The chief examiner in the Department of Education is worried about the future of Irish writers, in that they may be going the way of the dinosaur. It's text messaging that's to blame.
In reviews of honours papers composed during the last sitting of the Junior Certificate exam, the anonymous examiner was appalled to find spelling and punctuation errors, in such abundance that he became alarmed. Text messages, with their shorthand phonetic spelling and lack of commas, have become the standard for communication, while the written word has fallen by the wayside. As we all must communicate through reading, it is imperative that we all have some common rules of interpretation to understand one another. The use of text message speak undermines that completely.
The sentence structure of the students sitting the exam also reflected the popular culture of texting, with short answers and minimal responses to the questions. There were no flights of fancy, complex sentences or poetry in prose. The resulting answers, brief and quick, failed to show whether or not the student really understood the question or made any attempt to hash over the problem and compose a response in some detail. Yes, no, C U L8R. Hardly the stuff of deep philosophical thought.
What's to be done? If the students are turning in classwork that pays tribute to texting, it is up to the teachers to sharpen their red pencils and attack with a vengeance. After all, there is far more to writing than passing along information. Texting is fine to let mammy know you're on your way to the chip shop, back home at 8, but to say that the bag of chips was fine does not begin to explain the smells, the texture, the taste. Strings of words, put together in sentences that have punctuation to guide the reader, are needed to fully describe things so that someone else gets a clear picture. It takes effort to write something clearly enough so that the audience can imagine they were there, at the chip shop, while still being so concise that the listeners don't drop off to sleep with boredom.
Honours level writing, dumbed down to suit popular culture, has proven to be lacking in the sort of sentence structure and vocabulary that makes up good writing. Being fluent in text does not bode well for the future of literature. English teachers of the world, unite!
2 comments:
My first day online I e-mailed my co-worker/friend "M," who's half my age, and she replied in text-ese.
What do "lol" and "btw" mean?, I asked.
"M" was on the honor roll in high school, yet her written papers, while factually correct, were dreadful. After graduation, she attended an ivy league school and graduated with honors, and still her writing is full of errors -- spelling, punctuation and grammar.
I shudder to think of what the average students' writing is like.
Do they teach sentence structure these days?
...
It's still grammar and sentence diagramming in the Catholic grade schools. The publics are far behind, only just getting to it when the students are juniors or seniors.
Is it any wonder that people don't read as much as they used to? They can't understand what they're looking it when it's in proper English.
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