Monday, February 1, 2010

Freaking kids!

So, I know that I promised to write a post about the topics in the previous post, and I assure you I will get around to it at some point in the not too distant future. I do owe all six of my avid readers some closure after all.

But before we get into that, some people have criticized me for being a "grammar nazi" and ask me why I care so much. Well, I care so much because it matters. As a society I think we are devolving. If we needed any more evidence that without some manner of outside intervention things go from order to disorder, and not the other way around, look no further than the barren landscape of competent writing skills that is our incoming college freshmen.

Thirty percent of incoming Freshmen at the University of Waterloo in Ontario fail to pass a basic English competency test. For any of you who failed to pass a basic math competency test, that is nearly one in every 3 incoming college students. It used to be that when you'd take an advanced class, the professor would say: "Look to your right and left, one of you will fail". Now they just tell kids at Freshmen orientation: "Look to your right and left, one of you doesn't possess the English skills of a 6th grader". And these are the ones who decided that education was important enough to continue on past what the government required of them! These are the leaders of tomorrow. The people in whom my future will be dependent upon.

So rather than just complain and do nothing I offer the following guidelines:
  • Nothing you learned at the "Derek Zoolander Center For Children Who Can't Read Good And Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too" is likely to be applicable in the real world. I'm just saying.
  • There are no conjunctions that I am aware of that end in "z". This includes "cuz" and "becuz". I assure you, those are not real words.
  • Numbers are not words. Numbers combined with letters are not words. "B4" and "U2" are a plane and a band respectively; not actual words.
  • Punctuation is meant to be used as such. It is not clip-art. If you turn in a paper using it as clip-art, you will likely be ridiculed.
  • Lack of Subject/Verb agreement will make you sound like a buffoon every time. "The instructions is confusion" is not an excuse.
  • Watch your participles. Generally, if something happened in the past, you want to -ed it. "I watch TV all night last night", while hilarious, is just wrong on so many levels.
  • Pronoun errors. "Everyone needs to bring their own brain to the conversation" is wrong. If everyone brought his or her own brain to the conversation, they would likely understand why.
So please, heed my advice. Do your part to stop the decline of humanity into the depths of stupidity. The last thing we need is to prove Mike Judge's vision of the future correct. Plus, my mom says I'm awesome and the most popular and handsome kid in school. You don't want to be the object of my ire; it's just social suicide.

6 comments:

Tiffany said...

did you watch idiocracy again this weekend? :)

I didn't watch the mike judge video you posted, but I am guessing it is along the same lines?

It is quite scary how people don't care about much anymore - buildings are ugly (look at old buildings - they took decades to build) now we throw things up as quickly as possible. So sad!

Fletcher Life said...

I <3 this post soooooo much!!!!!1

Why R Canadians teh leaders of our future though?

-Cody

Bakka said...

tru dat ;)

Mikkele Suzanne said...

exceptions to the grammar rule are people who don't speak english as their first language and are incredibly entertaining in their misuse of it. even so, when i quit laughing i try to help them say it correctly next time.

on a side note, in the first two weeks I was in amsterdam, I had FOUR SEPARATE PEOPLE tell me that i had a huge vocabulary and one guy even referred to me as "brain box." I'm like, since when does being able to use the phrase "bane of my existence" count as having a huge vocabulary? these are important words, people! how on earth do you express yourself adequately without them?

Bakka said...

to mikkele: i didnt really like the george clooney batman movie, but it sounds like you picked up something from it......

Mikkele Suzanne said...

i dont get it