Slight aside…
The fact that you received such a sweet and endearing e-mail from your step-daughter speaks volumes about you, IMHO.
As for the problem, perhaps you (or your husband) could take her aside for a moment and explain the importance of spelling and grammar when it comes to job applications, resumes, etc.
I have to wonder if this problem is really as bad as all that.
Consider: Forty years ago, how often did the average person have to write anything more than the occasional personal letter, or a piece of official work-related correspondence that would be vetted by the department secretary before anybody else saw it? And compare to now, when text is everywhere — we’re all sending email at work and at home, we’re all generating our own letters and memos at work without administrative intervention, and in general we’ve democratized and expanded in a huge way the production of text.
My hypothesis, in other words, is that the majority of the population has always been fairly crummy at spelling and grammar and stringing together words to form coherent thoughts, but there was no widely available platform where this borderline illiteracy could be seen and scrutinized. We haven’t all become stupider: We’ve just made the writing tools available to a much larger segment of the population.
Thoughts?
I have to say I disagree Cervaise.
I think that anti-intellectualism has become a cultural fixture; attention to grammatical detail is seen as a weakness. It’s hip to be stoopid. I’m not sure where this came from, although I feel like it’s part of MTV culture, hiphop culture, etc.: it’s my anecdotal understanding that when black kids make any kind of academic effort they’re often accused by their peers of “trying to be white.”
I think “coolness” and “smartness” are, in the youth culture of today, antithetical. Spelling things correctly in a textmessage is seen as effete.
I’m struggling with this now, at work. I work at a young, “hip” architecture firm. When I redpencil an outgoing document and show them how sloppy their stuff might appear to an outside eye, the universal response is an eyeroll.
If anything, the increasing dependency on text–emails, etext, whatever–has exacerbated this problem, by codifying certainn “misspellings” or misusages as perfectly acceptable.
::shuffles feet, looks embarassed::
I’ve got to admit, my grammar and general english skills are not what they should be. They’re not apalling - my spelling is fine, my sentence structure is adequate, and I can usually guess an approximation to correct punctuation. It is however just that: a guess. I put semicolons where they look right, and the inner workings of the comma are beyond me. I honestly don’t recall having any formal training in english grammar beyond the absolute basics - the definitions of nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. It’s possible that I did learn more than this and have since forgotten it all, but I’m skeptical.
Really I think it is a teaching issue. Note that I say a teaching issue rather than a teacher issue. I’m not saying there aren’t bad teachers out there - for one thing, to do so would be a blatant lie - but the real damage to teaching isn’t caused by them. Students who don’t seriously care and an education system that is fundamentally flawed cause far more problems than the worst teacher ever could.
Anyway the point is that, as someone who does care about his grammar, it annoys me intensely to see people who are infinitely worse than I am. I encounter people online who make the email quoted in the OP seem like Shakespeare (ok, a bad example perhaps, but you know what I mean), and tend to get quite irritated with them for it. It’s sad, and somewhat embarassing, that from a certain perspective I’m not all that much better. Especially given that I do a fair bit of writing, albeit all quite unpublished and likely to stay that way. Even more alarming are those who don’t do it out of laziness, but do it because they actually believe that the notions of there being correct grammar and spelling are outdated. Fortunately they seem to be quite rare - most people intelligent enough to form a coherent opinion on the subject are also intelligent enough to not form that particular one.
Actually, while I’m here, could anyone recommend to me a good resource for improving my english skills? I might as well add that to the already herculean list of things to try to do over the summer. 
P.S. Feel free to nitpick the grammar, punctuation, etc. in this post to death. I’m sure I deserve it. The above has bene proofread to death, so is hopefully free of any really major errors. I wouldn’t bet money on it though.
Style. I must remember to proofread for style as well as grammar. [Jedi Mind Trick] Kit did not overuse the word ‘I’ in that post. [/Jedi Mind Trick]
Hey, I think it’s realism. I bleed for the English language, along with the rest of you, but I honestly don’t think strong writing skills are necessary for career success. In fact they can even hurt you – you become known as the dweeb who knows the difference between farther and further and your reward is to proofread other people’s memos. I still carry a little resentment towards all the English teachers who told me if you want to succeed, you have to care about this sort of thing. They were wrong.
A nitpick, as well: one doesn’t graduate high school, or even graduate from high school; one is graduated from high school (or wherever). A great example of standard usage changing, illustrated by several people in this thread who, thank heavens, at least still care about to/two/too.
On the topic of writing teachers ignoring mechanics – my friend the private-school writing teacher was told to ignore everything BUT mechanics. He spent all his grading time correcting spelling, grammar, etc., and didn’t have time to focus on whether the message was being conveyed well, or was even worth conveying. You could write utter nonsense for him, and get an easy A if you kept your spelling and grammar in order. In a perfect world, the solution would be to separate the mechanical and the stylistic, or rhetorical, aspects of writing, ideally getting past mechanics altogether by age 12 or so. Ain’t gonna happen.
Actually, it’s the TEACHERS who freak me out - I see many teachers who absolutely can not spell or use proper grammar. I don’t want to send my (hypothetical) children to school because I’m afraid they won’t get a decent education. I’ve always been against homeschooling in our particular case, but we may find a way to do it when we have kids.
If kids can’t graduate from high school with basic grammar and spelling skills, what’s the point of sending them to school in the first place? We can teach them to parse a sentence in our spare time, and they’d probably learn more in an hour than in an entire week at school.
This whole ‘just get it down’ things bugs the shit out of me. We were taught to ‘get it down’, but we were taught to do so with decent grammar and spelling, and then we were taught to go back and fix our mistakes. It is possible to ‘get it down’ without having the final product make you look like a moron.
Ava
Yes, but the OP was talking about a college graduate. Knowing that a person has a college degree tells you… what about them? Shouldn’t it imply at least a basic level of literacy?
Count me among those who are quietly sobbing right now.
:eek: Geez! Doesn’t anybody play Mad Libs any more?
I often hear on these boards how one needs a degree to be able to effectively communicate. This thread has been interesting as I have come across many, many people with various degrees from the US who have extremely poor general knowledge and whose written english is absolutely atrocious. I’ve often wondered how these people ever graduated high school let alone obtained university degrees.
If you want teachers to be able to teach kids to write fluidly, you will have to decrease teaching loads. Here in Dallas, an average English teacher teaches six sections a day and has one period off for planning. If you are really lucky, your student load is around 125 students at any one time; 150 is not ridiculous, and it has to be over 170 before you can start putting your foot down.
To grade a one page paper meticulously takes at least a minute. So every one-page writing assignment x 125 students = 125 minutes to grade–that takes up forty percent of your weekly planning time–time that you also have to spend doing paper work, and calling parents, and making copies, and you know, occasionally planning. Furthermore, for it to do any good at all, the student needs to redo the assignment and that revision needs to be graded just as meticulously.
And you can’t grade that sort of thing in class because you can’t just have the kids write, at least not at first–you have to be actively going around and around, trouble shooting and motivating and shoulder-squeezing, if you don’t want to just get a bunch of blank papers turned in at the end.
I put every ounce of creativity and energy I have to coming up with interesting ways around this basic problem, and I’ve come up with some and had some success–but I’ve had an awful lot of failures, too, and until the underlying issue of too high student loads is addressed these probems will continue.
They did so by stealing all your commas. 
IMHO, anyone who is serious about being a good writer owns (and uses on a regular basis) the following three books:
FWIW, Stephen King recommends going to a used book store and finding an elementary school primer on grammar if that’s your weakness. Another decent book on grammar is Woe is I by Patricia T. O’Connor. Also, if you are writing anything longer than one page, you will produce better writing if you revise, revise, revise.
Manda Jo, I have a lot of respect for the majority of teachers. My MIL is a teacher, my sister-in-law is a teacher, and I considered becoming one - I’ve seen the work involved. And I do understand that the course load can be huge. I also understand that sometimes the school district sets unreasonable standards that work against the teachers - the examples given in this thread about teachers being unable to fail students without explaining it to the administration is one of the things that makes me mad.
But I’m talking about some of the teachers I know who can’t even put a proper sentence together. I went to college with some. Others are family. And some are friends. It truly freaks the hell out of me. Honestly, I don’t expect someone who knows nothing about music to be able to teach it. Just the same, how can we expect someone who knows nothing about grammar and spelling to be able to teach it properly?
Ava
Well, my writing is primarily technical in nature so I’m not too desperate to improve my vocabulary (which is already reasonably extensive anyway). I do however currently own and use both a dictionary and a thesaurus. When the time comes to get my ass in gear and start writing that novel again, I’m sure my usage of them shall increase tenfold. In the mean time, I will look up the suggested books on style and grammar. Thanks for the suggestions.
(Also I know that extensive editing and revision of text is important. That’s also on my ‘to do’ list - I’m terrible at it)
Touché.
avabeth, I’m certainly not trying to defend all teachers. There are certainly some terrible teachers. The most unfortunate thing is that the worst teachers are often the ones who end up teaching the least desirable classes, and those classes are inevitably the classes that contain the neediest students–and I am as guilty of this as anyone.
But there will continue to be terrible teachers so long as the working conditions continue to be unattractive and there is a paucity of alternatives to chose from.
…
Ok, can someone please tell me how the fuck you get to college without ever having written anyting longer than one sheet of paper long?
I dropped out of high school, because of crappy family-upbringing crap, but I still got through junior year, by which time I’d written several many-page long papers…
For fuck’s sake, I was always under the impression you had to pretty much write a paper to get in to college…
ahything…any*thing[/n], not anyting.
sigh I need to proofread better, before hitting submit.
What degree did she do exactly? 
I agree. Honestly, I think the best thing we can do is to make teaching more desirable to prospective teachers - raise the salaries a LOT, decrease the workload, better incentives, benefits, etc.
And in return, any person going for a teaching degree is required to take an extensive basic skills test - if you can’t pass basic spelling and grammar, you can’t be a teacher. Period.
I took the Praxis I last year in preparation for a teaching degree. What kills me is that I scored very high on both (4 points below the highest score on grammar and spelling, 3 points below the highest score on basic math skills - I think - i know it wasn’t less than that on either one), and since I took the computerized test, my scores were right there when I was done. The two girls in the testing center went into practical hysterics over my scores - telling me that they had NEVER seen anyone score as high as I did. These were BASIC skills. I can’t even balance my checkbook properly and I got the highest score in the math that they’d ever seen in the center. That should have told me something right there. That should have told me that the Praxis isn’t a proper guage for skills. They were a joke.
Make the teaching salaries as attractive as a lawyer’s salary, and make the curriculum as difficult as law school, and perhaps we could turn the educational system around.
Then again, maybe not.
Ava