Breaking news from the trenches in the war against illiteracy:

Monash University will teach its first-year students grammar and punctuation after discovering that most lack basic English skills.

Baden Eunson, lecturer at the university’s School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, and convenor of the new course, said about 90 per cent of his first-year students could not identify a noun. “If you ask them to identify adjectives and other parts of a sentence, only about 1 per cent can manage,” he said.

His comments come after Monash colleague Caron Dann said the majority of her 500 students in communication were strangers to English grammar.

“Marking essays, I discovered the majority had no idea how to use apostrophes, or any other punctuation for that matter; That random spelling was in and sentence construction out. About half thought plurals were formed by adding an apostrophe-s, as in apple’s and banana’s.

“Marking the final exam, it emerged that few could write neatly: From bold childlike printing to spidery scribblings in upper case, it is obvious that handwriting is a dying art,” she said.

There’s a million theories why this is but my preferred thesis is the abrogation of responsibility, which usually starts with “It’s not important…” and finishes with “Someone else can fix it”. Unfortunately I cop this all the time because I’m usually the one who’ll send your copy back with a gazillion alert flags and a  comment saying “Fix the spelling and grammar on this steaming pile of moose droppings”.

And doesn’t the indignation come fast from 21-year-olds who think they’re great writers just because they’ve got a BComm and they once scored an A+ for a reflective piece in Year 10 English. And I’ve heard them all too. “Noone worries about grammar anymore, I’m writing for the SMS generation.” “Our system should have spellcheckers…” (it purposely doesn’t).”It’s just my job to report, it’s your job to worry about the quality of writing…” (fucking WHAT?!?) and “I’m only in print media until I score a gig on radio or TV…” (not if your arse gets sacked, bucko). I’ve even heard the “English language is a wonderful dynamic creature…” argument before.

The standards have definitely fallen and they continue to fall. This morning, an e-mail from someone way up the food chain that expressed a desire that certain people should “…get there shit together”. I cried. What hope have us grammarians got in such cruel, unforgiving world?

Since Ed has succumbed to the temptation we all try so hard to resist - not posting lolcats (oh, glorious lolcats!) - and clearly therefore GrodsCorp is now a site of more flexible editorial standards than we might otherwise have assumed, I think he’ll appreciate this graph posted today at GraphJam:

Amusing RSS feed plus grammatical grumpiness! If only there were cute kittehs.

The Editor, John Surname, Ant Rogenous, Jeremy Sear and Billybob discuss:

* Religious intolerance in Camden
* Kevin Rudd’s “butler” and work ethic
* Amazonian lost tribes
* Campayn to modernis Inglish speling
* Andrew Landeryou

** Because Craig is on the internet at home even though he told us he was sick, use only the “Play in popup” link or the “Download” link. **

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I’ve previously been called an “orthographic Nazi” (by somebody who couldn’t spell those words without a dictionary) and it’s a label I wear with pride. So I’m out at the pub with some mates last night and I found myself studying the chalkboard menu and writing down all of the words that were spelled wrong.

Here’s a list of errors on the menu at The Retreat Hotel in Brunswick:

* parmigana
* snitzel
* mediteraean
* tomato’s
* potato’s
* bolagnaise
* Mecury
* Hieniken
* jus

(I know the last one is a correct word in French but it has absolutely no place on a pub menu.)