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.”
