Grammarama

By Howard Good

If bad writing were a crime, most Americans would be under felony indictment. Students graduate from high school today unable to distinguish the difference between its and it's , or their and there , or than and then . They confuse the functions of a comma with those of a period, and they haven't the least idea what a semicolon is for (no, it's not part of the human intestine). Their prose, if one can designate their often childish scribbling as such, is marred by misspellings, misusages, and outright barbarisms.

Is this a tragedy? Maybe not. Mr. Dooley, the immigrant Irish bartender created by Finley Peter Dunne to satirize America in the Gilded Age, once said, "When we Americans are through with th' English language, it will look as if it'd been run over by a musical comedy." It could be we just haven't gotten to the songs and funny scenes yet.

At the state university where I teach, other professors also complain about the inability of their students--the vast majority of them products of the public education system--to write well. My colleagues sigh that clear writing has become increasingly rare, a lost art, like scrimshaw or persiflage. We all wonder what will happen next and worry that whatever it is, it will represent a new kind of Dark Ages, when everyone will be living in a consumer cornucopia, but no one will be...