Today's English 101

Check our this video about text language among our adolescents and young adult students.

The Ugly Truth

As a graduate teaching assistant, I have had the exciting opportunity of educating college freshman, plunging headfirst into the college teaching experience.  The challenge that I’ve noticed must, however, is the lack of proper writing etiquette college students possess.  Today, when we refer to writing literacy, it surpasses the traditional writing assignment completed on paper, but extends to typed documents, email messages, and even student Internet posts.

After brief interactions with my fellow peers, colleagues, and educators, this is sadly a typical list of the writing errors we’ve encountered:

• Run-on sentences and sentence fragments
• Missing punctuation, including periods, commas, and semicolons
• Lowercase “ i “ representing for capitalized “ I “
• Casual language (“We did a lot of fun activities like feeding the ducks and stuff.”)  
• Slang (e.g. “What’s good with you?”)
• Uncapitalized proper nouns such as september and bill gates
• Use of second person (“When you read this book, you will see…”)
• Lack of organization
• Use of numerals instead of words (“…15 years ago…”)
• Ebonics (e.g. “She is trippin…”)

Higher education sets the bar for enhanced writing skills over to be developed over the course of four years.  Professors are expecting their students to write concisely and consistently.

Discussion:  Do you feel as educators we should address these errors when seen?  What grade level should this correction begin?