English in Retrograde

I've noticed a very disturbing trend lately in our ability to write in the English language. Spelling, grammar and punctuation is woefully poor, and I'm not critical of just the younger generation here. Some miscreants are college graduates and journalists, people who should be more skilled in language arts than the rest of us.

I read news articles and columns on a daily basis.  Some of these contain so many errors in word usage and spelling that I find myself reading a sentence two or three times to try to parse it.  The comma seems to have gotten itself on the list of endangered punctuation marks, while the use of multiple periods, exclamation points and question marks has those three symbols in a Malthusian-like overpopulation explosion.

We all know that English isn't taught today like it was 100 years ago, and we also know that modern technology, with 'texting' as the new way to communicate, doesn't emphasize the rules of grammatical expression.  However, if we allow ourselves to disregard those rules in more formal communication, we will soon lose a huge base of knowledge needed for higher learning.

Am I being too critical?  Well, maybe I am, but when I see a misused, or a misspelled word in a sentence, or when I read a sentence that doesn't have clauses and phrases properly punctuated, it breaks my train of thought on the subject-at-hand.  And I am obviously not the only one who has this problem.

As an example, let me revert to that question I asked in the last paragraph.  Suppose I asked, "Am I being to critical?"  Does that give your mind a small pause?  The use of to instead of too is one of the most common errors I see, along with the misuse of there, their and they're.  Other winners are then and than, and where and were.  But, it doesn't matter which words are misspelled or misused, they all act to confuse and obscure the author's meaning.

I love to post comments at the bottom of a column, and it is a good way to open debate on the subject matter, especially when you don't agree with the columnist.  Much of the time I find myself chiding the writer for the errors cited above, but it seems to have little effect on future columns.  The deterioration continues unabated.

Here is  one more example that occurred recently in a column about bumper crops we harvested last year.  The article had a sentence that read, "It turns out that weather conditions in 2013 across all of North America were nearly ideal for growing just about every crop grown in the U.S., with the result that U.S. farmers were harvesting bumper crops of just about everything they grow in August and September 2013."

In reality, the farmers didn't grow the crops in August and September, they harvested them in those months.  To be concise, the end of the sentence should have read, "...with the result that U.S. farmers were harvesting, in August and September, bumper crops of just about everything they grew in 2013."  There are, of course, other errors in the run-on sentence, such as the use of three different tenses of the word grow, and the dearth of the comma; it is only used once in the entire sentence.

Well, maybe I am a nitpicker after all.  But, darn it all, I hate to see the English language mangled that way. 

Here's a recipe that I saw in an email this week.  I think they needed a proof reader for it:

 Yogurt Swirl

INSTRUCTIONS 1/4 cup uncooked rolled oats 3/4 cup lowfat plain yogurt 1/4 cup frozen berries 3/4 banana, sliced 1/4 6 oz. Kroger Frozen Fish Fillets 1 Tbsp. raisins or dried cranberries 1/4 cup whole grain cereal 1 Tbsp. walnut pieces Cinnamon, to taste (optional)
Mix the oats into the yogurt. Put the berries, bananas and dried  fruit on top. Add cereal and sprinkle with nuts and cinnamon.  Stir together and enjoy. If you like a thinner consistency, pour a  bit of skim milk over the cereal. Refrigerate any leftovers.  Serves 1.