Streetlights hum,
vibrate across the dark
parking lot.
Steam unbroken
on the windows,
like someone’s hot mouth
hovered for too long over the glass.
Our bodies fit together
and erase the pavement.

Trapping the heat,
it’s hibernation in your mind,
inside your voice,
that stifles my thoughts
of progression
with ones of static.
Skin
stuck to leather
means nothing will change.

Fibres sink in the glow
of the stereo, discharged
by movement.
Notes cyclical and
slurred
saturate the background,
rest heated on top our
bare arrangement of limbs
and words.

Humidity:
sticky and persuasive.
Confined within
movement
and reaction,
invisible in
this backseat,
we’re fixed and stationary,
nothing but static.

Source: Zazzle.com

I was reading through TheRecord’s online paper a few days ago looking for a particular story when I stumbled upon an entirely unrelated but equally interesting article.  It’s talking about the collapse of English Language Proficiency in our tech-savvy (read: dependent) generation and what better place to discuss it than in a tech-centric blog.

Now, I’d like to preface this post by saying I consider myself of a fairly decent writing-skill level. I’ve read a great deal of “academic” writing from peers throughout my university career as well as have done a fair bit of editing of peer work (both required and volunteer) since high school and I have to say that I agree with a lot of what’s being brought up in this article. That’s not to say however, that I believe the causes are the same, but rather there certainly is a great degree of syntax neglect these days.

This article is coloured by a great number of quotations from all sorts of grammar, education, etc experts who all have their piece to say about the decline of writing skill and grammar knowledge. Many attribute this great decline to the rising popularity of the internet, word processing programs, Facebook, Twitter, cell phone texting and possibly even the moon’s phases (well, maybe not that last part).

“Ontario’s University of Waterloo is one of the few post-secondary institutions in Canada to require the students they accept to pass an exam testing their English language skills.

Almost a third of those students are failing.

‘Thirty per cent of students who are admitted are not able to pass at a minimum level,’ says Ann Barrett, managing director of the English language proficiency exam at UW.

‘We would certainly like it to be a lot lower.’

Barrett says the failure rate has jumped five percentage points in the past few years, up to 30 per cent from 25 per cent.

‘What has happened in high school that they cannot pass our simple test of written English, at a minimum?’ she asks.

Even those with good marks out of Grade 12, so-called elite students, ’still can’t pass our simple test,’ she says.

Poor grammar is the major reason students fail, says Barrett.

‘If a student has problems with articles, prepositions, verb tenses, that’s a problem.’

Some students in public schools are no longer being taught grammar, she believes.

‘Are they (really) preparing students for university studies?’”

The article goes on to discuss similar occurrences happening on university campuses across Canada. These close-to-home statistics are worrisome considering that we’re supposed to be an educated society, especially in wake of how easy the ELPE (English Language Proficiency Exam) is (or should be) to native English speakers. It’s also fairly scary to hear that a great deal of the people who fail still did well in their high school English courses. What were these students learning at excelling at when the rest of us were being taught how to properly write essays, proposals, etc? I remember having grammar and spelling ground into me from a fairly early age only to be faced with heavily structured essay writing later on. If anything, coming to university was a chance to be more free and step beyond the rigidity of high school English structure–but it appears some people either never learned that structure to begin with or they simply are too lazy to put it into action.

Said later in the article, this shocked me most of all:

“Emoticons, happy faces, sad faces, cuz, are just some of the writing horrors being handed in, say professors and administrators at Simon Fraser.

‘Little happy faces … or a sad face … little abbreviations,’ show up even in letters of academic appeal, says Khan Hemani.

‘Instead of ‘because’, it’s ‘cuz’. That’s one I see fairly frequently,’ she says, and these are new in the past five years.

Khan Hemani sends appeal submissions with emoticons in them back to students to be re-written ‘because a committee will immediately get their backs up when they see that kind of written style.’”

Has our generation really been so sheltered or uneducated to know that that’s simply not appropriate in any kind of formal paper, assignment or appeal? We all like to use shorthand, emoticons and such things in our daily lives because they make quick communication and conveying of information easy. We’re addicted to fast-talking, QWERTY blasted texting, Facebook wall posts and Twitter 150 character messages–but when did the line between casual communication fade enough to make people think that kind of method is OK for anything outside of casual?

While the article tends to lean on the easy scapegoat of blaming ‘teh intarwebz’ for all of life’s problems I’m not about to jump on board for such an easy excuse. Instead I chose to see it more as a band of pure laziness and ignorance. It doesn’t take much in your essay or online communication to type out ‘you’ instead of ‘u.’ ‘Cuz’ is just as easy to write as “because” and letting poor grammar and spelling build up on your Facebook posts, email communication, or gaming-chat boxes simply makes you come across more ignorant than anything else. As I said, we all love our short-form, but there’s a time and a place for it. Too much can become annoying to read and generally makes whatever you’re trying to say sound less respectful or valid–especially on an academic level.

So next time you’re writing that little tidbit to your friend on Twitter or talking to your guild in World of Warcraft, take that extra few seconds and try as be as correct as possible. Nobody’s perfect but that doesn’t mean you have to be one of the unwashed masses either. I guarantee if you take the time to be more eloquent in your daily life, it’ll show in your academic writing too. Technology can be a great tool to improve your writing rather than to degrade it. So prove society wrong and make them see that it’s the individual to blame for their writing laziness, not the tech.