Strunk & White Is Still a Crock at 50

No one wants to teach grammar because it's not fun: Kim Brooks

(NEWSER) - Sometimes, while Kim Brooks is grading essays by her college composition students, she cries. "Not real tears, exactly—more a spontaneous, guttural sob, often loud and unpleasant enough to startle my husband or children," she writes in Salon . Why? Because many of these students "simply ... cannot write." They don't have basic skills, like knowing how to organize paragraphs, how to write a thesis statement, how to outline, how to proofread or edit, or even "how to make sure their sentences contain a subject and a verb." Is this the fault of the traditional high-school English class, full of class discussion but little writing and almost no grammar education? More»

Kids can't write, and it's getting worse

(NEWSER) - Take it from a first-year college instructor: The writing skills of young adults are a joke. "They have either forgotten the rules of writing, or they never learned them in the first place," writes Kara Miller of Babson College. And while the media focuses on the need for better science teachers, "finding, coaching, and retaining good English teachers is an underreported struggle," she writes in the Boston Globe . More»

Sad kids do not 'literally tear' the heart out of a mall Santa, and other mistakes

(NEWSER) - Some common grammar mistakes are also inexcusable, Johnny Truant writes for Copyblogger. Too many of the following, and your readers may decide "that you’re actually a chimpanzee—and not one of the smart ones, either."

• It's "me," not "myself:" People often "think that complicating the language needlessly will make them sound smart." Usually not. "I did the job myself" is correct. "So-and-so and myself..." is heading down a dangerous path.

Teaching millennials causes new frustrations for college writing professors

(NEWSER) - College professors have lamented the state of student writing for centuries. But today’s Internet-obsessed culture brings new, infuriating errors to Writing 101 as students brazenly use colloquialisms like “:-)” and “LOL” in essays. “Occasionally, I've seen someone using the number 4 for the word 'for,'” a Cal State San Marcos professor tells the San Diego Union-Tribune. More»

At least on the SAT, where you may need only write long words

(NEWSER) - The hours and dollars spent on SAT writing preparation might be for naught, the Boston Globe reports, as 56% of four-year colleges don’t even use the newest section of the aptitude test. Skeptics find fuel in a study showing that big words were all it took to achieve near-perfect scores. "These aren't higher-level learning measures," one admissions officer says. More»