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.

Really? How much less could you care then? No, damn it. You meant that you couldn’t care less.

That’s it.

Actually, here’s a really helpful web page.

There is nothing more tedious than analysing texts and repeatedly making bullshit up about the effect of linguistic devices. “Wordsworth’s use of foregrounding in this stanza emphasises his love of the English countryside.” Does it? Fuck no.

All I ever learnt in English A-level was how to dissect the crap out of any text. What a marvellous resource that is. The thing is, I could extract all I ever needed to from a piece of writing before I did A-level English. The ability to label every type of word under the sun (notice the deliberate use of a cliché, clearly highlighting how shit the subject is) or throw around phrases like “subordinate adjectival clause of degree” succeeds only in making one sound like a pompous twat.

I would sort the subject out. What needs to be taught are comprehension and writing skills. The vast majority of people can’t read for shit. And writing? Forget it. They can’t even spell “like,” a word many of them are particularly fond of - constructing a coherent sentence is well beyond their abilities.

It’s a sad state of affairs when you have to use incorrect (”non-standard”) grammar for people to understand you.