A bit of a complaint. Or maybe I'm just whining... I know cursive writing is no longer taught. Have they discontinued teaching about punctuation, also? Some of the current posts are difficult to read (translate?) because of the lack of punctuation. Is it just me???
That’s a good question. If it’s’ taught, it would be in primary school ( a grade level I never taught.) Consequently, I really don’t know. My experience with high school students was that, when taking a test or doing their homework, they could generally punctuate. But the same people who will punctuate in a document tend to write very hurriedly for things like texts & internet posts.
I know my posting punctuation has suffered b/c I often use voice-to-text on my phone and don't always remember to dictate punctuation as well.
My mom and I always laughed at each other when we read or spoke the word "cursive". A real flashback to when I(and I suppose her too)learned writing skills.
In order to help reverse this reckless decline into illiteracy, characterized by sentence fragments, substandard puntuation, and improper capitalization, I will avail myself in humble service to the forum. As such, I will offer free sentence diagramming and copy editing services in my office on Mondays from 2 to 4 pm. If Dutch language services are required, I refer you to my esteemed colleague, @richgem.
Back in my day, I was remediated for poor handwriting/cursive. Nowadays they don't even teach it unless you go to a private or Catholic school.
Mind you, my gripe is with adults who should know better. Unless grammar and punctuation lessons stopped happening 20 years ago.
Grammar and punctuation are one thing...they both seem to be relics of the distant past, woe betide we admonish the little darlings and correct their frail little egoes Interestingly spelling is less important according to some folk, which is why is so hard to proofread Olny srmat poelpe can raed tihs. cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! (You can do an online search for letterreplacer.zip and have bit of fun with that) https://qwiklit.com/2014/03/05/top-10-authors-who-ignored-the-basic-rules-of-punctuation/
Ye olde proofreader's trick is to start at the bottom of the page and read right to left and bottom to top.
Yup, read it out loud too, or better still get someone else to do it! My dad worked as a printer in the days soon after manual typesetting . I remember watching poor old Mr January the proofreader (most important man in the shop if you ask me) with his coloured wax crayons having to mark up the trial book runs: spelling, page numbering, m and n spacing, line and paragraph spacing, fonts, caps etc etc to be corrected and another trial run done until he was happy. It must have been real fun for him (not!) proofreading the maths textbooks they printed for the schools with all the geometry, trigonometry, calculus, quizzes and answers at the back! We seldom had the Errata sheets in the school text books though. When he then went to the Director's office and said "All good, Boss" then all the inks and reams and reams of paper were ordered in, the printing presses were run 24 hours non stop to get the books out on time. Too costly to have to re-do the print run! Those were the days...
