Four (or Five!) Reasons Why

….Grammar is So Terrible

1. No one really teaches or studies grammar any more. From what I can tell, it’s not really a major part of the curriculum given teachers are scrambling to get their students to read, let alone understand grammar.

2. The importance of grammar is terribly under-appreciated. It’s unfortunate that there’s little attention or interest paid to having a comma, for example, in the right location so that a sentence is properly structured. At a time, when people want to consume information as fast as possible, it’s not something people care about or, for that matter, even recognize.

3. E-mail has killed grammar. With the use of emoticons, acronyms and personal digital shorthand, grammar is getting ignored and/or butchered. This contrasts when the golden age of letter writing when beautiful language, including proper, grammar was important and ubiquitous.

4. Many people write like they talk with same kind of informality and lack of structure. This explains why punctuation is pretty much non-existent, run-on sentences are the norm and spelling is atrocious.

For thoughts on grammar, check out Stanley Bing’s rant on “When smart people use bad grammar”, while the Big Bad Book Blog has some interesting thoughts on how some grammar rules are meant to be broken.

Technorati Tags: Grammar