler and taught him well. DH has a Masters in English.

My grammar is quite poor in comparison because we didn’t learn any grammar rules at my Comp school (late 1970’s) and despite two degrees, I’ve muddled along ok for now.

I have noticed that quite a few teachers at DS’s secondary school have poor writing skills too.
Unfortunately, DS isn’t in a position to correct them so they go unchecked, but he definitely spots them and occasionally will point out the worst offences against SPaG to us.

I was always very keen to make sure DD wrote well. My background is copywriting and proof reading, although I suspect some of the posters on this thread might not think so.

She often used to complain when I pointed out corrections and said that the teachers didn't care.

However, at 25 she writes very well and writes clear and concise emails.

I occasionally look at my manager's letters. I know she prides herself on doing them quickly but the poor formatting, typos, badly constructed sentences makes me feel embarrassed. She's not young, not a recent graduate.

I teach an MA writing course and we get good students from good unis with good degrees who can't spell or punctuate.