Regional variation exists too, especially English from country to country as we all know.

One difference that bothers me - the sport I most often watch on TV is soccer. Between the US and the UK, the UK seems to have a practice (I'm open to being corrected) of treating singular words that have a plural connotation, as being plural words, not singular.

So for a pre-game warmup on the field, if one of the two teams comes out to do that, a British commentator would say "Chelsea are coming out on the field". Where I think in American English, the word "team" is singular so that if referring only to one team, that remains singular. So, "Chelsea is coming out on the field"

Aww🤗

Thanks, Ally De.

I used to be really good at spelling and grammar and punctuation and stuff like that.

Lately, I’ve found myself doubting some of the ways I write things ——quotation marks, question marks, commas…..

I’d just hate to think that people refrain from giving their opinion because of their spelling or punctuation or grammar.

I think it is an important thing to learn, though. Some are better at it than others.

At least they’re trying, chloebud.“

Good point! I’m guessing lots of people wouldn’t even notice it. My mom was an English teacher, and her grammar corrections to my syblings and me could get annoying. The time came when I was glad she did it.

I used to do quite a bit of editing as part of my job. It never ceased to amaze me the errors some well educated people made. Simple things, such as ”its” and ”it’s.”😵‍💫

Roxsolid, I too used to be much better than I am anymore. I just corrected an error in my post above. Good grief. 😆

Nothing I have ever seen on this forum is all that bad, honestly. We seem to attract people who care about at least trying. Occasional errors here don't even register on me, probably because I have gone numb from the horrors that exist in the rest of my social media.

@Ally De Your comment about FB reminded me of my pet peeve of the hand lettered signs throughout many grocery stores. The thing that peeves me about them is the many creative spellings on those signs. I’m truly appalled! I understand that it’s just human to make a spelling error. But, on a sign that’s to be displayed in a place of business for customers to read? How is it that none of the employees notice the errors or that the store manager isn’t cruising the store and reading these signs? I hate to be distracted from the message because I’m all agog at the spelling error(s). Maybe I’m petty but I don’t think so. I agree with you that we are probably doomed.

KW, like this? 😆

@sephia_wa Now that is absolutely hilarious!! Where oh where is the store manager? 🤣

Right?!? Hard to believe someone wouldn't know what that looks like 😂

That depends. I'm not inclined to observe textbook grammar, when I'm posting online or in a text.

I use precise grammar at work. So much so, I'm the person who checks everyone elses' before we turn in grants, medical textbook chapters, journal submissions, etc.

Why should we be formal at all times?? We don't do that in face to face life, so why bother when writing?

Why do you think proper grammar is formal? It's literacy. It's our (if we speak English that we are talking about here) language.

Thank you @Olychick! My thoughts exactly!!

Yeah, I lack literacy. Seriously? There's a time and a place for everything. We don't wear hats and gloves anymore either. There's no point in being proper with every step and action. And yes, exact grammar is very formal.

rob - no one has said or is meaning that you “lack literacy”. Oly’s point that I agree with is that our use of proper grammar doesn’t give speech a formal tone. My idea of formal speech is to not use any slang or contractions. The use of slang and contractions does, for me, make the tone of the speaker’s speech more casual but that doesn’t mean proper grammar shouldn’t be used.

Maybe not in the case of this one, but formal communication is how you'd want to interact with the President of the US. Or a person in another important position or one of great authority or in a position of great seriousness or importance to you. To convey the highest degree of respect and deference. At the other end of the range is the most colloquial, our casual speech. How you talk to a sibling (but not a parent), a close friend, etc.

I think communication in situations like this forum should be expected to be pretty squarely in the middle. Neither too much deference nor too much sloppiness should be seen. To use too much slang, bad grammar, buzz words not widely known or understood, or to have consistently misspelled words, are in poor form. Typos and even errors of content happen.

rob, it's a spectrum with many alternatives. Not a switch that's either this or that offering only two choices. There are many varieties of communication usage and standards that are other than formal. .

Don’t we all agree that baseline literacy is rather high today and average spoken or written communication was actually of a lower standard in the past? We do have agreed upon spelling even though we see many typos.

Years ago there was a true fishmonger in my town and he was a fishmonger, not a well educated man. He was probably very happy to be freed from school. He knew how to handle fish— something many of us are pleased not to do. I love remembering the large hand lettered sign in sloping magic marker advertising Muscles. Sadly, there was no pocket phone available to capture that sign forever.

Formal:

Please, get out of my house.

Informal:

Get out of my F’in’ house.

petalique, I think the preposition ’of’ actually connotes a level of formality.

Get out my f’n house.

At least they abbreviated assorted correctly.

IMO, the article in the OP suggests that people should try to be more tolerant of what they think are grammar mistakes and faux pas, since old rules may no longer apply.

Chloebud, I am howling. Thank you. 🤣

How do you get assorted right and mess up Coke that badly?! 🤣

Ally De, go figure!🤷‍♀️🙃

" Don’t we all agree that baseline literacy is rather high today and average spoken or written communication was actually of a lower standard in the past? "

Eh, I'm not so sure. Perhaps I have an incorrect and wrongly expanded notion of literacy but I think of literacy as not only the ability to do basic reading and writing, but it should include the ability to read AND understand what was read. Together with the ability to follow and describe simple abstract concepts.

In too many places, basic K-12 education systems do a poor job of preparing kids for their adult lives. It's not recent, it's been a long downward slide. Too many kids are allowed to graduate without meeting requirements that in the past were more rigorously imposed.

We should measure how well the mission to educate is being met by looking at the kids in the bottom 50% assessment and achievement range of schools and school systems, not those in the top 50%.

If you want a really good measure of how the school systems are doing, ask a professor (or other instructor) at a mid-range (not top tier) college what their experiences are these days concerning the average level of student preparedness for college work, compared to 20 years ago.

Carolb, since I am old, personally I am going to hang on to the "old rules" for my use. :)

Fair enough, murraysmom - I think many are still valid anyway 🙂

As far as atrocious spelling goes, there has been a shift in reading education over the years, phonics were disfavored over 'whole-word' method and that has arguably created a lot of very poor spellers. There's been quite a bit of reporting about it, and moves to revert to again teach phonics rather than word recognition.

Thanks for explaining that sign @Ally De. I couldnt figure out what it was supposed to say, though I didn’t read down far enough to see the Sprite, which would have helped me.

Agree strongly with Elmer's description of literacy. Young people can't even figure out change if the cash register malfunctions. That's basic arithmetic. I don't frequent drive-throughs very often, but on the rare occasion that I do, it's comical watching someone figure out the change if I've paid with cash. Comical and very sad.

I disagree regard to an increase in baseline literacy nowadays. One only need peruse online message boards to find that written communication has gone to s*** courtesy of AI/voice dictation/posting that is blindly submitted with no review of spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors ... as if much more than 50% of the population nowadays could recognize the errors if they did review it.

Agree with Dadoes.

I make more mistakes than I would like, including spelling errors which annoy me to no end when I see one in something I posted. If I see one, I fix it.

Using this board as a great example, there are mistakes here and there, maybe a word or two. This isn't a doctoral dissertation, it's fine.

Most others forms of social media are a million times worse. There are times I will read a paragraph elsewhere and actually can't understand it. People post a riddled mess of incomplete sentences, and words which are so mangled they don't appear to be English. Yet these are native English speakers. They just don't care. Unless ~75% of the people posting public comments on news stories, Facebook, and Nextdoor (what a cess pool Nextdoor is!) have a learning disability, that's the only way it is remotely ok.

.... written communication has gone to s*** courtesy of AI/voice dictation/posting......"

Nah, dadoes, that's been the case for decades now. It's not a recent change.

Again, I'll revert to my suggestion - find someone who teaches college and ask them to compare the academic preparation of today's students with those of some years ago.

Not a community college teacher, because those have always made a special effort to help lower achievers in high school, and rightfully so.

Some like-minded people here might enjoy this reel. I’m sure we all have seen rhe badly decorated cakes with errors. This comedian takes it to a new level. LINK-Matt Eubanks on Cakes

He has some other funny ones too, one about signs.

@KW PNW Z8, yes the original thread is anout grammar. However there is a mention about punctuation, and I am of the opinion grammar, punctuation and spelling go hand in hand. Did anyone else here have to diagram sentences in high school? I didn’t enjiy doing it, but learned a lot from it. Too bad the kids these days aren’t exposed to a little of that.

I have had trouble lately with my iPad not auto-correcting or doing it’s usual job of predictive typing. Some I catch, some I don’t. Sometimes i am given an alternate word choice when I mis-type. One that drives me nuts is when i use the word ’she’; it is changed to ’Sherry’. I am still looking for a fix because this apparently has been a recurring problem with Apple iPads.

When I worked, i was very careful about how I wrote things in a first draft. When I’m sending a text, I’m now to the point I‘m about 50-50 using a period, especially with a one sentence note.

Outside Playing, yes, I learned to diagram sentences in 5th grade. "LY words are adverbs and they modify the predicate" still lives in my brain. I enjoyed diagramming sentences though they could be tricky at times. I am very thankful that I went through kindergarten to high school when I did. I received a very good education that has stood me well during my whole working life and even into retirement. I still get requests to edit reports and I enjoy the challenge.

There are many adverbs that don't end in LY, so that isn't a guide that covers all possibilities. I had decent teachers when it came to presenting grammar. And some that hit it with a far too large hammer. Including one in particular whose stock in trade was a too large hammer - assignments to memorize >100 preposition in one week, to memorize very long poems in one week, to diagram 40 sentences due the next day, etc. Even with these tough and well meaning teachers, my knowledge was incomplete.

I never really learned English grammar well until learning foreign languages well. Meaning, past the first year or two stage. You can't properly learn tenses, changing word forms depending on the part of the sentence the word is used for (especially with German and others in particular that have case declensions) without knowing the counterpart in English.

I'm sure many others here had the same experience.

Edit to add - a simple example that to this day causes me to react like a fingernail scraping an old fashioned black board -

People who don't know of subjunctive situations - sometimes a tense, sometimes not- and when/how to use it. Resulting in statements like:

If I was you, I would........

I was a technical writer and editor. At one job, a new person was hired, but no one from the documentation department had interviewed her. It was quickly apparent that she could not construct a written sentence. Rather embarrassingly for all, one of the managers decided to check out her diagramming skills, which were nil, even at the most basic level. Frankly, most of the product developers, and managers, could not do it (it was left up on the whiteboard), even those who could actually write fairly well. Most of the technical writers could, but we were a little shocked that it was not taught in all schools. (btw, that person did not survive a month at the job, and the hiring process was altered.)

I learned the most about English grammar when I studies French, and more when ai studied German! My kids both had Latin in elementary or middle school, and I know it helped them understand grammar and vocabulary.

bpath, we had the same path with French and German. Which I extended on my own into the basics of another one or two related to those.

Was there truly a time when everyman could write and speak well? Those select beautiful letters from the Civil War are not a representstive sample. What could act as a representative sample?

Elmer, Sister Phillip Marie would take her heavy ruler to you for poo-pooing her LY words saying. She did not say ONLY LY words are adverbs. She was introducing a new concept to 11 year olds. Perhaps you can't remember that far back?

That's a rude and unnecessary insult. Obviously too many years have passed or there are other reasons why you don't remember what she taught you about the Golden Rule. That's sad, you could have put it to good use all these many years and years. .

I took the comment as a joke. I wonder though if one had to have experienced having a nun as a teacher to see the intended humor. I did have nuns for grades 1 -6. Elmer I wanted to say that grammar teacher you had sounds like it was a sledge hammer she used! An extreme taskmaster who brooked no nonsense from her students I bet. Yikes!

Then she can take my reply as a joke.

Yes, absolutely a sledge hammer, a Jr High English teacher.

To this day, I can recite pretty closely all the versus of the Star Spangled Banner (I think there are four), and poems like "When the Frost is on the Punkin" and Shakespeare's "7 Ages of Man" from As You Like It (All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players, etc). There are others I may remember the words to but not the titles to get started.

I can't do the entire list of 135 prepositions. I did that by breaking it down into lines and chanting them like a football cheer in a recurring rhythmical pattern. I remember parts, like

Below! Beneath! Beside-Between-Betwixt! and

Along! Amid! Among-Around-Atop!

Testing occurred over several days, standing in front of the class. The first day's test takers stood in front of those assigned to the last day, then from the second day on, the audience was those who'd already been tested. So you had more study time when in the last group, but had to perform in front of a larger audience. The day for each assignment group was rotated from week to week so that all had the same turns to be first as last.

Not until later did I learn the aide-memoir that a preposition could often describe what a plane can do with, to, or near a cloud or clouds. That would have helped.

That's a rude and unnecessary insult. Obviously too many years have passed or there are other reasons why you don't remember what she taught you about the Golden Rule. That's sad, you could have put it to good use all these many years and years.

Passing judgement again. And can't take a joke. And you know nothing about me to insinuate that I have tarnished The Golden Rule. I happen to have a very good memory. And obviously we had different educational experiences so comparing would be an apples to oranges situation.

Let's just agree to let the dust settle on this one.

You missed my joke?

So that's a "no" to letting the dust settle then?

murraysmom, I thought you were making a playful comment. It seemed to me, that you were saying that you were old enough to remember that far back, and that Elmer wasn’t quite as old as you.

I don’t think that you meant it to be an insult.

I must have missed the smirk on her face or her eye winking at me.

Written conversations and in-person ones work differently. Duh!

They really do work differently. I always have to remind myself that not everyone can see my smile or hear my laugh in my written repartee. My siblings tend to be smart alecks when we’re together and we all know we must tone that down when we’re around other people.

KW, you’re quite right about that.

That’s why emojis and emoticons can be helpful. The only problem is that some folks really dislike them. They think that they are childish.🤷‍♀️ Some think that they clutter up the page. They could be right.

They are a part of our communication now, like it or not.

I know that I try to avoid using them around those that have expressed their disdain for them, though. I’d never use them in business but I think that they are quite useful in relaxed settings like this forum.

And, oh yes, my siblings and I have the greatest time poking fun at each other!

rox - I agree emojis and emoticons can be helpful. They can also be overused just as the exclamation point is. But, they both serve a purpose in non business writing.

“They can also be overused just as the exclamation point is. ”

Dog people vs. cat people.

roxsolid, I tend to find humor in most things. I'm funny that way. :)

murraysmom, especially in this forum. It’s full of floof topics, games, silly quizzes…

I know that there are serious topics here, and people use it as a sounding board which is great!

For real answers, and real experts, I go elsewhere.

muuraysmom, your posts are always a pleasure. (I imagine that I’m talking to Helen Hunt) LOL