Wednesday, Dec 12, 2018 at 20:55
You could make it a 24 hrs-a-day, 7-days-a-week, lifetime project, to try and improve punctuation and spelling in forums, and in websites generally.
I can only blame the teachers of the last 30 or 40 years, because I'm sure their standards, related to the teaching of literacy, have declined enormously in that time.
Perhaps we can blame Dr Benjamin Spock and other do-gooders who reckoned you can't keep correcting and punishing children for not getting their writing and comprehension up to speed.
I was taught in the 50's and 60's (in the inkwell era) by teachers who would be classed as tyrants and child abusers today. They ruled with brutality.
I got whacked for getting things wrong, and caned nearly every day for simple transgressions, as in just talking in class.
So perhaps I'm a damaged individual with bitter memories of a childhood where I was treated worse than a wild, uncontrollable animal.
However, all my mates got the same treatment, so I guess we're all in the same boat.
But one thing I can tell you. We can spell, we can write with correct punctuation, verbs, adverbs and nouns - and add up in our heads without referring to a calculator.
We can do that, because we were too frightened of the dreadful consequences of getting it wrong.
Somewhere along the way, things went badly wrong in the education system.
I can tell that, because I see regularly see advertising signs with mis-spelt words, webpages with numerous spelling errors, journalistic articles that lack comprehension - and which obviously haven't even been proof-read.
I can also blame Google and smartphones, that dispense with capitals and punctuation as soon as you type something in.
Put in capitals and punctuation, and they eliminate both, first chance they get!
Or I could simply blame it all on personal laziness and an unwillingness to improve their skills, as they go through life. I think there's a lot of that about today.
Cheers, Ron.
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