cnn.com — The rising popularity of text messaging on mobile phones poses a threat to writing standards among Irish schoolchildren, an education commission says. The frequency of errors in grammar and punctuation has become a serious concern, the State Examination Commission said in a report after reviewing last year's exam performance by 15-year-olds.
Apr 26, 2007 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountApr 27, 2007
I AM IN UR SKOOLZ, KILLIN' UR ENGLISH!
bamborzledApr 28, 2007
Of coarse, languish revolves. It's just that won you a low multiplification of ways to say wards, and acronymate everything to just a few letterheads, it becomifies verily hard to understate. We neat to learnify studiousants to user English corrected.I mean, would you be pissed if someone were to write like what I just did above?
rationalistApr 28, 2007
2B R !2B = teh ?( - Teh Bard)Frankly, I fail to discern a problem in this instance.
macoafiApr 28, 2007
Perhaps it is the teachers who are to blame. Some teachers are allowing students to use netspeak in their written papers, provided it isn't a final draft. This is still unacceptable. It simply reinforces the idea that it is "okay" to use netspeak/txtspeak. On a whole, I believe English teachers are not doing their jobs as well as they should be. English teachers no longer teach proper spelling and grammar. They teach literature. These are two separate disciplines, or at least they were at some point. For some reason, though, it is now acceptable to have an "English class" which consists entirely of reading Shakespeare, Vonnegut, and Fitzgerald. As a result, students graduating high school--even those which take AP level English classes--are inept when it comes to proper grammar. Last semester, I studied Russian. I was amazed at how many times the teacher had to ask whether the class knew the difference between and adjective and an adverb or what a preposition was. Sadly, few knew, and I am at a rather highly ranked university (George Washington University). The professor had trouble teaching Russian because instead of being able to compare to a construct which the students should recall from English, he had to first teach English grammar. At one point, he burst out, "you know, when I was in school we had to diagram sentences. Don't your schools teach grammar?" I was required to take three years of sentence diagramming, and I believe I have a fairly good grasp of English grammar; however, I would like to learn some of the finer intricacies of sentence diagramming, such as what to do when there are multiple dependent clauses. To see the way my sister types out her messages when IMing, though, makes me cringe. She appears uneducated when one looks at her writing. Her difficulty with understanding college-level literature--something which was part of 6th grade literature classes in the form of Shakespeare--is almost certainly related to her inability to correctly parse the English language. For that, I can only blame teachers who did not drill students thoroughly enough. I fully believe that if one cannot even take the time to use the spell-checker on one's computer, one should not receive an A if there is any misspelling. Proper nouns could be an exception since they are not dictionary words. In addition, students should not be permitted to turn in typed papers, except, perhaps if they are done on a typewriter, until a certain age. A student should not rely fully on the spell-checker on the computer since it will not flag improper use of homophones, nor should a student rely on Microsoft Word's grammar check which does an abysmal job.Regardless of what technology a person has, it is up to his or her teachers to impress proper grammar and spelling upon the student, even if for no other reason than the teacher's own pride. What teacher would be proud to say "I was his 8th grade English teacher" regarding a person hu speld lyk dis?
soothsingerApr 28, 2007
this is so true. I'm a computing teacher and I get homework handed in all the time with "ur", "coz", etc.Nightmare! English levels right now are pretty bad in schools.xxx
i_soarApr 28, 2007
"...it is a sorry state of affairs when us children are learning..."WE children.
bob7Apr 29, 2007
IMHO, English is annoyingly convoluted and inefficient. Would someone please explain why it is quite sad that things are improving, besides the fact that it makes you look 'unprofessional?'
yearnfulgpMay 1, 2007
Thats how words like "You're" and "That'll" came about...because people were lazy and didnt feel like pronouncing the entire words correctly...im sure people bitched about it at first...but standards can always change =)
yodarealdealNov 16, 2007
text so doesnt impact our writing habits...its called PROOF READING PEOPLE!!!!!!!!