An interesting article was published this week in Felix: a survey was conducted at Imperial and found that everyone sucks at spelling and grammar. Especially the British students. Surprise, surprise.
I noticed quite a few of my pet hates in the common mistakes: effect/affect, its/it’s, separate…
Dr Lamb believes the reason is that the youth of today spend too much time watching television and not enough time reading.
He blames our schooling system, citing “poor standards of teaching and spelling in schools and a woeful lack of correction of errors at the primary and secondary level” as the main cause, underlining the need for “more emphasis on grammar and spelling… with teachers routinely picking up on mistakes.” And I couldn’t agree more.
Lamb also notes the increasingly “casual use of language in email and text messaging”, although he seems to have forgotten its infuriatingly awful usage in instant messaging.
I blame Microsoft Word and the squiggly underline + autocorrect bullshits. It’s developed a generation of lazy people dependent on technology to fix their problems, rather than realising their errors, understanding them and then learning not to do it again.
I have to agree although I am as much a part of the problem as many other but I disagree that it is a lack of reading (given that I read a variety of books regularly) but more to do with the general plethora of influences that Gaz is talking about. Instant Messengers, AutoCorrecting Word Processors, the lack of any penalties online for poor spelling and grammer etc are all, in my opinion big contributors to the problem.
oh my god. Someone else from the middle of nowhere in cambs and at imperial. I’m from some random field inbetween the villages of arrington and longstowe. I can tell you south kensington may be quiet but you’ll go insane when you start living anywhere near a hospital.