Re: vocabulary nitpicking

[James and/or Nancy Gilly <KatieMorag@worldnet.att.net>]

Poster: James and/or Nancy Gilly <KatieMorag@worldnet.att.net>

Quoth Corum:

>I beg to differ. Good grammar checkers are extremely inexpensive, or at
>least relatively so, since the best grammar checker is your own brain.
>Now we all went to school at some point where we learned grammar and
>phonetics et. al. Whenever I have a problem, I grab a reference book
>like a dictionary, thesaurus or a book on english usage and look it
>up. 

Unfortunatly, this seems to no longer be true, and not everyone has been
taught English grammar in school.  There has been a very interesting thread
going on the Medieval History list this past week on just this point.  There
are many third level instructors out there who find that the students they
get from the high schools these days are clueless about the concepts.  (And
these are bright students from supposedly good schools.)  They don't even
know what the words "verb" or "noun" mean.  One professor said that he/she
got rather shocked looks when he/she tried to explain to some students that
good sentences need both a noun and a verb.  (Of course you then wonder
about the sentences which prompted this suggestion.....8))  I am by no means
suggesting that any one on this list has this problem, but if a large enough
proportion of college students have this problem for it to such a heated
topic on a professional list, obviously most secondary schools are not
teaching grammar anymore, or at least not teaching it well.  A lot of quite
intelligent students don't know about thesauruses simply because they were
never told about them.  The current educational theory seems to be that they
will pick it all up by osmosis.  And they wonder why so many of us are
considering home schooling for our children.....

Philippa


-----------------------------
James and/or Nancy Gilly
katiemorag@worldnet.att.net

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