Re: Propper Englesh

"CJ Dunnaway" wrote:
"Rosemary" wrote:
"CJ Dunnaway" wrote:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storyc
od e=403092&c=1

A British educator has proposed that schools stop penalizing
students for such misspellings as "truely," "speach," "arguement"
and "opertunity" rather than continue "beating ourselves and our
students up over this problem."

You're sounding more American every day. Next you'll be listening to
cRap music.

That's been all over the news here for a couple of days. I don't care
how
people spell in letters and emails and on newsgroups, but I think if
it's
something like a professional or commercial document, a book or
newspaper, an essay or anything else like that, then it's rude to not
bother checking the spellings. I can't read as quickly if the
spellings
are wrong because I tend to read by glancing at the shape of a word
rather than by sounding out the letters and reading each word
individually. If the author wants me to read what he's written, then
why
should I be the one to make all the effort to decipher it? There was
an
interview on the TV news with a fellow advocating allowing
misspellings,
a woman who was against it, and the presenter. The woman was saying
that
she wouldn't employ anyone whose CV had incorrect spellings in it,
and the bloke gleefully recited a list of people who by that
criterion, wouldn't have got a job with her, including Einstein and
Churchill. Well,
okay - maybe he's right, and all those people couldn't spell. But I'm
sure they would give enough of a *** to check their spelling in a
dictionary, or have friends check their CVs. Incorrect spelling on a
CV
IMO just shows that you don't want the job enough to make sure you've
done the CV right.

Hi, Rosemary. You're preaching to the choir. I personally think it's
lazy and makes people seem stupid - even if they are neither. If
you're chatting with your pals that's one thing - but when you're
writing at work or school it's another.

I think literacy is below average here in the states, but it seems to
be worse among the younger generations (my children write very
poorly). Capitalization and punctuation also seem to be lacking, as
well as sentence and paragraph structure (no offense intended). :)

For bonus points, spot my crappy comma usage :-) Damn, I hate reading
back what I've written - I've always got so many fucking mistakes that
jump out at me the moment I press Post. (I say I don't care too much
about spelling etc. in newsgroups, but when it comes to what I've written
myself I bloody well do!)

I don't think literacy in English-speaking countries is ever going to get
that great. We have a pretty crappy system for transferring the spoken
word to the page, compared with languages like Italian. It seems like
there was better literacy in the past, but I bet that's only because the
bottom 20% literacy-wise were doing jobs which required no reading or
writing.Those lucky enough to get a decent education got a very very good
education, and the others just got dumped on the why-bother pile. So the
ones with little or no ability in reading and writing just never stood
out at all and never got noticed, because they never needed to.

But now, reading and writing (or at least typing) are pretty much
requirements for anything you want to do, and not being able to read is
an immense handicap.

I'm not very impressed with the state of education I've seen, though.
Dyslexics don't get picked up early enough, kids with low levels of
ability in reading and writing don't get the basic skills they need, and
kids who are average or better don't get stretched.

I don't think spelling, punctuation and grammar are considered that
important by teachers, or at least, whoever sets the curriculum doesn't
think they're important. Which is kind of bad timing, cause it's arguable
that literacy is more important now than it used to be, since so much of
our day-to-day work and communications are text-based.

"Twinkle Twinkle Your The Star" - massive poster (of the large vinyl type
- obviously one that was distributed to lots of branches) in the shop
window of a branch of a large chain of teen fashion outlets.

"The Millenium Hilton" - hotel in Manhattan.

Rosemary
.

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