I see more often than not, people who don’t know how to use proper terminology or spelling when trying to get a type-written message to be understood.
Granted, I know that when I went to school, spelling was a big thing and we always got marked on our good spelling and grammar, and if you spelled something wrong or used incorrect grammar, you were punished or received bad marks. It seems that today, it doesn’t matter how you spell something, just as long as you make it sound like the way it’s supposed to, you’ll still get a good grade.
Teachers are our greatest resources when it comes to teaching kids how to properly spell at an early age, but it seems that some teachers today don’t even care about how something is spelled or the correct use of grammar.
For example, your test might have you correct the following sentences:
Incorrect: Jane is going too the supermarket
Correct: Jane is going to the supermarket (not “to, two or too”)
Incorrect: Michael through the ball (or “thru”)
Correct: Michael threw the ball
Incorrect: David has offered to look after are dog while we are on vacation.
Correct: David has offered to look after our dog while we are on vacation.
My partner is a high school teacher and says as long as the kid gets the point across, it really doesn’t matter how something is spelled and the kid will get a good grade.
Is there anyone out there that is bothered by reading comments on resources like Facebook and YouTube where some of the spelling is so abhorrent that we choose not to read comments anymore?
Some people can’t spell, that’s a given. You can blame the school system or the parents or whomever you want to blame. If I read a post on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, and the poster uses "there’ instead of “they’re”, it really doesn’t bother me that much. It’s not being graded and people are typing with their fingers or using the auto guess feature. If a teacher lets it slide on an English test I think I would take that up with the principal.
Your title doesn’t match your OP. Are you giving a grammar lesson, or complaining about people who don’t spell correctly?
I’m all for correct spelling, too. It bothers me when people use “are” for “our,” or “fare” for “fair,” or “it’s” for “its,” etc. But my theory is that some people, because of how their brains are wired, think of words first as combinations of sounds, while others think of words first as combinations of letters.
That was the hot new pedagogical trend in the 1990s when my children went to grade school. When the teacher laid that on us at the first parent-teacher meeting I was, if not horrified, deeply dismayed. What was wrong with phonics? I was brought up on phonics in the 1960s and look how well I turned out. Even though it’s necessary to eventually break the paradigm of phonics to progress in English, phonics has proved to be the best method for beginning literacy. My kids were deliberately kept disadvantaged in spelling and they had to work extra hard to overcome that. If they hadn’t had my example to learn from, they might still be as semi-literate as the Facebook crowd. ::shudder::
I too have a double standard. I have a nephew who frequently posts on FB and his spiling an grammer ar atroshus, but it is not for me to correct him and I think doing so would be akin to bullying.
Many people on forums, even, believe it or not, on this forum, make mistakes but it is generally considered bad form to correct them. In any case, one can be sure that Muphry’s law will come into effect if one does. In these cases, pointing out errors is almost required.
When I read a business letter or email, spelling and grammar errors will colour my opinion of the sender’s competence.
Spoken language is a different creature than written language. In spoken language to, too, and two are the same sound and so are they’re, their, and there.
Most online communication tends to mimic spoken English rather than written English. It’s put onto the keyboard by sounds. (It’s and its are also the same sounds.) People are essentially hearing themselves talk to others.
This may be bothersome to those of us who grew up in a world when all writing needed more or less formal, standard English. You’ll notice , however, that when formal writing is called for, which is almost all cases other than social media, regular, standard written English dominates. Younger people will have no difficulty moving among what will be three varieties of English: spoken, written, and social.
Going by the long-term trend of thread titles in GQ mentioning “grammar” and then asking about spelling, punctuation, or stylistics, for many folks “grammar” is a catchall for English class in general.
In linguistics, “grammar” is defined as a combination of two things: morphology and syntax, each of which is a field of study in itself.
Not always; depends on the dialect and whether the word is stressed or unstressed.
The informal communications I receive do not at all tend to be spelled badly, though they do seem to contain a larger proportion of smilies and emoticons.
ETA at one point it was important(?) to use SMS-speak to minimise one’s character count and maximise typing speed.
I don’t care if people misspell words in Facebook comments - I know that when I do it, it’s more a typing mistake than a spelling mistake and there’s only so much effort that I will put into a Facebook comment. I wouldn’t expect an fifth grade English teacher to let it slide on a test - but I’m also not in love with the idea of giving a paper with “A”-quality content a “B” because of spelling and other errors that don’t interfere with getting the point across. The idea of a test or paper is to determine how well someone understands the subject - so yes, for a spelling test, spelling counts. Not so much for a biology test. Making note of the errors or annotating the test/paper with corrections is one thing- lowering the mark is another. It’s not like the paper with “B”-quality content gets an “A” because the spelling and grammar is perfect.
Taking points off an assignment because of bad spelling and/or grammar is lame; if it’s unreadable, I want to assume standard procedure is to have the student revise it.
What subject does your partner teach? There are teachers in certain content areas who believe students’ grades should reflect their performance on the standards in that area, not spelling, grammar, mechanics, syntax, etc… I taught English and social studies, and while I see that point, if student can’t express their ideas without requiring extra work on the part of the reader, it’s hard to argue writing skills don’t matter. Also, if those skills are required for other classes, students are more likely to learn and use them universally.
I do believe some people have a terrible time spelling. For essays that are word-processed, spelling is less of an issue. For other work, I corrected spelling errors but didn’t count off for them. High school students have had enough writing experience, however, that they shouldn’t be writing in fragments and run-ons in their junior year. One or two such errors in a history essay wouldn’t have affected the grade–though I’d correct them and suggest working on them in my comments; more than one or two, and that’s an issue. I did have students spend time on revisions and peer-editing and offered help for those deficient in those skills.
Today’s students get so much “bad practice” in writing via tweets, posts, and texts, it’s getting harder and harder to build strong writing skills.
I have a spreadsheet on which I enter student assessments twice yearly, tracking their use of 78 (I think) different spelling patterns, from initial /b/ through “tion” for /shun/, from doubling consonants when adding vowel suffixes to monosyllabic words with short vowels and single terminal consonants through using the “ize” suffix to change adjectives into verbs. Based on these assessments, I work with three other teachers to put students in eight different spelling groups working on different topics. Some kids are still working on silent e words with single syllables; others are using Greek and Latin roots to determine meanings of polysyllabic words like polysyllabic. We meet with our groups 1-3 times weekly to introduce and review patterns, test them weekly, and move students from group to group as necessary. #notallteachers
“They’re”, at least, is sometimes pronounced with an /eɪ/ “ay” sound, so that can differentiate it from “their” and “there.” I’m not sure about distinguishing the other ones. There is an obsolete pronunciation of “two” that includes the “w”, and Scots has “twa,” but that one is spelled differently.