Language: November 2005 Archive Page

--Volunteers work smoothly for Operation Santa Clause [sic] (Tribune-Review [Online])

Dear Santa,

For Christmas, what I need most of all is a good copyeditor.

Love,

Pittsburgh Live.com

Okay, okay... To err is human.

I shouldn't be so harsh on whoever typed the headline. It's gloating blog entries like this that annoy professioal professional journalists and make them think of bloggers as "the enemy." But as I deal with the final crush of rough drafts from my students, I've been upbeat and constructive and positive as much as humanly possible, and that takes its toll on a guy.

So I've briefly unleashed the unflinching grammar bastard who dwells within. That felt good.

Now it's time to go back to being Professor Helpful.

Teenagers are ten times more likely to use non-standard English in written exams than in 1980, using colloquial words, informal phrases and text-messaging shorthand — such as m8 for ‘mate’, 2 instead of ‘too’ and u for ‘you’.

Despite this, the two-year study found that today’s teenagers are using far more complex sentence structures, a wider vocabulary and a more accurate use of capital letters, punctuation and spelling. --Adam Fresco --Texting teenagers are proving 'more literate than ever before' (Times Online)

gr8 2 c