# In Which We Discuss Grammar, Spelling, Punctuation and the art of the written communique. **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [August 5, 2011, 4:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-we-discuss-grammar-spelling-punctuation-and-the-art-of-the-written-communique/591608 "2011-08-05T16:10:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Cartooniverse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cartooniverse/32/3084_2.png) [@Cartooniverse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cartooniverse)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2011, 1:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-we-discuss-grammar-spelling-punctuation-and-the-art-of-the-written-communique/591608/41 "2011-08-06T13:22:12Z")
> [@Zoe](#): > > I think you mean **were**. (I’m just doing that to be mean. I congratulate you on caring about good usage. Feel free to pick at my misusages or misspellings.) Aiiieeee !! I tried so very hard in the OP ! 😃 Damn. Now on a real keyboard, able to respond more fully. I use “they” as it is commonly used. **Cat Whisperer**? I sensed in the context, “We got” meant “we have rented, we have obtained. We got, we rented, we have at our disposal. " Is this sloppy English? Would we snap our fingers to a lyric that went, " We have obtained two turntables and a microphone” ?? **Balance** , how many points? On Preview: **RickJay** beat me to it!! :smack: ---
**Author:** ![Shakester](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/shakester/32/437_2.png) [@Shakester](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shakester)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2011, 2:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-we-discuss-grammar-spelling-punctuation-and-the-art-of-the-written-communique/591608/42 "2011-08-06T14:03:12Z")
Getting back to homonym abuse for a moment, my favourite example is one I saw on a sign in a fruit/veg market: “Please do not break off mushroom storks”. That’s accidental surrealism at its finest. ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2011, 3:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-we-discuss-grammar-spelling-punctuation-and-the-art-of-the-written-communique/591608/43 "2011-08-06T15:10:07Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > Of course it’s not decaying. People have always struggled with English grammar. The people of my parents’ generation (early Boomers) were no more literate than today’s schoolkids. While i think that we often tend to over-emphasize decline, and that we too often point back to a mythical golden past when things were allegedly better, it does seem to me that things have deteriorated in some particular ways over the past couple of decades. I teach history at a state university here in California. Our students are taken from the top third of the graduating high school classes of the state. And yet, even in their sophomore and junior and senior years, many of them still have no idea how to write. I’m not talking about stuff like split infinitives or other pointless rules like that; i’m talking about things like subject/verb agreement, inability to use apostrophes, incorrect usage, and, in come cases, sentences that simply don’t make sense no matter how hard i try to decipher them. Unlike a couple of other people in this thread, i’m not sure that the culprit here is a lack of formal grammar instruction in the schools. I had very little formal grammar during my school years, and yet i still graduated with an ability to write coherent sentences. In many cases, i think that the reason for shitty writing ability can be blamed on the fact that many students simply don’t read very much. I know they read text messages and emails all the time, but it’s clear to me that many of my students don’t read anything in the way of proper, grammatically correct writing. They don’t read books, magazines, newspapers. While i didn’t get a lot of formal grammar instruction, all the reading that i did allowed me to learn, by a process of absorption, what a good sentence looks like. And i’m not saying that the reading needs to be highbrow literature. I didn’t spend my childhood and teenage years reading Joyce and Austen and Melville; i read cheap adventure stories, science fiction, spy novels, and stuff like that. As i said, i teach university history, and one of the most common complaints that i get on my student evaluations is that i require too much reading. In my upper division history course, i ask my students to read about 50-70 pages a week. And that is far less than i would require if i were teaching at a top-level college. When i worked as a TA during my grad degree, at Johns Hopkins, it wasn’t unusual for upper-level history courses to require well over 100 pages a week. But my student evaluations are constantly full of complaints about how much reading they have to do, and it’s clear in class that only a small percentage of students do all of the required reading each week. If someone doesn’t read, and has had little or no formal grammar instruction, it shouldn’t be very surprising if that person is not a good writer. ---
**Author:** ![Colophon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f05b48/32.png) [@Colophon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colophon)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2011, 3:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-we-discuss-grammar-spelling-punctuation-and-the-art-of-the-written-communique/591608/44 "2011-08-06T15:19:42Z")
> [@mhendo](#): > > Unlike a couple of other people in this thread, i’m not sure that the culprit here is a lack of formal grammar instruction in the schools. I had very little formal grammar during my school years, and yet i still graduated with an ability to write coherent sentences. In many cases, i think that the reason for shitty writing ability can be blamed on the fact that many students simply don’t read very much. I know they read text messages and emails all the time, but it’s clear to me that many of my students don’t read anything in the way of proper, grammatically correct writing. They don’t read books, magazines, newspapers. > > While i didn’t get a lot of formal grammar instruction, all the reading that i did allowed me to learn, by a process of absorption, what a good sentence looks like. And i’m not saying that the reading needs to be highbrow literature. I didn’t spend my childhood and teenage years reading Joyce and Austen and Melville; i read cheap adventure stories, science fiction, spy novels, and stuff like that. > > As i said, i teach university history, and one of the most common complaints that i get on my student evaluations is that i require too much reading. In my upper division history course, i ask my students to read about 50-70 pages a week. And that is far less than i would require if i were teaching at a top-level college. When i worked as a TA during my grad degree, at Johns Hopkins, it wasn’t unusual for upper-level history courses to require well over 100 pages a week. But my student evaluations are constantly full of complaints about how much reading they have to do, and it’s clear in class that only a small percentage of students do all of the required reading each week. > > If someone doesn’t read, and has had little or no formal grammar instruction, it shouldn’t be very surprising if that person is not a good writer. I totally agree with this. I’m only in my early 30s (just about!) and didn’t get much formal grammar tuition at school, but I read lots, and still do. And, as you say, if you read a lot then you are exposed to good grammar and correct spelling, and you learn subconsciously what’s right. After a while, writing properly simply becomes automatic and examples of bad English leap out at you when you come across them. On a vaguely related note, it does seem to me that a lot of the beauty of the English language has disappeared over the past century or so. This struck me again recently when reading Evelyn Waugh – not his novels but a collection of his private letters. The vocabulary and turns of phrase were so much more eloquent than I imagine even the most educated person would use today. Similarly, if you read newspapers from 100 years ago you find a much more stylish use of language. English today, even when it is used correctly, seems extremely workmanlike by comparison. ---
**Author:** ![Cat\_Whisperer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cat_whisperer/32/4839_2.png) [@Cat\_Whisperer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cat_Whisperer)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2011, 9:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-we-discuss-grammar-spelling-punctuation-and-the-art-of-the-written-communique/591608/45 "2011-08-06T21:13:26Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > \ That is clearly what the sentence meant to say. Clear to you; I obviously interpreted it differently. Had the writer been more clear, I probably wouldn’t have. ---
**Author:** ![Inner\_Stickler](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/inner_stickler/32/318_2.png) [@Inner\_Stickler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inner_Stickler)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2011, 9:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-we-discuss-grammar-spelling-punctuation-and-the-art-of-the-written-communique/591608/46 "2011-08-06T21:18:40Z")
I fail to see how “We have two rental cars,” affects your understanding of the situation any differently than “We got two rental cars,”. ---
**Author:** ![Cat\_Whisperer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cat_whisperer/32/4839_2.png) [@Cat\_Whisperer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cat_Whisperer)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2011, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-we-discuss-grammar-spelling-punctuation-and-the-art-of-the-written-communique/591608/47 "2011-08-06T22:05:28Z")
> [@Inner\_Stickler](#): > > I fail to see how “We have two rental cars,” affects your understanding of the situation any differently than “We got two rental cars,”. The first is proper business English; the second can be interpreted as non-correct English, which is what this thread is about. ---
**Author:** ![guizot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guizot/32/3636_2.png) [@guizot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/guizot)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2011, 4:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-we-discuss-grammar-spelling-punctuation-and-the-art-of-the-written-communique/591608/48 "2011-08-07T04:55:45Z")
> [@Cat\_Whisperer](#): > > The first is proper business English; the second can be interpreted as non-correct English… This is a question of [register](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(linguistics))–rather than “proper” vs. “non-correct.” By using such terms, you ignore this very important point from the Wikipedia article: [QUOTE=Wikipedia] As with other types of language variation, there tends to be a spectrum of registers rather than a discrete set of obviously distinct varieties — there is a countless number of registers we could identify, with no clear boundaries. [/quote] Business contexts can assume the whole spectrum of register level. Moreover, even a single business conversation can take on different levels and qualities of register as it unfolds. Language is much more fluid than what you imply. It’s not a binary distinction. > [@Cat\_Whisperer](#): > > …which is what this thread is about. The concern of the OP had nothing to do with questions of register. It was about writing, and only one, very narrow aspect of writing–namely spelling–at that, despite the title of the thread. The distinction between these two different ways to indicate possession becomes much more nuanced in speech, as opposed to writing. ---
**Author:** ![Serenata67](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/serenata67/32/10646_2.png) [@Serenata67](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Serenata67)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2011, 5:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-we-discuss-grammar-spelling-punctuation-and-the-art-of-the-written-communique/591608/49 "2011-08-07T05:08:11Z")
> [@movingfinger](#): > > Yes, the English language is changing faster than most of us would like. Grammar is the brake that keeps it from going totally out of control. May I use this quote? I love it. ---
**Author:** ![Inner\_Stickler](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/inner_stickler/32/318_2.png) [@Inner\_Stickler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inner_Stickler)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2011, 5:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-we-discuss-grammar-spelling-punctuation-and-the-art-of-the-written-communique/591608/50 "2011-08-07T05:25:26Z")
> [@Cat\_Whisperer](#): > > The first is proper business English; the second can be interpreted as non-correct English, which is what this thread is about. Don’t teach gramma to suck eggs. What I want to know is what pitfall did you fall into that means it makes a difference in understanding the sentence whether one says I got or I have. ---
**Author:** ![Onomatopoeia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/onomatopoeia/32/4145_2.png) [@Onomatopoeia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Onomatopoeia)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2011, 7:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-we-discuss-grammar-spelling-punctuation-and-the-art-of-the-written-communique/591608/51 "2011-08-07T07:55:13Z")
> [@corkboard](#): > > Same with ending a sentence with a preposition. Frankly, that is something up with which I will not put. Heh. I still chuckle whenever I think about that Keith Olbermann parody 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Onomatopoeia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/onomatopoeia/32/4145_2.png) [@Onomatopoeia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Onomatopoeia)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2011, 8:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-we-discuss-grammar-spelling-punctuation-and-the-art-of-the-written-communique/591608/52 "2011-08-07T08:03:31Z")
Duplicate Post. ---
**Author:** ![jabiru](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/bbce88/32.png) [@jabiru](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jabiru)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2011, 8:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-we-discuss-grammar-spelling-punctuation-and-the-art-of-the-written-communique/591608/53 "2011-08-07T08:28:37Z")
> [@Cartooniverse](#): > > My Dearly Beloved™ got an email this morning. One sentence read,\*\* " We got two rental cars so you could each figure out the best root. "\*\* > > No doubt about it. The person who wrote the email simply did not know what word to use. They believed that root, not route, was correct… Of course, the bolded sentence means something entirely different to an Australian. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Onomatopoeia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/onomatopoeia/32/4145_2.png) [@Onomatopoeia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Onomatopoeia)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2011, 8:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-we-discuss-grammar-spelling-punctuation-and-the-art-of-the-written-communique/591608/54 "2011-08-07T08:40:03Z")
> [@locamochagirl](#): > > The English language is decaying and nobody cares. Grammar is NOT taught at schools except by a few teachers (obsessed like myself). I feel like it’s a lost cause. It’s almost ANNOYING to know the rules of grammar because all I hear is misused pronouns, adjectives and adverbs. My ears are bleeding!!! “The English language is decaying and no[del]body[/del] one cares. Grammar is NOT taught at schools except by a few teachers [del]([/del]who are obsessed like [del]myself[/del] me[del])[/del]. I feel [del]like[/del] as though it’s a lost cause. It’s almost ANNOYING to know the rules of grammar because all I hear [del]is[/del] are misused pronouns, adjectives and adverbs. My ears are bleeding![del]!![/del]” I agree. ---
**Author:** ![nashiitashii](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/7c8e57/32.png) [@nashiitashii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nashiitashii)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2011, 3:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-we-discuss-grammar-spelling-punctuation-and-the-art-of-the-written-communique/591608/55 "2011-08-07T15:26:23Z")
> [@mhendo](#): > > While i didn’t get a lot of formal grammar instruction, all the reading that i did allowed me to learn, by a process of absorption, what a good sentence looks like. And i’m not saying that the reading needs to be highbrow literature. I didn’t spend my childhood and teenage years reading Joyce and Austen and Melville; i read cheap adventure stories, science fiction, spy novels, and stuff like that. > > As i said, i teach university history, and one of the most common complaints that i get on my student evaluations is that i require too much reading. In my upper division history course, i ask my students to read about 50-70 pages a week. And that is far less than i would require if i were teaching at a top-level college. When i worked as a TA during my grad degree, at Johns Hopkins, it wasn’t unusual for upper-level history courses to require well over 100 pages a week. But my student evaluations are constantly full of complaints about how much reading they have to do, and it’s clear in class that only a small percentage of students do all of the required reading each week. > > If someone doesn’t read, and has had little or no formal grammar instruction, it shouldn’t be very surprising if that person is not a good writer. I agree with you in regard to this situation; the students I knew who read voraciously tended to do well when composing essays and papers, while those who found reading to be daunting or tedious often had no idea how to string together words in a manner that was pleasing or easily understood. It was the same when I was in high school and college as it is now: the people who are reading a lot are more likely to be able to write coherently about a subject. However, exposure to a wide variety of books really helps with these skills; if one only reads the Twilight series and stuff written with the same grammar and spelling problems\*, then one may not be able to identify when certain spelling and grammar problems occur. \*Stephenie Meyer’s editors must have fallen asleep on the job, as there are a ton of examples of bad grammar and homonym abuse throughout the books, especially New Moon. [It gets really bad at times](http://reasoningwithvampires.tumblr.com). As for university reading workloads, I frequently was assigned more than 100 pages to read per week in my upper level courses; the most rigorous reading assignment I had averaged about 60 pages per night in a 6-week/5 days a week summer course. We would also be quizzed on the material we read before any discussion happened for that class so that the professor wouldn’t be wasting her time on discussion if only two people read and understood the material. I didn’t go to a fancy private college, but one of the “flagship” state universities in my state university system. It’s a good school, and I was lucky to have really good professors throughout my time there, with few exceptions. Part of that meant that I was challenged with a good bit of work and thoughtful group discussions in courses beyond the “basic” levels. > [@Colophon](#): > > I totally agree with this. I’m only in my early 30s (just about!) and didn’t get much formal grammar tuition at school, but I read lots, and still do. And, as you say, if you read a lot then you are exposed to good grammar and correct spelling, and you learn subconsciously what’s right. After a while, writing properly simply becomes automatic and examples of bad English leap out at you when you come across them. > > On a vaguely related note, it does seem to me that a lot of the beauty of the English language has disappeared over the past century or so. This struck me again recently when reading Evelyn Waugh – not his novels but a collection of his private letters. The vocabulary and turns of phrase were so much more eloquent than I imagine even the most educated person would use today. Similarly, if you read newspapers from 100 years ago you find a much more stylish use of language. English today, even when it is used correctly, seems extremely workmanlike by comparison. I’m 28, and I have been told that I need to dumb down my vocabulary by folks in the past, including former bosses in settings where speaking in an educated manner _should_ be seen as a good thing. I wasn’t talking over anyone’s head or using jargon, but apparently it was considered elitist by some of my coworkers. I wasn’t constantly using big words, but apparently using any big words at all was a problem. :dubious: I read a lot, I’ve formally studied two languages and informally learned a bit about two more, and it’s affected the way I speak. I occasionally move the nouns and verbs around in a way more fitting with older forms of English or modern German, but I’m still easily understood when I do this. Encouraging people to speak more elegantly or with more variance in their sentence structure is not a bad thing, and it’s not demeaning to those who speak with simple sentence structure or vocabulary, as many nuances of the use of the English language are beautiful. ---
**Author:** ![Ruken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f475e1/32.png) [@Ruken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruken)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2011, 5:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-we-discuss-grammar-spelling-punctuation-and-the-art-of-the-written-communique/591608/56 "2011-08-07T17:30:13Z")
The ignorance in these recurring threads is always staggering. First we have the notion of the mythical, static, forever proper English language. Second, we have folks who actually teach English who were apparently never taught enough about **language** to prevent them from thinking that one can “decay”. And finally there is the myth that reading more will make you spell better, which of course is only true when one has such a low reading proficient that one still looks at individual words while reading. Upon reading this thread, it would not surprise me if reading proficiencies _are_ that low for a good chunk of the population, given that only 100 pages/week were assigned for an upper level course at a so-called “flagship” college. Perhaps this was meant to be pages per class (assuming it meets 3x/week), and even that’s light for an intro history class in my experience. The only book I can remember from an intro history class I took my first semester was [this](http://books.google.com/books?id=9XZLZ_qYVpoC) light reading for one of the easy weeks (class met once/week and we read 1-3 books plus articles) when we had a big paper due. ---
**Author:** ![nashiitashii](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/7c8e57/32.png) [@nashiitashii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nashiitashii)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2011, 6:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-we-discuss-grammar-spelling-punctuation-and-the-art-of-the-written-communique/591608/57 "2011-08-07T18:54:32Z")
> [@Ruken](#): > > Upon reading this thread, it would not surprise me if reading proficiencies _are_ that low for a good chunk of the population, given that only 100 pages/week were assigned for an upper level course at a so-called “flagship” college. Perhaps this was meant to be pages per class (assuming it meets 3x/week), and even that’s light for an intro history class in my experience. The only book I can remember from an intro history class I took my first semester was [this](http://books.google.com/books?id=9XZLZ_qYVpoC) light reading for one of the easy weeks (class met once/week and we read 1-3 books plus articles) when we had a big paper due. It appears that you’re mixing my post and **mhendo** ’s to get that idea above. He had mentioned 100 pages/week and I had mentioned at least 60 pages/class. When mentioning the “reading helps with comprehension and facility with language” idea, I \*was \*referring to students who I would assign a low level of proficiency with their own language, regardless of spelling ability. Spelling is a battle that can be fought _after_ the battle of “learning to use one’s words in a way that makes any sense whatsoever” is won. The class that I mentioned specifically? We’d have a few articles to read per night, like [this one](http://www.jstor.org/pss/648953) and [this one](http://www.jstor.org/pss/646521) and [this one](http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.an.18.100189.001411). Not everything that is a short read is a simple one, and it’s best when one is calling out ignorance to double-check in case one is mistakenly conflating two posts by two different people for one person’s post. ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2011, 6:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-we-discuss-grammar-spelling-punctuation-and-the-art-of-the-written-communique/591608/58 "2011-08-07T18:59:01Z")
> [@Ruken](#): > > And finally there is the myth that reading more will make you spell better, which of course is only true when one has such a low reading proficient that one still looks at individual words while reading. Please point out where anyone said that “reading more will make you spell better.” > [@Ruken](#): > > Upon reading this thread, it would not surprise me if reading proficiencies _are_ that low for a good chunk of the population, given that only 100 pages/week were assigned for an upper level course at a so-called “flagship” college. Perhaps this was meant to be pages per class (assuming it meets 3x/week), and even that’s light for an intro history class in my experience. No, it really isn’t. I’ve been an undergraduate and a graduate student, and taught freshman and upper division history classes at universities in Australia and the United States. These universities include a top-tier state university, a second-tier state university, an exclusive private art college, and an exclusive world-famous private university. Not one of these places has averaged 300 pages per week (100 pages per class meeting) for a typical history course. In a couple of places, the senior research seminars would require students to read a book per week, but even in those classes that wasn’t always the case. > [@Ruken](#): > > The only book I can remember from an intro history class I took my first semester was [this](http://books.google.com/books?id=9XZLZ_qYVpoC) light reading for one of the easy weeks (class met once/week and we read 1-3 books plus articles) when we had a big paper due. You read 1-3 books, plus articles, per week for a single undergraduate intro history class? Quite simply, i don’t believe you. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2011, 7:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-we-discuss-grammar-spelling-punctuation-and-the-art-of-the-written-communique/591608/59 "2011-08-07T19:32:20Z")
> [@mhendo](#): > > While i think that we often tend to over-emphasize decline, and that we too often point back to a mythical golden past when things were allegedly better, it does seem to me that things have deteriorated in some particular ways over the past couple of decades. > > I teach history at a state university here in California. Our students are taken from the top third of the graduating high school classes of the state. And yet, even in their sophomore and junior and senior years, many of them still have no idea how to write. **mhendo** , I don’t mean to dismiss your observations, but you have to bear in mind that university instructors said the same things, everything you’re saying, about your class. And I don’t have to know when you graduated to know that’s true, because they have been saying it for much longer than you and I have been alive, about every generation of new university students. ---
**Author:** ![Canadjun](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/76d3ee/32.png) [@Canadjun](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Canadjun)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2011, 8:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-we-discuss-grammar-spelling-punctuation-and-the-art-of-the-written-communique/591608/60 "2011-08-07T20:04:28Z")
> [@Inner\_Stickler](#): > > Don’t teach gramma to suck eggs. What I want to know is what pitfall did you fall into that means it makes a difference in understanding the sentence whether one says I got or I have. It may be the case that you got the two cars but don’t have them (maybe they were stolen sometime between when you got them and now). [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-we-discuss-grammar-spelling-punctuation-and-the-art-of-the-written-communique/591608.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-which-we-discuss-grammar-spelling-punctuation-and-the-art-of-the-written-communique/591608.md?page=4)