The Generation of Why You No Rite and Reed Good?

I have been stewing over this concept for months in particular, but I’m sure it has been years for people who have been alive longer than I have. The truth is that Generation Y, children born around the early 1980’s to the early 2000’s, are disappointing. Considering  this is my generation, I feel that I have a unique understand of this sensitive issue, in addition to being  an exception to this conundrum, with a love for writing and learning to improve it.

The issue: why young men and women from Generation Y as a whole have lost the passion and drive to read and write. As a disclaimer, there are obvious exceptions to this generalization, but it is difficult to deny the pattern that started from the generation of Millenials. For the dozens of people I have discussed this issue with, only one question rings true from every conversation.

How did it get this bad?

Now the American education system is less than perfect, and we could use a couple trillion dollars to improve the quality of each child’s education. Yet, in the age of the internet, it isn’t difficult for the majority of children to gain access to the necessary information needed to learn the basics of their own language.

At the same time, I see mistakes like the following example or the cartoon to the left plastered over social networking sites without any indication of the internet being at fault for the gross misuse of the English language.

Example 1: well i think it time 2 meet new ppl and maybe get some new friends 2 im going to still be friends with my old friends but sometime its a good thing get 2 know ppl

 

It is 2012 and almost everyone who has access to the internet and able to post on Facebook and Twitter should have passed third grade. So why are the majority of the people who have graduated high school, currently in college, or already having children unable to form complete sentences? Even for non-English majors/writers/readers, this is a horrible example of English, and it bothers me to know that people out there don’t care enough to think before they press post.

I don’t think it’s too much to ask for the people who were raised in an English speaking/English writing house to remember what they were taught back in Elementary school because they should be using it every day. There is no excuse, other than learning disabilities such as dyslexia, etc., for people who were born in a predominantly English speaking country not to know how to write their native language. Call me a idealist, but it seems appropriate to expect people to use the language they’ve been speaking for 18+ years properly. At some points it becomes a need to show people what they’re doing incorrect because it sickens me to see how easy their mistakes are to fix in the first place.

From the misuse of their, there, and they’re (which urks me the most) to the lack of punctuation or capitalization in sentences, I am losing hope for the future of my generation. Lisa Mazzie from the Marquette University Law School seems to agree with my discomfort as I’m sure it is shared with thousands of other conscientious people writing in English. She expresses the importance of grammar in her article, So You Think Grammar Don’t Matter. If you need some validation in each time you smack your head from seeing a friend’s terribly written post, then please check out the article.

For those haters who think Grammar Nazi is offensive, the believers know the truth. Grammar, spelling, and common sense are not to be taken lightly because we use writing every day, in every profession. Why if we use it all of the time would people only put half of the effort into forming clear sentences to get their point across. The Grammar Police provide the answer. Although there aren’t laws for grammar rule breakers or horrible writing, there is an obligation to your education when there are hundreds of children who will never have the chance to learn how to communicate through writing or have the pleasure of reading anything let alone this blog.

Please children of the 80’s, 90s, 2000’s come forth and enter into an era of renewed hope for the English language. Let me introduce you to the world of homophones, subject-verb agreement, and the wonderful book called the dictionary. The water is fine, jump on in!

Happy reading/writing! Feel free to share your pet peeves about bad writing in the world today.

 

Are Blogs Full of Bad Writing? I Sure as Hell Hope Not!

Perusing the internet, I come across an opinion article from the Los Angeles Times that has a title worth reading. Michael Kinsley, the author, titles his article “Are blogs killing good writing?”

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-kinsley-column-felix-salmon-20120210,0,1549723.story

Immediately, I became interested in a title like that especially with my new love for blogging and expressing myself in the digital world. I was also offended. Yes, a good writer takes time to create, but I don’t believe everyone (including myself) could be contributing to some of the terrible writing on the internet. I know it’s out there. We see it every day on Facebook and Twitter. The lack of spelling skills and distinction of the correct words in sentences is apparent in a majority of our friends. We thought they were intelligent until we saw what they posted for their status.

However, I tend to give a benefit of the doubt for anyone willing to take the time and dedication to write a blog at least once a day. It takes either a good writer or one who relies on the spell check to consistently put out content. Now, whether the content is good quality or not depends on the education of the blogger. I know that some people think they are entitled to write because they have been moderately educated, but sometimes they still don’t know how to do it. I get that those people contribute to the bad writing on the internet. But it can’t be that many people, right? To Kinsley, it’s too many. He details the opinion of a famous financial blogger about the quality of blogging and online writing. Not only has it degraded in quality, but the amount has increased exponentially.

So, if you increase the product and reduce the quality, what do you get? A million versions of the same crappy product. Do the consumers (online readers) seem to care or notice? Hell, no and we all know why. Because nobody cares about it anymore. No one is willing to take the time or pay someone to take the time and check for grammatical/any other kind of accuracy. I know that I am nowhere near the perfect writer. I’m not even a good one yet. At least, I admit that I have a lot to learn, and that I am willing to take criticism to learn more. The majority of these people pushing out these crappy quality blogs don’t realize they aren’t writing well AND they don’t care to learn to become better writers. Instead, every consumer (reader) settles for this mediocrity because as long as there is stuff on the internet dumb enough for us to understand, we don’t care if it’s right.

By the end of the article, the author describes the reality that all of the qualities of good writing could be overrated. Now, if we are speaking to the new generation and those bad writers on the internet, I agree. To them, it’s overrated because they don’t understand or respect it. Nevertheless, I disagree greatly that the qualities of good writing should just be thrown out because some people think they are exempt from it. Look, these rules of writing were not created to be forgotten just because the medium changes. Instead, the rules should be enforced. Without rules, society has no order. While I believe that some rules can be bent and altered in certain situations, what makes writing good is that people can make a good quality story without cutting corners. It is the people that cut corners that make me sick. The authors that don’t actually follow the rules, but end up selling millions on a book that isn’t very good.

I feel like the quality of online writing is simply the tip of the iceberg. It is not only that some people think they don’t have to write well and will be received by readers. It’s that publishers, writers, and readers will make a book popular not because they value the story for what it is, but for its market value. We use the term “selling out” when a writer gives in the requests of the publisher or popular theme because it will make money. Writers write the story that only they can tell a certain way. Not everyone should write a romance just because it’s popular. If that were the case, they wouldn’t all be good. I wish that people could understand that the books on the best-seller’s list are not all good writing. Just because they make money, doesn’t mean it was actually difficult to write. Now, you would like to think that the writers actually worked to create a good story, but most of them are written to make money. And in this age, you don’t have to be complicated to entertain. The quality is down because it doesn’t take good quality to entertain a reader for a few hours. This is such a sad reality because there are so many underrated writers not on the best-seller’s list or not even published because they won’t “sell out” to the most popular idea. It’s become a staple for people to read a best-seller and assume it is good writing because it’s made money.

For example, Twilight. Regardless of the people who enjoyed the STORY, which was entertaining I will admit. I read the books to entertain myself and they did the job. That’s it, though. They didn’t make me think, care, or even work hard to read the book. And yet it has made millions. It doesn’t have half of the things that make a good quality book. It may have a catchy, entertaining story, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a good book. The author knew her audience and gave them an entertaining story that took her the least amount of effort and time to write. I bet she spent more time marketing her book (websites, blog that she was good at) than she did actually writing a good quality book. People loved the book. They ate it up like candy. It didn’t matter how it was written anymore. What mattered was if it entertained people enough to buy the whole series and pass it along to their friends. Is this what writing has come to? Wasting the space on the internet just to get a name rather than a quality product out? Filling up our shelves or best-seller’s list with books that entertain, but don’t change lives.

Now, I know that I may be scrutinized for my previous sentences about Twilight, but it’s true. From those who have spent years reading hundreds of books and learned how to write well, it is difficult to see something mediocre make millions. We watch the quality diminish and we’re supposed to stay silent because people like it? Bull! I’m not going to sit back and wait for the Stephenie Meyer’s and Michael Kinsley’s accept mediocre writing as our future.

I will continue to become a better writer and give a good quality product. No matter how much time I take to write my blog, I know that I’m not diminishing my worth as a writer. I will fight to show people that learning how to write is the most important part of life because it is! Writing, reading, and speaking are the most vital skills we can acquire. They lay the foundation for the rest of our lives. If we allow the quality of these skills to degrade because we’re too lazy to stand up for ourselves, then we deserve to be called bad writers. We can’t just be bystanders as writing is bullied into submission. Stand up and be proud to know how to write!