University students to get remedial English classes

[Belisarius]

This story comes from Australia, but I guess it could be anywhere in the English speaking world:

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,24428680-421,00.html

One prof said:

"Marking essays, I discovered the majority had no idea how to use apostrophes, or any other punctuation for that matter; that random spelling was in and sentence construction out. About half thought plurals were formed by adding an apostrophe-s, as in apple's and banana's."

Who would have thought it?

 

[Eagle]

That is just sad.

 

[tl8]

This stems from really bad High school English. This sort of stuff is stopped in about grade 10. Grade 11 and 12 is basically a literature course that every uni student has to do(ones from HS).

I can do on, but I prefer to put my English classes behind me.

 

[tblaxland]

This stems from really bad High school English. This sort of stuff is stopped in about grade 10. Grade 11 and 12 is basically a literature course that every uni student has to do(ones from HS).

I can do on, but I prefer to put my English classes behind me.

Teaching the English language stopped earlier in my recollection, grade 9 at the latest. As you say, everything after that was literature. My engineering school at uni was smart enough to recognise the poor English of the undergraduate engineers and put us through a one semester technical report writing class. I learnt more about English in that six months than I did in the preceeding three years.

I could go on too, but I have addons to work on and I have to face the inevitable question, should I use "color" or "colour" in my code?

 

[bujin]

I can't exactly remember how English classes worked when I was in school, but as someone who works in the education sector and gets to see the writing abilities of some of the several-thousand students who come through the doors each year, I can see how extra tuition may well be needed.

But something needs to be done at much earlier stages! Not just in English, but in other subjects too (especially sciences and maths). The whole state of education (at least in Britain) needs to be reformed.

 

[GregBurch]

I teach legal writing at what amounts to the post-doc level in our firm's in-house professional development program. I'm also one of our firm's general "kindergarten teachers" -- doing a lot of general mentoring for the crops of young lawyers we harvest every year. These folks are "the best and the brightest" in the sense that they've come up through a pretty grueling filtering process so that they don't get to me unless they've been at the top of the top for layer after layer of general education that's focused on "language arts."

Even with all that, the remedial work I end up having to do is pretty depressing. While probably a little more than half of the kids I deal with have good basics, I still encounter individuals who have a shockingly low level of mastery of the foundational elements of simple expository writing. Outside of this pre-filtered group, the picture only gets worse and worse. Sometimes when I read past the actual posts in political blogs, for instance, down into the comments, the level of language use is ... well ... so bad it makes you want to ... build a spaceship and get off this rock ...

 

[willy88]

This makes me feel much better in myself.

 

[Missioncmdr]

Considering how people usually type on the Internet, I wonder if they even use their hands or even know the basics of the English language.

The deplorable grammar I sometimes see would probably make some people cry.

Whenever I type something, I always try my best to use proper English.

 

[pete.dakota]

I see this sort of typing everywhere. I know University students here in England that still don't know their 'your's from their 'you're's. Or their 'they're's from their 'there's. It's a real gripe of mine.

However, it's the inept use of commas that really **** me off. Simply throwing in a comma randomly because a sentence seems too long is way too common.

However, according to a lot of people, 'Grammar Nazi' = Elitist.

 

[willy88]

However, it's the inept use of commas that really **** me off. Simply throwing in a comma randomly because a sentence seems too long is way too common.

I don't, see what you're, complaining, about.

 

[tl8]

My engineering school at uni was smart enough to recognise the poor English of the undergraduate engineers and put us through a one semester technical report writing class. I learnt more about English in that six months than I did in the preceeding three years.

I'm doing that now actually.