Being able to write this sentence sets me apart from many other college students in a peculiar way. For one thing, this sentence is grammatically correct. Or at least, I believe it was grammatically correct. I have no real way of knowing because I have not had a lesson in basic grammar since elementary school.
You may ask me, “How could this be? Were you raised by wolves?” Unfortunately, the only canines that were involved in bringing me up were the happy, slobbery ones who liked to play fetch. No, I am not the only young person who was cheated out of a proper education. In Canada, there has been a rush of complaints coming in from college professors who claim that their freshman students cannot write an English sentence.
According to an article posted on Cnews, Canadian universities are conducting research into why students have such poor grammar. Ontario’s Waterloo University requires students to take an exam that test their basic English grammar skills.
Thirty percent of students fail this test.
It’s not only articles, prepositions, and verb tenses that students are struggling with. Some of the common issues professors are encountering are students writing emoticons into their essays, writing the word “’cuz” instead of “because,” and combining the words “a lot” into one word. Students also have no sense of proper apostrophe or comma usage. “[Students] think commas are sort of like parmesan cheese that you sprinkle on your words’,” said Paul Budra, an English professor and associate dean of arts and science at Simon Fraser.
The professors interviewed in the CTV article are blaming Twitter and Facebook for the student’s atrocious grammar. It may be to blame for the inclusion of emoticons in essays (and in a few years we will see the Oxford English Dictionary make an executive decision to officially include emoticons in our language), but no one can be blamed for not teaching students grammar other than the schools.
Budra admits this himself, “We haven’t taught grammar for 30-40 years…(and it) hasn’t worked.”
However, I am not from Canada, I am from New York—which claims to have one of the best educational systems in the United States. I have to say that I am not impressed.
I can thank New York for teaching me how to structure an essay. The mantra of “Introduction, body, and conclusion” was hammered into me daily for four solid years. Actually, make that six. I can recite to you the textbook definition of a thesis statement. I know how to cite sources and I have the MLA handbook memorized. All of this information has helped me succeed as an English major, but the English Department seems to have ignored the very same fundamental knowledge that my small town public high school has—how to write an English sentence. For example, did you know that the “dash” I just used in the former sentence is called an “m-dash”? I didn’t know that until last semester (and I am a senior here at UAlbany).
The English Department at UAlbany has not offered a basic grammar class in four years. Every now and then I will encounter a professor with the energy and drive to go over the basic fundamentals of grammar with the class. In my first such class, the professor stood before us and asked, “how many of you went to school in New York State?” Three-fourths of the class raised their hands. My professor then said, “Then I assume you know next to nothing about grammar. We will start at the beginning.”
I will always remember that speech and how extraordinary it was for me to learn that I didn’t know how to write. The problem with many of my peers and I was that we did not know that our writing was full of grammatical flaws. No one had told us before.
I ended up choosing journalism as my minor so that I could learn how to write. What the English program failed at, journalism succeeded. Every class has been an intense lesson in the art of writing grammatically and coherently, and I still feel I have so much to learn.
It is not possible to point fingers at applications such as “Twitter” and “Facebook” and claim that they are the reason people my age have no concept of grammar. It isn’t as if these sites actually encourage bad writing, saying so puts all the blame on the students, claiming that their ignorance is due to their own negligence. What needs to be revolutionized is the school system, the teachers, and the parents who allow the mistakes to go on unchecked.
