From this side of the border this discussion smacks of fairytales.
In most of the US public education has been in free fall for the last
two generations, with elementary schools passing on functional
illiterates to high schools which pass them on in turn to colleges. I
remember a girl in my freshman comp class in Arizona, who told me
that the longest paper she'd ever been asked to write in high school
was a one paragraph movie review. She had a hard time writing a
sentence, and she was an average student in the class. It gets worse.
To graduate from U of Arizona she had to take and pass freshman comp,
but she didn't have to do it as a freshman. She was a junior.
This is not atypical, and Tucson is by no means the least literate US
city. And it's not a matter of failure to read, though some of that
girl's classmates had a hard time reading a newspaper, and none of
them could read it critically. Basic formal education seems to have
fallen out of the curriculum.
Want to know how bad it's become? Pick at random 5 English
dissertations accepted in 1960 and compare them with five in 2005.
These are the teachers-to-be.
Mark
At 05:55 PM 1/18/2009, you wrote:
>Yes, Doug, it is the lack of reading that causes most of the problem. You
>can teach kids grammar and punctuation at primary school level, then again
>at high school level, and still have them ignorant because it is not
>reinforced in their 'real' lives. They watch visual media and hear songs and
>sound tracks without ever coming across the need for printed punctuation.
>You can hear it in the way many first year uni students read aloud - they
>simply plow through commans, colons, full stops, etc, and pause whenever
>they run out of breath! I try to point out how to read using the
>punctuation, and in doing this show them some examples of how commas and
>such actually help supply the meaning (and often the rhthym) of what is
>written. But we are fighting an increasing tide with buckets of sand, I
>fear.
>
>Andrew
>
>2009/1/19 Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]>
>
> > Sadly, you may be, Christopher. I know that teachers try to teach grammar
> > to ten year olds (my wife did), but apparently it doesnt stick, or
> > something. And then, when you factor in what (if anything) they read,
> > including newspapers, wherein typos, bad writing, etc now appear regularly
> > because there is no such ting as a copy-editor any more. But
> mostly when you
> > factor in the fact that most young people just dont read that much, so they
> > have not seen enough sentences to be able to recognize a working one from a
> > non-working one, well, yes, if they want to write well now theyve made it
> > into university or college, then they require, once again, to be taught the
> > basics....
> >
> > Doug
> >
> > On 17-Jan-09, at 9:59 PM, Christopher C Jones wrote:
> >
> > I have just done a quick search on the use of quote marks and was
> >> surprised to find how to use was directed at first year college students
> >> in the USA undertaking writing courses.
> >>
> >> Ummm... is this related to grammar no longer being taught in primary and
> >> high school, as if learning how to use inverted commas is too
> >> intellectually taxing for a ten year old child? It has me worried that a
> >> college professor needs to teach basic grammar before anything else? I
> >> can understand it for journalism since the inverted pyramid is very
> >> strict and not generally well known but for first year writing students,
> >> I have some difficulty.
> >>
> >> I would have assumed a first year writing student for the first week's
> >> assignment could write a dramatic monologue in a voice not their own
> >> (usually the opposite sex) and for a term paper a 3,000 word essay using
> >> traditional academic footnotes and citation without needing to be told
> >> how to.
> >>
> >> Am I assuming too much?
> >>
> >>
> > Douglas Barbour
> > [log in to unmask]
> >
> > http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/ <http://www.ualberta.ca/%7Edbarbour/>
> >
> > Latest books:
> > Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
> > http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
> > Wednesdays'
> >
> >
> http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
> >
> > Oh, goddamnit, we forgot the silent prayer.
> >
> > Dwight D, Eisenhower
> > [at a cabinet meeting]
> >
>
>
>
>--
>Andrew
>http://hispirits.blogspot.com/
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