I believe that the only way to begin this article is by stating that, I majored in English at University, and have been an English teacher for the last two years.

It wasn’t too long ago that I had a friend who taught English at the university level ask me, “What are you doing to the kids? They can’t write.”  Of course, I smiled, crooked my head to one side and said. “To be honest with you, I don’t know.” I have been attempting in these last two years, to help develop my student’s writing abilities and trust me, it is not an easy task.  ”ur” is You’re or Your, “@” is at, and BTW is often the way sentences are started. Capitalization is no longer used, and when it does get used, it’s sparingly.  Sentence fragments are all too common and there is rarely any use of punctuation, except to create emoticons. I spend the majority of my time fixing these mistakes, giving assignments back to students only to see no improvement in their work. Sure, this can be frustrating when correcting a paper and seeing a mess of spelling and grammar mistakes.

When I saw this article within the local newspaper, my interest was piqued. A study was performed at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, where they attribute social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter as factors in the “downfall” of the English Language. Social Networking sites are where most people of this generation are doing the majority of their writing. They aren’t writing emails, they are texting and tweeting within that 140 character limit. Having to spell out each word means not fitting as much information into a single text or tweet, and can mean spending more money (if they’re paying for their own texts).

To summarize the study: students current have a 30% failure rate of on the general writing skills exam that students have to complete before entering post-secondary schools such as Simon Fraser and Waterloo.  This has jumped from up 5% in the last few years.  The article is also filled with sources from the post-secondary level of how terrible student’s grammar has become.  In other linked articles, there are a number of people that believe that the fault lies with the grade school teacher for not teaching “proper” grammar and spelling.

To those of you that think that this is all the grade school teacher’s fault; here’s what’s required in a typical English class: four novels, two plays, a short story unit, a poetry unit, an essay/research paper unit, each required to be at least a month long with only ten periods in a fourteen day cycle. (Do the math.) What about a writing course? Well, dear readers they exist, but are not mandatory in order to graduate.  If you had a choice between gym and a writing course, what do you think many students are going to choose?

In my personal opinion, I would change the word “downfall” to “evolution”. That’s right, evolution. The English language has and will forever be changing; the words we use, how we speak, and then how we write, changes. Sure, there is a time and place for everything. Sure, the “golden age” of English language has gone, but the “golden age”  is also relative.  When Old English (Anglo-Saxon) transitioned to Middle English, do you think that people where having a fit? Saying “The kids today, don’t know how to speak?”. The same thing happened when Middle English transitioned to Modern English.  Now, it is just happening again, maybe it will be called “Future” English, or “Tech English” or whatever. We just have to try our best to keep formal writing, looking formal, and work to accept change.