I have two different schools of thought on this. I don’t mind mistakes in informal settings like social media. I see children all the time at school who cannot spell except phonetically and have no understanding of punctuation and, unfortunately, it is quite clear that they are unable to learn it except on a very basic level. Those children then become adults and as they couldn’t learn it when receiving daily direct teaching, they’re not going to suddenly learn it as an adult. They still have a right to communicate online and it’s not feasible or fair to expect them to get someone to correct their posts before they hit enter each time. I do struggle if full stops are used randomly as my brain cannot ignore them and pauses every time when it sees one. I’d much rather they were not used at all in that case. In professional settings, however, I am the exact opposite. I hate mistakes in things such as mass produced leaflets, posters, permanent signage, official letters, posts on websites etc. The sort of thing where even if the writer isn’t great at spelling and punctuation, they could get someone to check it over. That seems like laziness or cost cutting and reflects badly on the business.
I read an interesting article about this recently - it was in response to Lord Digby criticising one of the female football commentators for her accent - and basically, the development of written speech lags behind the development of spoken speech and particularly regional colloquialisms. Its the reason we have such issues with the pronunciation of words like cough ("cof") and borough ("bur-uh") or knight and night compared to the spelling. So while written phrases such as "could of", etc, are incorrect in written English *now* they might become correct written English in the future. In the same way as words and expressions such as "LOL", "Brexit" and "omnishambles" have entered the language within very recent memory.
[QUOTE="upthecolliers, post: As long as you can read it I personally don't give a toss.[/QUOTE] Corrected it for you mate.
"We won Coventry in our first home match". No we didn't. We BEAT them. If we'd won Coventry we'd have an entire City on display in our Trophy cabinet.
Agreed. My daughter (34 years old) says it and types it in messages. She also says "brought" when she means "bought". She's not thick, she starts a degree course at Derby Uni in september.....
Why is that, though? I know some people have genuine learning disabilities, dyslexia(etc), but if I think back to my own childhood(I'm 40 next year), there were very few kids who didn't know at least the very basics of grammar. I'm talking about the correct use of full stops and capital letters. Many either over or underused the comma(as I do from time to time), but they knew the general rules. So what is it that has changed? Is it laziness, brought upon by the emergence of spell checkers and the like on all their devices? Has the quality of the teaching dropped off(as a result of the budget cuts)? Another thing we need to consider is the fact that all languages are constantly evolving, and the likes of "...could of" may become the correct term for future generations...
It’s not laziness as a lot of these kids really do try and it’s not a decline in teaching quality as it’s maybe 5-10% of children across a year group and they have masses of specialist teaching time dedicated to them. There’s loads of different reasons, children with dyslexia/general learning difficulties/ADHD/terrible home lives where neglect means they just don’t have the capacity to learn/same with ongoing illnesses, and many other reasons. I’m almost certain you’ll have had the same amount as school, you just didn’t know. How often did you go and read someone’s book who was in the bottom set? Presumably only people in the same class sees the writing, and not very often, and as they’d be at the same level they wouldn’t notice anything untoward. When you then grew up and got a job, the people who couldn’t read or write very well would have got a job where that didn’t matter and unless you became pen pals with them (unlikely due to their poor reading and writing skills) you would have no idea what their literacy levels were. Everyone who you did see writing at work got the job because they were ok at it so everyone you saw was by default ok at it. Now, almost everyone has a social media account and the people who may have otherwise never written a word since leaving school spend a significant chunk of their day reading and writing. It may be annoying to those reading who get annoyed at such things but it’s fantastic for those who get to practise the skill every day. It can be a source of shame for many people who struggle and strangers pointing it out to them every day is cruel. That can lead to them not expressing themselves if they know their opinions will be ignored or ridiculed because of the way they write.
I think this is true. This forum is exceptional in the main. It's not just us English speakers either who make mistakes. I read a lot of stuff on-line on Spanish, French and Portuguese websites, and the levels of grammar and spelling to be found make this forum look like the Oxford English Dictionary. What does annoy me are the frequent mistakes on sites owned by the BBC or so-called highbrow English newspapers, where a high standard of English used to be the norm. These aren't just typos or autocorrect howlers. I mean stuff like confusing licence and license, or lead and led, criterion and criteria, practice and practise and so on.
I'd imagine some would regard Coventry as "tin pot" and not worth putting a full strength team out for.
Only a few hundred years ago how words were written and said were different to what they are now. Who's to say how different they might be in another few hundred years.
I hate "can I lend?". It's "may I borrow?" Bockle, Hospical, lickle. I'm worse round George because I don't want him growing up fick.
You make a lot of good points! I do know a lot of people who were in the lower groups at school because I was in them too. It's why I honestly think there needs to be an alternative way we educate kids. The reason I was in the lower groups, was because I wasn't mentally stimulated in a classroom environment. Rather than trying to stimulate me and others who were like me, they simply bumped us further and further down the groups(which just compounded the problem). I don't know the answer to how, but I wish there were alternatives that motivated me to do better at school(I only sat and passed my GCSE's to prove a teacher wrong who told me I'd never amount to anything). As for ridiculing those who don't have the capacity to learn basic spelling/grammar, it doesn't sit right with me and I hope I have not come across as like I'm trying to do that with my posts in this thread.
Spot on. I remember the lowest set at comp being called "support". It wasn't even defined with a number or letter like the other sets and I thought this must be so degrading for those children in that set.
Some of the kids I was at school with were put into the equivalent and were actually bragging that they got to spend about 18 hours a week doing remedial English and the rest of the time doing basic maths. To be fair though, it was a waste of time for them - 2 didn't make it to 21 and another was in prison by then
"Roys Auto's" at Mapplewell. Not sure how many trucks they have, but surely the signwriter could have put them right..
