I strongly disagree with your ‘experience’. Have you attended a university recently? In all of my non-mathematical related subjects proper sentence structure and grammar are a prerequisite. Workshops are freely available weekly for anyone seeking help; from basic through to advanced concepts of English. I could thoroughly 'nit-pick' the grammatical errors you've made above. Your sentence structure is all over the place and you’ve misplaced a few commas. Not that it matters. I still understood the contention. Using JC as proof that literacy is falling is fallacious. I've mispelt words plenty of timezzz. Doesn't mean I can be bothered fixing it. It's a goddamn forum.
you may disagree with my experiences, I've had the experiences, the facts are still there whether you agree or not.
No I haven't attended a university recently, however I have dealt with university students and when a non-university student like myself is requested upon to assist so called graduated university students construct sentences, write reports & correspondence then clearly something has gone wrong somewhere between school and university. Forums are a reflection of the literacy levels.... It is a reflection of our written communication. We all make spelling errors of course, but as I've already mentioned, I'm not referring to spelling errors being a problem. As several others have pointed out here, the overall level of english is on a downhill slide (I'm not just referring to this forum) and the increasing amount of text talk is one of the largest contributing factors, which is the main issue I am addressing.
Look I could nit pick your grammar and sentence structure too etc etc, and one english teacher could do the same to another. As you said, it's a forum, I don't proof read my posts to the extent I would an official document going to court etc. I never claimed to be an A English student nor did I criticise people's sentence structure (apart from not using sentences at all....) and precise placement of punctuation. I'm referring to people not using punctuation at all, instead typing a 20 line slab of text with no full stops, no commas, no sentences at all. Can you honestly say those posts aren't difficult to read through ? I'm sure you would agree that my english is at the very least, easy enough to read and understand, that's all I'm suggesting of others. This a social forum where we attempt to communicate with each other, is it really that difficult for people to type in plain english, and use the occasional punctuation mark to clarify what they are saying? With little to no punctuation use, text language etc, it becomes very difficult and/or tiring trying to read some peoples' posts. Spelling mistakes, as said I really don't care providing it is easy to understand what the author means. Punctuation marks, I'm certainly not going through with a red pen. I just want to know when a sentence ends and another begins, maybe a comma here and so I read the text the way it was intended.
But more to the point, my biggest gripe is text talk on forums. I can understand the reasoning for text talk on a phone, but on a forum no.
