LONDON — A professor of English at one of the world’s most venerable centers of learning has outraged language purists by challenging whether spelling matters. Simon Horobin of Magdalen College, Oxford was this week said to have prompted shocked gasps from an audience at the annual Hay-on-Wye literary festival in western England by suggesting that spellings of they’re, their and there could be standardized. Spelling pedants should also be more relaxed about changes in standards of written English that have seen the adoption of spellings such as “thru” and “lite.” Sound familiar? In March, Rendezvous reported on a grammar warthat had broken out over the decision of an English council to ban the apostrophe from its local street signs. Traditionalists have also lamented the growing use of SMS slang, which they fear is creeping into the classroom. …show more content…
Horobin’s intervention comes at a time when the British government is introducing changes to the national school curriculum to include a list of 162 words that all 11-year-olds would be expected to spell. He pointed out that the draft law announcing the reform managed to spell “bureaucracy” incorrectly. The Oxford academic and spelling blogger, whose latest book is “Does Spelling Matter?”, said he was not proposing a spelling free-for-all but was inviting people to accept that spellings change. “People like to artificially constrain language change,” he said this week. “For some reason we think spelling should be entirely fixed and never
What she previously thought was “bad” English is merely a language variation, each variation with its own history and culture. Lanehart now believes these variations need to be celebrated and that they don't always need to be corrected. The more Lanehart learned, the more she believed that English can vary as long as we can all understand each other. Lanehart decides she doesn’t want to correct people anymore.
Imagine coming home to a family that has to use a dictionary in order to speak. A family so worried, that they quit their jobs, in order to lessen the chance o accidentally slipping and saying a censored letter. Mark Dunn wrote a novel to explore how people would react when being censored, and the results caused a considerable amount of consternation in people. Censorship on language caused people to have lipograms forced on to their tongues, these rules brought out the worst of people, and even the government wasn't able to conform to these silly rules. Censorship causes unusual dialect in people.
Review of Vershawn Young Discussion After reading “Vershawn Ashanti Young: Should Writers Use They Own English?” against Rebecca Wheeler’s “Code-Switch to Teach Standard English (Young 111. Wheeler 108)”. Each paper expresses a different opinion regarding the teaching of English in the classrooms. Each author writes with different agendas, different tones, and different purposes. Each acts upon their beliefs as they perceive them, and as a result are poles apart.
Texting is ubiquitous in modern Western society. It's a convenient way to communicate basic ideas quickly without having to commit to a phone conversation or the long wait for a letter. All of this is done through cellular phones on the go and many teenagers have subscribed to this method of communication as their primary one. When texting, it is customary to abbreviate certain words in order to save time. These abbreviations can be considered a language that evolves out of texting, and that language can be referred to as textspeak.
(Forward: The Prologue Preamble Perambulate) SERVING NO ESSAYS BEFORE THEIR TIME While demonstrably neurotic to care about wines and worry over colleges, before their time - both of which, during the writing of these initial drafts, are in my far-flung future - I can’t help myself. If I had a nickel for every time someone told me I had OCD, I’d have $39.25! However, the dispassionate diagnosis of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is not so singularly simple, for example, while some excitable clinicians propose I exhibit multiple symptoms of CDO, which is almost exactly like OCD, but in alphabetical order; other more melodramatic diagnosticians advocate for a verdict of Compulsive Disorder Extreme, which is indistinguishable from OCD & CDO, but sequential - just as it should be!
Entry #2: Date and Time: Friday, February 17, 2017, 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. (3 hours) Task/Activity: Students in both classes started off the class by taking their weekly spelling test. Following this, both classes examined prose-constructed responses completed by fellow students (although responses were kept anonymous). Students would then work in groups to grade the response according to PARCC standards.
The essay “In Praise of the ‘F’ Word” by Mary Sherry explains some flaws Sherry has noticed in our education system. These observations are from her teaching perspective, and from her son’s own experience in high school. Sherry claims that some students that have earned a high school degree should not have because they are “semi literate.” She starts out her essay by stating this bluntly, but further explains herself as it goes on. Sherry is an adult literacy grammar teacher, and often faces students that wish they could have had a more beneficial experience in high school.
Language, though primarily used as a means of communication, can be used to form community-like bonds with additions to and evolutions of different regional, cultural, racial, etc., vernaculars. What is one community’s “how are you?” is another’s “what’s good?” or “‘sup?” Those terms are understood and accepted almost unilaterally in their respective communities, but beyond those borders, they may or may not be. The push to broaden mandating “proper English pronunciation” is a direct attack on those communities that do not fall in the narrow definition of those whose community is deemed “correct” by mainstream society. When this is enforced, its roots are usually found in racism/white supremacy.
Are our communication skills declining due to the vast internet use? Technology has given individuals the ability to do things that would otherwise be considered impossible. However, while technology has provided the ability to communicate with people halfway across the world and opened a comfortable space for teens, it is believed to have affected not just the interaction among others, but furthermore writing skills. Although technology and communication has given individuals the ability to do things that would not have been done before, writing online has had a negative impact on a person’s writing skills which can be proven through the writings of Malcolm X, Gannon, and Daum.
“Teachers of English and literature have either submitted, or are expected to submit, along with teachers of the more "practical" disciplines, to the doctrine that the purpose of education is the mass production of producers and consumers” (Berry). Berry uses the word practical to describe the way in which we produce students as though they were massed produced. School systems today demonstrate specialization, and with that follows oversimplification. “In our society, which exists in an atmosphere of prepared, public language-language that is either written or being read illiteracy is both a personal and a public danger” (Berry). While schools relax their education standards and primarily focus on profitability, we become vulnerable to loss of literacy through
Article Analysis: The Importance of Writing Badly Bruce Ballenger’s article titled “The Importance of Writing Badly” takes a rather peculiar approach to addressing the issue of effective writing. The author eccentrically argues for the importance of ‘bad writing’ by describing different reasons to support his arguments. He argues that it is normal to apportion blames without understanding the root causes of poor writing skills. The author quotes different people who have expressed concerns about poor writing among students including his doctor. He proceeds by explaining why he would encourage his students not to concentrate on their poor writing experiences.
Slang remains a bright part of language in any era, including the
By limiting the vocabulary, Newspeak is essentially “unintelligible” and hence controls the people’s understanding of the real world. Orwell emphasises that language is of utmost importance as it structures and limits the ideas individuals are capable of formulating and expressing. In 1984, language is used as a ‘mind control tool’. The party slogan, “war is peace, freedom is
Along with this, Orwell openly portrays his anger revolving around the destruction of the English Language. In prior writings, Orwell displays his disgust at the evolution of language and his unhappiness in the migration of shorter, unexaggerated sentences to the lengthy wording of simple phrases. In Orwell's writing titled “Politics and the English Language,” he states “no modern writer of the kind I am discussing- no one capable of using phrases like “objective consideration of contemporary phenomena”- would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way,” a passage which thoroughly depicts Orwells contempt of modern writers. By incorporating Old English language into his writings, Orwell subtly displays his unrest with the modernization of our language.
Today, issues of social class are not straightforward as they once were; increased educational opportunity and economic prosperity means that more and more young people are exposed to standard English than ever before. Nevertheless, linguistic prejudice still exists, particularly amongst employers, some politicians and sections of the general public. as