Saturday, July 14, 2012

WHY HAS GRAMMAR BEEN SO NEGLECTED IN SCHOOLS?

I know my grammar may not always be perfect as one can get carried away expressing one's opinions while at the same time forgetting how to 'write' correctly.

When I was at school (1937-1947) we had ENGLISH as a subject and not only did we learn poetry and write essays but we also did parsing (analysing a sentence) and grammar and so on.  We learned all about nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives etc., and also how to use punctuation correctly.  The latter is particularly important for reading poetry and prose aloud.

Hopefully I learnt to write words in the correct sequence but also to spell rather well.  I always prided myself on being a very good speller and if I am not sure of how to spell a word I still always look it up.

What distresses me the most these days is not only sometimes bad spelling (I have never worked out why they left the 'me' off the end of the word programme...just 'cos they do that in the USA?) but the use of words such as 'and' to begin a sentence.  We were taught that 'and' was a conjunction, a word that joined two phrases in a sentence.  For example:

"Today we went to the shops.  And we bought some curtains."  Why not simply write  "Today we went to the shops and we bought some curtains."

Am I getting old and grumpy or is it time the younger generation, and others, including journalists etc., began using our English language as it should be used?

Just had to have a wee grouch about it.....hope you don't mind me doing so.

P.S.  I love words and our English language which is probably why I have 50 games of Scrabble going on Facebook.

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