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staph
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Join Date: May 2004
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2006-04-25, 06:23

Quote:
Originally Posted by RichieB
[VENT]What happened to good language skills? What happened to being proud about the command of a language? What happened to our writing skills? Have you seen a typical kid's handwriting lately? Atrocious. Penmanship is a lost art[/VENT]
In order for language skills to have been "lost", they must have been found at some point. Perhaps standards are slipping, but frankly I think the majority of the population's language skills have been crap for a very long time indeed. How many school children have ever been able to write a whole page without the most crass errors throughout it? Really?

Reading the work of my highly paid superiors at work only reinforces this for me.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a language pedant with the best of them. I just think that an expectation of perfect compliance with the formal rules of the language is an expectation of disappointment, and always has been.
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