A work in progress for the next edition of the USQ paper... Enjoy! :) Also, ignore the referencing - the font went weird on me... :/ A passionate plea for proper punctuation! There are many things about contemporary society that deeply concern me: global warming, our feuding pollies and a fractured fiscal situation to name just a few. But most concerning to me (and yes, I am speaking from the biased perspective of an Education student), is our alarmingly prevalent ineptness with punctuation. And I’m not talking the occasional comma-instead-of-a-semicolon error (because let’s face it, we’ve all done that once). I’m talking a whole line of full stops instead of the three (that’s right, three!) that constitute an ellipsis, careless spelling and proofreading errors and of course, the perpetual problem of the homophone, specifically your and you’re. Nowhere else are the horrors of the homophone more obvious than in the highly public forum of Facebook. After googling ‘facebook statuses with incorrect grammar’ (which, incidentally, has over 4 million results), I found this: I cant spell every word rite, but when I see you Im only thinkin of one word. And thats i love you. (Jedeikin, 2012). Comic gold, but grammatically appalling nonetheless. But our ghastly grammar doesn’t stop on social media. It is quickly worming its way into the pages of well-respected publications read by thousands every day. For example, I recently read (in a highly circulated daily newspaper), the headline: INDOOR CIRCKET: THE ROAD TO THE GRAND FINAL. How fascinating, I thought to myself dryly. A completely new sport has been invented right under our noses, and has heretofore received no coverage whatsoever! Though it was probably a careless proofreading error, I fear for our journalistic future if the simple skill of proofreading isn’t obvious in a headline! Until this point, we have examined our punctuation, spelling and grammar foibles in a broader social and professional domain. Now, I think it’s time that we hone in on somewhere a little more familiar to us all (though perhaps not all at the one time…). One of the most important places to spend our formative years– high school. Home to some highly intelligent, passionate and driven teachers who only have their students’ best interests at heart. While surely possessing the qualities that make a great teacher, some of my old educators’ punctuation skills were less than admirable. One of my Year 12 assessment tasks (thankfully not from the English department) were marred with the unforgivable ‘ultra-dot’ ellipsis……… And it was in that one inexcusable punctuation error that I wondered how I was going to educate others if I was being constantly bombarded with grammatical incorrectness in my own learning. My own experiences, and those we are all so frequently exposed to in the wider world, have piqued an insatiable curiosity within me, and caused me to wonder: What kind of an example are we setting? And more importantly, how will we strive to educate a generation who suffer perennial exposure to poor punctuation?
Posted on: Sat, 20 Jul 2013 10:32:13 +0000
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