More fun with English "students"

[andysocial]

Oh, geez, yet another moron has brought forth his comments on life and the universe. The first assignment for this lame-o English class was to introduce ourselves. Yes, this was an assignment for an entire week of class. Frightening, eh?
So, here are some excerpts from the latest person to finally get around to posting his first assignment, only two weeks late.

I may encounter works that I am truely interested in I may tole around for hours just for marginal success and if it is in my belief that this work is of perfection I'll have my satifaction.
I am a student, a security officer in a shopping mall and in a half-way house and I am an investigatiogator mainly woeking within the Criminal Justice Act.

Ouch! My head hurts just reading that crap. These idiots made it out of high school? I can only imagine the fun my teacher friends have on a daily basis...

Comments

[sosiouxme.livejournal.com]

pathetic. but it reflects the sort of thing i see on the web all the time, and i don't even read very widely. no slashdot anymore. how can people care so little about how they present themselves?

[andysocial]

What are you, the second comming of ee cummings? Where are those capital letters? :-)

I know the rules of good spelling and grammar are relaxed in online communications, since they are so "disposable" as well as being rather quick and dirty as a general rule. So, while I am not going to take people to task for a few typos here and there (or even a complete lack of upper-case characters), folks who consistently mispell words like "which" are absolutely mind-shattering to me.

But, in the context of an English class, whether it is online or not, one would expect a certain basic level of technical perfection. Whether your logic and rhetoric work is what should be graded in a college-level class, but I keep seeing such awful basic language mechanics that I'm ashamed to be considered these idiots' classmate.

Meanwhile, the other class I'm in, Economics 201, has had all of one person post the 3rd week's assignment (due no later than Monday): me. I know I'm awesome and all that, but come on!

Ah, well, off to write a measly 750 word essay (two weeks worth of assignment)....

[sosiouxme.livejournal.com]

i know you didn't just say "comming" and "mispell" =)

capital letters are hard on my fingers. i use my fingers for a lot. so i typically don't bother. sometimes i eschew punctuation too. i don't think it inhibits understanding, although it probably makes long paragraphs a little harder to read.

i don't bother to correct people who intentionally flout the rules, or make accidental typos. but i have no patience for people who type the wrong thing because their brains access the wrong spelling or grammar rules. it's not hard to tell the difference.

college students seem to have gotten increasingly lazy. for some reason, colleges admit them and graduate them. i don't quite understand this but it probably has to do with funding and accreditation. personally i'd rather have my degree mean something.

ee cummings

[andysocial]

Hey, I thought my intentional "mispellings" were funny. :-P

Anyone who can use the word eschew correctly is going to get no harassment from me regarding meaning conveyance issues.

Re: ee cummings

[sosiouxme.livejournal.com]

every time i look up that word it seems to mean something slightly different from what i though it meant =) grah! but it's just so much fun to type

[laruth.livejournal.com]

Yes, the degradation of education standards is to do with funding. Although students here in Australia get help and funding from our Government, we get many International students who pay twice what we pay for the same degree. Hence, the Universities love them.

BUT.....the English standards are disgusting! I'm marking assignments where I can barely understand what they are trying to convey to me! Some of them even use IRC/Internet language (i.e. R U pls etc). Unfortunately, I haven't got any examples here at present. ;)

It's sad that money may take precedence over quality.

[rillifane.livejournal.com]

I think that falling standards come from liberal political decisions that decree that everyone must be determined to be above average.

[frockazulu.livejournal.com]

Right on. "Let's expect better performance, by expecting less performance!" - yeah that's a brilliant idea.

[sosiouxme.livejournal.com]

are profs not allowed to fail these kids or what? if i were an english prof and i had my way i'd be happy to fail my entire class if none of them could use decent english.

i heard recently on the radio -- this is *not* a very official source, mind you -- that 91% of harvard graduates were "cum laude." i'm not sure what that says -- that their grades were majorly inflated or that most non-honors students failed out? would be useful to know the dropout rate too. anyway it doesn't sound good...

Criminull Justess Acks

[bloojanuary.livejournal.com]

O my god. R theese the people we want garding are malls?

Re: Criminull Justess Acks

[andysocial]

I think maybe he guards a "maul" or sumthin. heh

I wonder if he's armed...

Re: Criminull Justess Acks

[kaylee.livejournal.com]

Now that's a SCARY thought!!