Students Failing Because of Poor Grammar 1343
innocent_white_lamb writes "30% of freshman university students fail a 'simple English test' at Waterloo University (up from 25% a few years ago. Academic papers are riddled with 'cuz' (in place of 'because') and even include little emoticon faces. One professor says that students 'think commas are sort of like parmesan cheese that you sprinkle on your words.' At Simon Fraser University, 10% of students are not qualified to take the mandatory writing courses."
Oxford comma? (Score:1, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma
AKA the Oxford Comma.
It actually demonstrates grammar. Oh noo! Stop the grammarians!
Re:And this is how we die (Score:4, Informative)
Disclaimer: I am German. While we have our own share of problems, I like living here but the one year I lived in the US I liked that, too.
Just one minor inaccuracy: the cost for university depend on where you live, and can range from 0-500 Eur + fees per semester. (I pay around 600)
Re:Language evolves with how people use it... (Score:2, Informative)
Better punctuation would have made your point a whole lot clearer.
The point here is not about the evolution of language, it's about the accurate use of accepted language to make a point. With consistency comes clarity, and clarity is what academic expression is all about.
Re:unpossible (Score:5, Informative)
The article fails basic orthography. It's the University of Waterloo, not Waterloo University ...
The test mentioned in the article places students in one of a graduated series of writing courses (at least it did in 1987, when I went there).
And now, a professor in Pennsylvania, I get papers riddled with "cuz", "u", and God knows what else.
Re:hai (Score:3, Informative)
You betcha.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_with_fraudulent_diplomas [wikipedia.org]
Re:Language evolves with how people use it... (Score:3, Informative)
However, grammar and syntax rules for a human language are essentially no different than rules for a computer language. The rules are set to establish use and understanding.
If I, suddenly decided, that every, second word, should be, separated by, commas then, it would, make this, sentence much, tougher to, use and, understand right?
The rules can be archaic at times, but no less useful and necessary. Language efficiency is important. However, the language becomes less efficient if everyone is working from a slightly different set of rules, and it becomes near useless if it takes even longer to use and understand what is being said.
Re:Oh, no... (Score:5, Informative)
OK, I can't resist, I'll start us off. From TFA:
AHHHH!!!! It's percent not per cent!!
British English vs. American English. From Wikipedia: In British English, percent is sometimes written as two words (per cent, although percentage and percentile are written as one word). [...] The form "per cent." is still in use as a part of the highly formal language found in certain documents like commercial loan agreements (particularly those subject to, or inspired by, common law), as well as in the Hansard transcripts of British Parliamentary proceedings. While the term has been attributed to Latin per centum, this is a pseudo-Latin construction and the term was likely originally adopted from the French pour cent.
Re:Language evolves with how people use it... (Score:5, Informative)
Now, Chaucer might be a better example as the difference between middle and modern English is substantial enough to not just be a difference between written literature and spoken vernacular. However there is a difference between the way in which phonetic units are pronounced overtime and being completely ignorant of fundamental grammatical constructs, and the inability to use the language of power has massive implications in society, both economic and political.
Loss of grammatical knowledge in the vernacular eventual brought the vulgate latin down to where it morphed into Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian -- but the language of the church and government remained Latin, and when the people and their rulers are separated by linguistic barriers like that, then it just leads to oppression and resentment, then eventually to revolution and upheaval, and there has been MAJOR upheaval in all of those countries even after the powerful accepted the new vernacular when high profile people, such as Dante and Cervantes began to write in it, or Chaucer -- the first major author in the English language after the Norman conquest brought French in as the language of the landed.
My degree is in literature and history, and I studied linguistics in school. I fully understand that language changes, words shift meaning, etc -- however for a democracy to function it is essential that proper education be as wide-spread as possible and that the language of the powerful not differ to greatly from the language of the proletariate, lest the gulf continue to grow. This has nothing to do with efficiency of language. It has to do with can you read the ballot and pamphlet, can you communicate in court, can you deal in the workplace, etc?
But, as usual, most people refuse to see this, or much anything beyond the reach of their computer monitor, which far from being a window to the world at large has, in recent years, turned out to be a tool for reenforcing one's own ideology by being able to filter information down to almost exclusively that with which one is wont to agree. O, tempora... O, mores!
Re:Oh, no... (Score:2, Informative)
OK, I can't resist, I'll start us off. From TFA:
AHHHH!!!! It's percent not per cent!!
In American English it's generally "percent", but in British English it's usually "per cent".
I guess Canadians may use the Brit version.
Re:UW has a lot of foreign students (Score:1, Informative)
I lived overseas a few years ago in high school and this is very true. I went to an American school, where there was a lot of other kids too. I had a Korean friend who I found out had only been speaking English for about 2 years and had better grammar then me, and could speak perfectly clear.
Except slang... he didn't know anything of slang words (though he slowly did learn those too going to the American school).
Re:Maybe its the school thats failing (Score:2, Informative)
This is honestly one of the most intellectually lazy excuses ever. Or to put it in terms you geeks might understand: "My code failed to compile because the compiler isn't aware of my new syntax."
Re:And this is how we die (Score:1, Informative)
Flunked geography? The article is about the University of Waterloo. In Ontario. Canada.
It's the University of Waterloo (Score:3, Informative)
Dudes, get it right. This is an edit #fail.
It's the University of Waterloo, not Waterloo University, just like it's University of Notre Dame, not the other way around. The top Google search comes up with the correct name. Although, given the topic, feel free to mod this #ironic.
Alex
Yep, a UW grad.
Re:It's the parents (Score:3, Informative)
My wife worked in a private school for awhile and came upon this attitude. The parents felt that they "owned" the teachers because they were paying for the school. Since they were paying, the kids deserved A's. One father once came up to argue with my wife about the grade his daughter received on her paper. He insisted that he was an English teacher and thus knows that she should get a better grade. My wife asked if he had read the paper. When he said he hadn't read it, she showed it to him and he sheepishly agreed that the low grade was deserved. What possessed him to go off arguing grades with the teacher without looking at the paper itself, I don't know.
I had hoped that this behavior was confined to private schools, but your wife's experience indicates that exists in both private and public schools. That's really sad. If my son does poorly in a subject, I want the teacher to give him a low grade. If he gets A's just for showing up, what's the incentive to actually learn the material?
Re:Why is ":)" less valid than "!"? (Score:3, Informative)
Obviously, I'm eliding "it" before "would". That last part of the sentence forms an a clause independent of the preceding one, and so can be offset by a comma. I'll admit that many people omit the comma in that case, but there is a grammatical justification for it.
Pedant.
Re:Maybe it's not so bad (Score:3, Informative)
Off topic, but the use of "thru" on a thesis reminded me of something from my dissertation.
I used the term "thusly" in my prospectus, as in "So-and-so explained the effect thusly:" followed by a long quote. The most esteemed (and elderly) member of my committee said, "Look that up before you use it."
I discovered that "thusly" was first used by British satirists to mock the speech of people who were trying to sound intelligent. Its use was promptly adopted by academics.
I learned my lesson and changed it to "thus".
Re:And this is how we die (Score:5, Informative)
Of course you don't mean "free" as in beer. Most of your tuition is paid for by the good taxpayers of Germany who presumably view a well-educated citizenry as an overall win relative to the cost involved.
I do mean "free" as in beer. Free beer is given out to make a party better, however said beer needs to either be purchased or produced, which costs money, man-power, etc. Free education is given out to make society better, although teachers need to be paid, books need to be bought, etc. I agree, though, that it's about priority. I went to a public university (University of Arizona) in the US. With a tuition of about $3,500 per semester for in-state students (roughly 5 times the €500 fee here), it was one of the cheapest universities you could find in the state. However, when the money got tight, the state opted to slash the education budget but continued to happily fund the fourth largest jail system in the world, something that, IMO, makes no sense. People in jail must be fed, clothed, sheltered etc by the State. People in college require assistance for a time, but eventually come out more educated and more capable, which would seem to be more helpful to the economy than funding a wack job sheriff [wikipedia.org] who likes to drive a tank around poor neighborhoods to intimidate people.
I feel like the general idea of university is cheaper here as well. People don't shell out hundreds of Euros per semester on books they don't want or need but nonetheless are required to buy because the prof or department has a sweetheart deal with a publisher. People live in modest student housing that costs around €190 per month with utilities and internet included rather than renting out houses and filling them with kegerators and big screen TVs. I see advantages and disadvantages to both systems, but I really think the US could learn a thing or two about saving money from paying attention to how things are here.
Re:unpossible (Score:1, Informative)
The problem in this case, however, isn't about rampant American consumerism and the need for an increasing number of mindless consumers.
The real problem is that Canada lets in far too many foreigners. Contrary to what they may believe, many of them just cannot speak English (or French) adequately enough to function in society, let alone pass a comprehensive English grammar test.
Having attended one of the Canadian universities mentioned in the summary, I can assure you that native English speakers were in the minority. This was true, even among the professors.
It's a sad state of affairs when a native-born, English-speaking Canadian pays many thousands of dollars (in addition to the funding the universities receive from taxes) to attend university in a predominantly English city, only to find that the only languages really understood on campus are Chinese, Arabic and Hindi.
Re:unpossible (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And this is how we die (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Oh, no... (Score:4, Informative)
"If a student has problems with articles, prepositions, verb tenses, that's a problem."
This should read "If a student has problems with articles, prepositions, or verb tenses,then that's a problem.
"Punctuation errors are huge, and apostrophe errors. Students seem to have absolutely no idea what an apostrophe is for. None. Absolutely none."
This should read "Punctuation errors, particularly those regarding the proper use of apostrophes, are a huge problem"
"I get their essays and I go 'You obviously don't know what a sentence fragment is
This should read "I get their essays and I think, 'You obviously don't know what a sentence fragment is'."
"It would say to me ... 'well, this person doesn't think very clearly, and they're not very good at analyzing complex subjects, and they're not very good at expressing themselves, or at worse, they can't spell, they can't punctuate,' " he says.
This run on sentence has many inappropriately used commas.
"You can go back and read Plato and see Socrates talking about the allegations that this generation isn't as not as good as previous ones," he notes.
"Isn't as not as good"?
Re:unpossible (Score:3, Informative)
Re:And this is how we die (Score:3, Informative)
Re:unpossible (Score:2, Informative)
I guess I'd assumed most people had seen it before, but it's actually here:
http://www.angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif [angryflower.com]
Re:unpossible (Score:5, Informative)
Whenever I have to write either "its" or "it's", I have to stop and remind myself that the normal apostrophe rules are essentially reversed.
No, they aren't reversed.
Where is his brain?
Where is its brain?
It is my ball.
It's my ball.
Re:And this is how we die (Score:1, Informative)
I am an American, you neanderthal.
Fuck you.
Yes, with that kind of immediate reaction, we could tell.
Re:unpossible (Score:5, Informative)
Although I agree with the sentiment, the BSA was likely never a strictly secular program. I can't say for sure about the first few months after its creation, as it was a private organization from February 1910 through April 1910, at which point control was taken over by the YMCA, emphasis on the C for Christian. The Scout Oath includes the line "To do my duty to God," and thousands of packs, with hundreds of thousands of members, are organized by churches.
Again, while I disagree with the anti-gay rhetoric of the BSA, it's important to note that this is a case of secular society attempting to "hijack" a semi-religious program.
Re:unpossible (Score:2, Informative)
>Many of the "txt speek" words and grammar constructs are either oversimplified to the point where a word has many possible meanings or, in the case of grammar, is mangled to the point where it is either extremely context-sensitive or simply unreadable.
Well put.
Many do not see a lack of good grammar as a problem. They frequently see proper grammar as simply a matter of putting commas in the correct places and not confusing similar-sounding words. Good English grammar is seen as analogous to good English spelling: conformance to a set of arbitrary rules. They do not see good grammar as useful except as a basis to sneer at those less educated.
Those who scorn good grammar fail to understand that incorrect grammar and poor grammar destroy meaning. Putting commas in the correct places is only the beginning. Good technical writing requires an ability to use grammatical constructs which clearly indicate the relationship between the parts of a device or a computer program. If the writer's grammar skills are weak, he will fall back on vague expressions which suggest that things are related to one another without explaining how.
Poor grammar is holding back many interesting software projects. The writers tell us what settings and command are, not what they do. I suspect the reason is that the writers lack the sufficient command of grammar.
Here is an example:
This is the port number of the LPR server.
Notice the use of the word "is" and the vague word "of". Ask yourself, "what will happen if I change this value?" Will an LPR server be reconfigured to listen on the port of my choosing? Or perhaps this setting will be used when connecting to an LPR server, in which case we must determine the one and only correct port number and enter it here.
Depending on the intended meaning, better field descriptions include:
Port on which LPR server should accept connections:
or
Port on which remote LPR server is excepting connections:
Of course, someone who clearly understand the operation of the devices in question will be able to infer the intended meaning from context. But, we frequently do not know what an unfamiliar program does. Grammar is required to explain its purpose and operation. If people do not understand how a program works, they may not use it.
Re:unpossible (Score:3, Informative)
What?
I'm a straight atheist, and I had a hell of a time getting my Eagle Scout because of it. It wasn't secular when Kinsey was crying to God about being guilty of onanism, and it isn't secular now.
Re:unpossible (Score:5, Informative)
If you try to deconstruct that sentence, it really has no definite meaning. You're using the infinitive form of the verb, which means you really haven't defined a definite time for the statement.
No, it has a perfectly definite meaning, because it's a perfectly grammatical sentence in Black Vernacular English. "Be" is used to construct the habitual present tense [wikipedia.org]. This isn't discarding verb conjugation, it's using an additional conjugation that you don't happen to have in your own dialect. Note that if you replace this particular construct with what you think is a "reasonable conjugation" (say, changing "I be working" to "I am working") you'll misunderstand the sentence.
Re:unpossible (Score:2, Informative)