I was listening to the Today programme this morning, and there was piece about the state of written English. Written English from English students showed three times as many errors than from foreign students. It sounds quite shocking, but you must remember that most people in Britain start learning English orally. Written language comes later.
The argument seems to have been distilled down to whether we need to teach spelling and grammar, or whether we need to change the English language to make it less confusing and hence easier to write. For me, it's quite straightforward - we must resume teaching of spelling and grammar.
As someone who went through the schools system from 1978 to 1991, I never had an English lesson on grammar and only a few on spelling. My first lesson on grammar came in French, when I first found out about nouns, pronouns and verbs. At the time I couldn't believe that we weren't being taught this in English, and my incredulity grows with the years. I've always thought hard about the words I use in my blog posts to try to express what I feel, but I guess a greater grasp on grammar and a wider vocabulary would help. I'm still a stickler for typing full words in text messages, and I try never to use smilie's - as I think it's cheating!
The opposing argument reminds me of one of those English lessons, when we learnt about newspeak in George Orwell's 1984. Words were stripped out of the language which could be expressed by other means, so "bad" became "ungodly". It's a horrible, dumber down vision of the future.
We should respect our language. Allow it to evolve by all means, but organically rather than as some get out clause for correct teaching. We must bring back proper English lessons, teach grammar and allow ourselves some pride in the language of Shakespeare, Dickens, Fry and Chaucer.
Squiffy.
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