In which Cherry is offensive.

[cherry]

The dreck that some people seem to think constitutes proper English -- or that they seem to believe constitutes usage of the English language at all -- continues to amaze me.

I am not speaking of some of more questionable literature published professionally, or of some of the more amusing fan fiction out there.

There are a surprisingly high number of my fellow engineering students whom I honestly consider to be barely literate. When it comes to group reports or labs, I find that I tend to have to go through each page to ensure that it is written at least at a fifth-grade level.

It occurs to me that I may come across as rather elitist, and that the simplest recourse would simply be ceasing to care. I would never claim that my grammar is impeccable -- goodness knows, it's much easier for me to catch mistakes in papers or stories someone other than myself has written -- but I find it more and more frustrating that so many people around me seem to have failed to achieve a basic competency in their native tongue.

There is simply no way in which "These data Suggests that solar gain through thermal mass is no economical" is is a sentence. There just isn't.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_bounce_/]

They're not ESL students, are they? Besides which, most ESL students know to get their work checked before submitting it if they've anything near that level of difficulty with it. As such, they need to learn basic English grammer and usage and then learn to apply it.

I'd be appalled if the year 8 and 9 students I used to tutor handed in something like that. People shouldn't be able to get to a tertiary level what that degree of written ability in their native language. (The fact that I'd well below that level in French is beside the point. I know enough to get someone to check over my work in any other languages because I'm not STUPID)

[cherryice.livejournal.com]

The people in question are not ESL students -- in my experience, they tend to do a tad more poorly, but I give them a bit more slack.

It's not that people aren't smart enough to figure these things out, it's that the emphasis on communication skills just isn't there in so many of the technical professions. This makes me sad.