The following was written in response to a relative’s sending me the following link:
http://www.globecampus.ca/blogs/parents-view/
Oh, Lordy! Don’t get me started!
From the time when the children were in elementary school, and I’d send the school handouts back to the principal with the spelling, punctuation and grammar corrected, to the working world in an office, trying to make sure that letters to clients and diary entries on the work log are at least comprehensible, never mind professional – it has been a losing battle.
If our educators (those that make the policies) had thought that literacy was important, it would have been taught. They didn’t, it wasn’t – and now we’re left with a population where most under 50 think that the way they communicate on e-mail or cell phone text is the height of communicative skill.
And for anyone who reads a brief look at newspapers or recently published books will tell you that even the supposed “editors” are illiterate. Reading has started to aggravate me so much that I’m turning vigilante and reading with a red pen in hand to correct errors so that the next reader isn’t encouraged to think that the mistakes I find are the correct way to do things. I also started clipping mistakes from the local papers and sending them to the editors, but found that that endeavour could take most of the day, many days, so I gave up. And that was over a decade ago, and it’s only gotten worse.
Language vigilantes – Arise! Unite!
