About half of my students write fairly well. The other half, even after having been told that they are to adhere to standards of formal writing, and after having repeatedly experienced my corrections of their learning logs and their papers, continue to write with the habits which they have acquired through texting and social media.
I mark them down on grammatical mistakes and spelling which their writing software is capable of helping them identify and correct. I literally seem unable to make them care about formal writing. Some of them intend to go into careers where they will regularly need to write. What will the long-range effect be upon the disciplines if these abysmal writing habits become widespread and tolerated?
Is there a solution?
There were also other causes for students for not being good writers, then social media came and now we face a real disaster. I really don't know if this is the evolution of human race, to be partially informed and be always wired with a device. I don't think that this is a progress, since anytime that you seek for a higher position, then you will always be checked for your grammar, so you cannot escape from the good or bad language knowledge without consequences. Probably some people don't care for a well educated youth, they just want happy consumers to share their new 'findings' by their friends...
Unfortunately, it may already be too late. At the local university where I was lecturing, I received a letter from the dean stating that I MUST accept alternate spellings and accepted abbreviations such as used by people that text message.
To some extent, the real question is "is this necessarily a bad thing". Perhaps these are the first feeble steps towards a universal language?
There were also other causes for students for not being good writers, then social media came and now we face a real disaster. I really don't know if this is the evolution of human race, to be partially informed and be always wired with a device. I don't think that this is a progress, since anytime that you seek for a higher position, then you will always be checked for your grammar, so you cannot escape from the good or bad language knowledge without consequences. Probably some people don't care for a well educated youth, they just want happy consumers to share their new 'findings' by their friends...
Mark, you may be right. At the University of Connecticut, from which I retired over a decade ago, I am told that even remedial writing courses are producing deficient results. The problem may lie in the lack of basic grammatical training and spelling in the teachers themselves at all educational levels thanks or no thanks to social media. When I was in school aeons ago, we memorized definitions of parts of speech- nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, propositions--. No one does that any more!
In my modest (I´m not a philologist :-)) opinion, this is an inevitable consequence of the internet era. As Nelson has mentioned, when we were in the primary school we had to memorize definitions of parts of speech, etc. I´ll add even more, in my school it was a common practice to ask student to memorize and say in voice poems and long literal texts (not only in Bulgarian, but also in foreign languages as English, French, German, Russian). Who will have nowadays the "courage" to ask students to that... and, probably, closed to the Mark Laflamme´s comment, this a natural evolution, which is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, we are also not speaking / writing as the ancient Greeks and Romans, aren´t we... :-).
Ability to analyze the causality, writing correct spellings and grammar, conceptualization, literary beauty, and depth of relationships are likely to be worst hit.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Linguistics
- Philology
- Language
- English