Where Has Good Grammar Gone?
From newspaper articles to emails, social media posts to protest signs, Americans are showing a serious decline in basic language skills.
It was a marketing email that finally pushed me over the edge. I opened up my email yesterday to find this subject line from Acuvue. “Hey, Thad, tried of reaching for readers?” Obviously, it should have read tired, not tried. A: I have been wearing contacts or prescription glasses since age 8. B: I’ve never used “readers.” C: Why, when they have all this information, are they sending me such a useless email?
Putting that aside, that subject line is part of a broad trend that myself and everyone in my regular circle of friends & family have noticed for months now. Grammar is declining. Copy editing appears to be outsourced completely to software now, and software (even the overhyped “AI” we keep hearing about) is still horribly inconsistent at understanding context, which leads to one word being substituted for another because they’re both spelled accurately, even if one is correct and the other doesn’t make sense. I’ve seen news articles in the Detroit Free Press, New York Times, Washington Post, and The Atlantic in recent weeks that all have glaring typos in them. Press releases from politicians like Florida governor Ron “Fascist Doughboy™” DeSantis and former president Donald Trump regularly feature spelling mistakes, grammar errors, and clumsy language. Emails from clients and management alike have roughly equal chances of arriving with contextual or typographic errors.
Why has the usage of proper grammar become so poor in America? There’s a group of people that will go straight to blaming ubiquitous technology for causing the problem, and certainly reliance upon autocorrect and spellcheck has made many people far too dependent on technology that does not have the ability to understand the context in which a word was used in. That issue alone creates major problems for anyone relying upon automation to edit for them—my spellcheck tried to correct there to their this morning, because it didn’t grasp the context which I was using the word. It also tried to say that hick should have been hug. Incidents like this are indicative of the massive fallacy that corporations are guilty of when they push AI as a solution to hiring more human beings to perform writing/editing jobs.
I would also argue that the deeply insular focus of education policy for the last two decades has been about math, science, and technology, to the detriment of language skills and handwriting. Some years ago, I would lead STEM tours at my defense industry job, and teenage children would come in and barely be able to write legibly. Handwriting lessons appear to stop after second grade in many districts, cursive is no longer taught, and the issuance of tablets or Chromebooks to every student in a school has reduced time spent learning to write. I do grasp the irony of saying such a thing on a newsletter distributed through email and the Internet, but all throughout school until tenth grade, my writing assignments were completed by hand. There is a strong benefit in requiring handwriting for assignments, as I believe it requires the student to think more about sentence structure. Correcting mistakes takes more time when done by hand and incentivizes deliberation. I’m not advocating removing the ability of students to type up homework, but it certainly doesn’t need to be the default in early formative years.
The most important skill that humans possess is communication. The ability to speak or write what we are thinking sets us apart as a species. It should concern everybody when proper grammar regresses even amongst the most educated of us.