Fun with grammar (No, really!)

[M's]

Whats even worse. The schools are trending away from teaching proper grammar usage.
They say that with the technology that is present today there is realy no need; as long as the student has a basic idea of sentence structure, verb, noun usage.
Word proccesing programs will and can correct most if not all errors.
Makes one wonder, have we caused the downfall of or culture with technology?

[Bronze Fox]

Whats even worse. The schools are trending away from teaching proper grammar usage.
They say that with the technology that is present today there is realy no need; as long as the student has a basic idea of sentence structure, verb, noun usage.
Word proccesing programs will and can correct most if not all errors.
Makes one wonder, have we caused the downfall of or culture with technology?

Maybe it's because I'm from the current generation, but it's true that actual grammar skills are kind of pointless now.
I can hardly read most cursive, and I greatly despised having to do a cursive book this last school year.

The entire time I was going, "They don't even allow cursive in college, is anything even hand-written anymore too?"

[MasterChef]

I had a few classes in college that had hand written essays as tests. Damn blue books! With handwriting like mine, I can see why teachers require everything to be typed now.

Those pictures had some good tips though. I do actually remember learning a lot of those items in school though.

[Boss Llama]

Whats even worse. The schools are trending away from teaching proper grammar usage.
They say that with the technology that is present today there is realy no need; as long as the student has a basic idea of sentence structure, verb, noun usage.
Word proccesing programs will and can correct most if not all errors.
Makes one wonder, have we caused the downfall of or culture with technology?

The sad thing about this is that no technology yet devised in any word processor can come remotely close to assembling a complete sentence. Just the other day I was proof-reading a paper, from a grad-student mind you, which was absolutely filled with the most blatant of errors. It even had "sentences" that weren't really sentences due to a lack of a subject OR predicate... they were just strings of words without context! Improper spelling, improperly used homonyms, and missing possessives and plurals were all over the place. It was pretty appalling. The wonders of technology managed to pick up a couple of misspellings, such as "futer" and "bwtwen," but failed utterly on grammar and structure.

Maybe it's because I'm from the current generation, but it's true that actual grammar skills are kind of pointless now.
I can hardly read most cursive, and I greatly despised having to do a cursive book this last school year.

The entire time I was going, "They don't even allow cursive in college, is anything even hand-written anymore too?"

Grammar is not the same as penmanship. Writing (and reading) cursive is a penmanship skill, while grammar is the act of putting words in the correct order, using the right words, and following rules for things like proper punctuation.

Proper grammar:

Excuse me, where is the store?

Improper grammar:

Me excuse wear, the store at?

It doesn't matter if you're writing by hand or with a machine, grammar is the same in both cases, and a machine isn't going to catch your mistakes. A quick check confirms that neither Word 2007 nor Word 2010 pick up any errors in my improper example sentence, despite the fact that there are five very major problems with it.

As far as penmenship, I don't have great cursive either, but I do come from a generation that was taught it, and it's a good skill to have. If you ever work with somebody who hand-writes notes, especially somebody from an older generation like most bosses will be, it's important to be able to read cursive. Also, since I'm a history buff, I need to know how to read cursive any time I'm dealing with old documents. In college, I did have a couple classes that required hand-written essays instead of type-written ones. This wasn't because the technology was new or unavailable, but because the professors wanted to see the writing process of their students in action, which is much more visible with hand-written drafts. We griped and complained, but the requirement was there.

Will cursive die out? Yes, I believe it will go the way of Secretary Hand some time in the next 100 years, replaced by printing and the resurgent Italian Hand (italics), but it is still relevant today, even if our under-funded schools are pretending otherwise.

[NeanderDude]

Proper grammar:

Excuse me, where is the store?

Improper grammar:

Me excuse wear, the store at?

Your improper grammar example reminded me of the crocodiles in "Pearls before Swine."

Thank you for posting those links. I'm specifically thinking of someone who needs to read those and put them all into practice.

[Masakari]

Me fail English? That's unpossible!

[metacide]

So if you put cursive on a treadmill, would it be grammar?

[grover]

I loved this entire thread.

Grammar has been out of style in elementary schools since the 1960s. There are academic papers dating to the early '60s that claim the teaching of grammar is fruitless.

It would be nice if schools still knew why teaching the Trivium works.

[Boss Llama]

I loved this entire thread.

Grammar has been out of style in elementary schools since the 1960s. There are academic papers dating to the early '60s that claim the teaching of grammar is fruitless.

It would be nice if schools still knew why teaching the Trivium works.

Glad you like it!

I agree that it would be nice if more school systems still supported the teaching of important thinking skills. Grammar, rhetoric, and logic are sadly relegated to the back corners of our education system, where students only find them if they go looking. It's not that I don't support the teaching of more recently developed subject matter - I certainly do! It's just that every time I meet somebody who thinks you can't prove a negative, I want to cry.