I've enjoyed this thread very much.
Oh, wow, Laura! I've never seen anything like it. Maybe my students aren't quite as bad as I thought. However, I thought I would share the following anecdotes with you.
I object to badly written student submissions not just because they look bad but also because it takes me two or three times longer to wade through a poorly written piece of work than it does a good one. The material might be there, but its value gets obscured by the grammar, spelling and punctuation mistakes.
When I was a teaching assistant in Toronto, I was specifically told by one of the professors that I could not take marks off for poor use of language. Why not? Because I was teaching geography and not English. That didn't, however, stop me pointing mistakes out.
One day, I gave a student a poor mark. She came back to me and complained. "You can't give me a low grade," she said. "You're not allowed to penalise me for bad writing." (Actually, I doubt she used the word 'penalise'; it's got three syllables, after all.)
"No," I said. "I'm not. But I can take marks off if I don't understand what you are saying at all!"
In other words, only when her mistakes had descended into gibberish was I allowed to do anything constructive about it!
More recently...
I still point out mistakes to students. Mostly these are limited to comments like: "Learn to use apostrophes!" or "Use the spell checker!" on their feedback sheets. (We don't return the original scripts.)
One day, I was standing next to the departmental photocopier, and I got into a conversation with one of my more senior colleagues. I vented about the standard of English amongst the students, saying that I couldn't see how they possibly expected to cope in the workforce once they had graduated.
His response? He told me that I shouldn't be worrying about it. His argument was that the people who would be reading their poorly written output would not be able to recognise the mistakes contained within because they would only be capable of producing equally poorly written output of their own!
In other words, quality doesn't matter, so long as the message being conveyed is comprehensible.
But what will happen when, as in the case of my Canadian student above, poor writing becomes a string of meaningless letters, neither spelled or punctuated properly.
Now, I know that my English isn't perfect. I do make mistakes, although I do my best to learn from them and not to repeat them. There are folcs around here who are better versed in the mechanics of the English language than I.
And yet... I also know that there are plenty of people in the big Out There whose writing is worse than mine.
I just wish I could work out whether I should be proud or appalled to know that.
Chris
