For those who don’t speak the languages of texting and leet speak, the headline can be translated as “Thirty Percent of “Elite” Students Entering College Cannot Use Proper Punctuation and Grammar—a Finding That Must Be Considered With Wry Bemusement, Lest We Fall Into Despair.”
Not all texting is similarly indecipherable, of course. Yet that has not stopped texting—and its online cousin, social networking—from being considered the primary catalysts for the horrid writing of post-secondary students. Whether these technologies are the cause of the problem or just another symptom is still to be determined. But one thing is clear: Young people are, generally speaking, atrocious grammarians.
As almost all college professors can attest, even “elite” students appear to be unfamiliar with basic grammar; their papers are often written as if they were posting on a friend’s Facebook wall. Yet while most complaints are based on anecdotal evidence, a university in Canada has quantified just how disastrous the situation has become:
For years there’s been a flood of anecdotal complaints from professors about what they say is the wretched state of English grammar coming from some of their students.
Now there seems to be some solid evidence.
Ontario’s Waterloo University is one of the few post-secondary institutions in Canada to require the students they accept to pass an exam testing their English language skills.
Almost a third of those students are failing.
“Thirty per cent of students who are admitted are not able to pass at a minimum level,” says Ann Barrett, managing director of the English language proficiency exam at Waterloo University. . .
Even those with good marks out of Grade 12, so-called elite students, “still can’t pass our simple test,” she says.Emoticons, happy faces, sad faces, cuz, are just some of the writing horrors being handed in, say professors and administrators at Simon Fraser.
“Little happy faces … or a sad face … little abbreviations,” show up even in letters of academic appeal, says Khan Hemani.
“Instead of ‘because’, it’s ‘cuz’. That’s one I see fairly frequently,” she says, and these are new in the past five years.
[. . .]Khan Hemani sends appeal submissions with emoticons in them back to students to be re-written “because a committee will immediately get their backs up when they see that kind of written style.”
Professors are seeing their share of bad grammar in essays as well.
“The words ‘a lot’ have become one word, for everyone, as far as I can tell. ‘Definitely’ is always spelled with an ‘a’ -’definitely’. I don’t know why,” says Paul Budra, an English professor and associate dean of arts and science at Simon Fraser.
“Punctuation errors are huge, and apostrophe errors. Students seem to have absolutely no idea what an apostrophe is for. None. Absolutely none.”
He is floored by some of what he sees.
“I get their essays and I go ‘You obviously don’t know what a sentence fragment is. You think commas are sort of like parmesan cheese that you sprinkle on your words’,” said Budra.
As the article notes near the end, there has never been a golden age when students excelled at writing. Most of us who write regularly (especially lowly web editors) receive a remedial education in grammar through trial and error. Yet for older generations (e.g., Gen Xers and before) the problem has generally been a failure to understand or implement the basic rules of usage. Today, it seems as if the younger generations have adopted an alternative form of grammar and punctuation that they believe is as acceptable, if not as legitimate, as standard English.
Such creative use of language is somewhat laudable, though students would do well to remember that the rules of usage are accepted as standard for a reason. As G.K. Chesterton said, “Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.”
February 3rd, 2010 | 12:07 pm
I belong to an on-line writers’ group. When newcomers ask for advice, I warn them that they can’t crit grammar without knowing it. In particular, a run-on sentence is not one that goes on and on and on and one, and passive voice does not mean that there is little action in a passage.
February 3rd, 2010 | 12:21 pm
The article points out that this isn’t a new problem, though the norms of electronic communication may me making it worse. State accreditation boards have been telling high schools to only administer multiple choice tests for years, in order to make it easier for them to assess schools. When students aren’t expected to write they don’t learn how.
February 3rd, 2010 | 12:54 pm
“horrid” has two r’s, as in:
“Yet that has not stopped texting—and its online cousin, social networking—from being considered the primary catalysts for the horid writing of post-secondary students.”
February 3rd, 2010 | 12:54 pm
Ummm…
>>“I get their essays and I go..”>>
Not “I say to them” or “I think” but “I go”?
Hmmm.
The reason for rules of grammar are the same as the reason for rules of math…to get a result that is accurate and says what you want to say. Start ignoring the rules, and the product often doesn’t say what you intended to say.
Of course, that assumes that your reader is able to comprehend clearly written material in the first place…!
February 3rd, 2010 | 2:06 pm
There is an educational trend (one that my own children have been subjected to) that encourages students to write from a very early age and does not correct for proper grammar. As the children reach middle school years, they are still focusing on the ideas and not so much the form. My oldest is in the 9th grade and I’m still waiting for grammar and punctuation to come into play….
February 3rd, 2010 | 2:42 pm
The name of the large country north of the 49th parallel is spelled CANADA.
February 3rd, 2010 | 3:25 pm
An alternative form of grammar and communication, by an intelligent and well-educated group of society? Or a sloppy, lazy, and inconsistent means to share snippets of information by a barely-educated group of society? Consider the following passage, written by an Army private, with minimal education, in 1804:
“The best authenticated accounts informed us, that we were to pass through a country possessed by numerous, powerful and warlike nations of savages, of gigantic stature, fierce, treacherous and cruel; and particularly hostile to white men. And fame had united with tradition in opposing mountains to our course, which human enterprize and exertion would attempt in vain to pass. The determined and resolute character, however, of the corps, and the confidence which pervaded all ranks dispelled every emotion of fear, and anxiety for the present; while a sense of duty, and of the honour, which would attend the completion of the object of the expedition; a wish to gratify the expectations of the government, and of our fellow citizens, with the feelings which novelty and discovery invariably inspire, seemed to insure to us ample support in our future toils, suffering and dangers.”
- Patrick Gass, regarding his experiences on the Lewis & Clark expedition.
Can an *educated* 21st century student, using text-speak, provide the same clarity as Patrick Gass did over 200 years ago?
February 3rd, 2010 | 5:16 pm
I believe “leet n00b” is an oxymoron. A n00b is not just someone new at something, it’s someone who can’t “get it.”
February 3rd, 2010 | 5:18 pm
Having started on the Internet and a smaller service through the gateway “Telenet” when I was 13 (1993), let me offer my explanation on the proliferation of netspeak/l33t, then and now, as I see it:
To be succinct, your intelligent youngsters didn’t use these alternate language forms in my youth They knew it was ridiculous. In fact, they criticized those who did as either hacker wannabes or idiots. This was especially true around IRC (Internet Relay Chat). The l33t’ers were either genuine hackers or fools, but most people simply wrote them off as the latter.
Of course, the Internet wasn’t really “mainstream” back in my childhood, until around the time I graduated high school (’97/’98). The reason we’ve seen a decline in grammar on the Internet and elsewhere is because it’s no longer predominately populated by geeks and nerds (like yours truly).
To channel James Joyce, here comes everybody. Kids start forming communities and communicating to each other through text, a mode a large segment of our younger population would otherwise not utilize. Kids communicate with friends, and not everyone is of the same grammatical ability. Who these kids talk to ends up affecting how they communicate ideas, both verbally and in writing. And they do indeed exchange ideas or expressions, right? True, these ideas are almost exclusively shallow, but such is the way of the average teen.
Then there’s text messaging. I’m told kids do it a great deal. Frankly, I feel like a fool for using commas in my texts, when everyone I know seems to be using a WWII cipher. Regardless, netspeak is encouraged through this medium due to practicality.
February 3rd, 2010 | 5:27 pm
You think the grammar of today’s youth is “wretched” now? Just wait another couple hundred years.
Here’s the Lord’s Prayer in the English grammar of a thousand years ago:
Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum,
Si þin nama gehalgod.
To becume þin rice,
gewurþe ðin willa, on eorðan swa swa on heofonum.
Urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg,
and forgyf us ure gyltas, swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum.
And ne gelæd þu us on costnunge, ac alys us of yfele.
Soþlice.
Today’s Standard English could be considered “atrocious” compared to Old English, but are we less capable of nuanced thought or communication because our grammar and vocabulary have “degenerated”?
Language is always changing, and no amount of wailing by grammarians and English teachers can stop it.
February 3rd, 2010 | 9:43 pm
Jordan, there’s a huge difference between the inevitable progression of language (something anything English teacher worth his/her own salt knows plenty about, by the way) and netspeak/l337. Netspeak is designed to be intentionally shallow, fast, and lacking in depth. This isn’t a simple case of “dictionaries are historical records, not lawgivers.”
February 4th, 2010 | 10:33 am
[...] Discover some of the wicked causes of our cultural descent into ’Inglish’ here [...]
February 8th, 2010 | 5:07 pm
I graduated from University of Waterloo and I passed the literacy test. Engineer students were given a break, though, and didn’t need as high a mark to pass. I guess they assume Engineers won’t need good writing skills.
I am also a former homeschooling parent with two kids now in public high school. Part of the problem is that the kids are not corrected for their use of “cuz” and other cute turns of phrase. There is far more emphasis on, “that was a good thought, Junior” than on, “Great thought, Junior; correcting our grammar would make it even better.” I regularly help students edit their papers, and what the 12th grade students don’t know about grammar is quite unsettling. Thankfully, I taught my kids grammar from 3rd to 8th grade, and they avoid using internetspeak in their papers.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact