The importance of hyphens

''that's not a nife, this is a knife''

 

But we portray ourselves as better than you, better than everyone else. We are Exceptional!

I'd feel better if our superiority meant more than just the world's biggest egos and blunders and military hardware. It is embarrassing to be involuntarily associated with the folks continually waving the We-are-Exceptional! flags when almost everything else about us is just average.

 

I work at a University and am appalled at the spelling and grammatical errors of my staff coworkers. I thought we were supposed to be good examples.

 

how can we be, when grammar is no longer taught in public schools?

 

There are alternatives.
We homeschooled our sons. They got grammar and even calculus before finishing high school. One son has a Masters degree and the other has a Bachelors degree.

 

someone has to be home.

 

None of the kids up here can read cursive any more. And their ability to print or write manually is atrocious. All of this may be a dying art, who knows.

Full disclosure: I lost the ability to "write" decently, about 30~40 years back when I became a draftsman, my printing is the naz, but long hand: fugdaboutit. Maybe I should knuckle down, it is a nice skill.

I did teach myself touch typing, with the help of a shareware course, maybe 15 years back.

 

i'm thinking of taking up bagpiping in retirement. no need to write or speak, the bag says it all.

 

I learned more about English grammar when I studied German than I did in any English class. German grammar is fairly similar to Japanese grammar, so that helped.

I've also been a proofreader and copy editor, so I'm a grammar cop.

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

What is real world socialisation (apart from schools)? Does it involve intersection with a variety of people across age groups? The older and more knowledgeable mentoring the less mature?
Is it like the the schools where people are in age segregated groups?
I believe both my sons are excelling in the business world precisely because of their real world socialization without the artificial grouping of the school environment.

One thing I like about PriusChat (when it is working), is the International interaction on items. Although I live in Virginia, I was raised in Canada. I also worked for a Swedish based company for a while. The International cultural perspective is very refreshing.

 

I still cannot touch type and I work using a computer keyboard for a living. I feel my typing skills are even worse on the newer touch-only keyboards on today’s mobile devices.

 

Being from Canada, I learned some French in school. It is interesting how the English grammar is somewhat backwards compared to many other languages. It is also very imprecise.

 

I was graduated from university in 79. In order to graduate, we all had to pass the JQE (junior qualifying exam) which consisted of your choice of a grammar test, or an essay. It was pass/fail, administered in person over a two hour period. If you didn't pass it your junior year, you could retake it your senior year. If you didn't pass it, you did not graduate, period. It was scary as hell for most except the English majors. I was fortunate to have had a lot of grammar all through grade school through my senior year. We'd been taught the model to write an essay.



Once you knew this format, you could argue most anything even if you didn't know what you were talking about. I chose to write an essay because I was not as confident on my pure grammar skills. You had to make up your own topic on the fly within a subject range they chose, so I decided to compare and contrast Star Wars (released 1 year before) with another movie, Battlestar Galactica, that I had not yet seen.

I used the essay model above, made my arguments, and passed. I gambled that the graders had not seen the other movie.

They got rid of the JQE a few years later, citing that it was too hard and most other universities had already dumped it. And so the dumbing down of America began.

 

My non-college education was all in Canada. My wife majored in Education in college due to her bad educational experiences in the lower grades. We are among the more fortunate / blessed.