These young workers is not well at grammar

http://online.wSportsJournalists.com/article/SB10001424052702303410404577466662919275448.html?mod=WSJ_article_comments#articleTabs%3Darticle

Article repeats something we've all noticed and mentioned at some point: Proper grammar and usage has lost its place in the age of texting and Twitter. But it interviews people who are doing something that I don't think is possible -- teaching grown adults the rules of grammar. Once you get that far down the road and out of formal education, either you know them or you don't.

Also, this ...

Patricia T. O'Conner, author of a humorous guidebook for people who struggle with grammar, fields workplace disputes on a blog she cowrites, Grammarphobia. "These disagreements can get pretty contentious," Ms. O'Conner says. One employee complained that his boss ordered him to make a memo read, "for John and I," rather than the correct usage, "for John and me," Ms. O'Conner says.

... would piss me off and would in all likelihood lead to my termination.

Anyway, as a technical writing contractor whose added value is the ability to write with proper grammar where engineers and others can't, I applaud this trend. I figure I will stay somewhat employed until the educational system begins to appreciate structure a bit more. So I will stay somewhat employed forever.

 

Texting, email and Twitter are often blamed for the decline in the appropriate application of basic English grammar rules; however, the phenomenon predates the technology being blamed.

 

Buck:

You are SO right. The problem lies in school curricula and not in Text/Twitter - - although texting and tweeting do not help here.

 

I blame Power Point. Or the telephone.

 

Grammar rules should be changed to appeal to the masses (and also to make it easier to text with grammatical precision while driving).

 

I think it's caused by a combination of rock music and standing on lawns.

 

As long as the upside-down exclamation point goes. Speak English while endangering the lives of others, dammit!

 

I blame the morse code. SPELL IN LETTERS YOU DAMNED KIDS

 

I, blame soccor:

 

Re: the example in the first post. My grandmother used to ALWAYS yell at me to make me say "blah blah and I" and when I'd try to explain to her that sometimes the "and me" was correct she would just get so mad. So I just let it go.

 

Your grandmother was Lorelei Lee? (You are so too young to get that.)

 

I blame soccer. Before ESPN decided that all its soccer coverage had to be by British people, we never used plural verbs with singular nouns, such as "Manchester are winning."

In all seriousness, schools are taking grammar out of the English curriculum, replacing it with literature, and assuming we'll learn grammar through that. I heard a colleague say he was told by someone writing the standards "grammar has no place in a high school English curriculum." Grammar should be taught in junior high, high school is for literature.