by David Wilkes
Too many don't know the basic rules of English
THE standards of spelling and grammar among university students
are so appalling that many cannot write proper sentences or understand simple
words, researchers have found. They warn there is a 'degree of crisis' in
undergraduates' poor grasp of the basics of written English caused by their
rising dependence on technology; such as computer spellchecks.
Common errors include not knowing the difference between their, there and
they're, and the misuse of simple punctuation including commas, apostrophes
and quotation marks. A study by the publisher of a new dictionary also found
many students - supposedly Britain's brightest young people - had little
knowledge of the language's rich vocabulary .They relied too much on dull,
devalued adjectives, such as interesting and good, or used a meaningless
'very' for emphasis.
When expressing themselves, they often resorted to informal,
vague word combinations such as 'kind of' or 'sort of'. Students regularly
wrote incomplete or rambling, poorly connected sentences while their descriptive
powers often resulted in them mixing metaphors 'with gusto'.
The low standards and frequent juvenile errors were revealed in research
for Bloomsbury, which has just released the student version of the Encarta
Concise Dictionary. The publi.sher asked an advisory board of 42 English
professors and teachers from around the world which problems they most commonly
found in students' writing.
Faye Carney, dictionaries publisher at Bloomsbury said: 'We thought it would
be useful to find out what extra help students might need. The results were
quite shocking. 'We are sure the use of computers has played a part. People
rely increasingly on automatic tools, such as spellchecks, which are much
more passive than looking something up. That can lull them into a false sense
of security.'
Bloomsbury said usage notes in other dictionaries - which provide guidance
for users - assumed an undergraduate level of grammatical and syntactic literacy
'that simply does not exist today'. The Encarta dictionary lists 800 commonly
misspelled words, and has notes which distinguish between pairs of words
pronounced similarly but with different spellings and meanings. Experts have
blamed the Government's attempt to broaden the university population for
declining standards in entrants' English over the last ten years. Last year,
a survey of history departments at 50 universities found many first-year
students have such a poor grasp of
grammar,
they could barely construct a sentence.
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