A friend posted an article written by a college professor about the writing mistakes he most commonly sees. I’m not going to add to the mountain of entries on the dearth (and death) of good writing skills – heaven knows there are enough of those floating about the Internet – but one item in the article struck a chord: “…punctuation is a train wreck among my students. I have no doubt as to the root of the problem: Students haven’t spent much time reading.” He goes on to say that students engage in a lot of exchanges like conversation and texting, but these don’t teach punctuation.
Having taught English and having tried to lay out rules for punctuation, I know how hard it is to try and define these ethereal concepts. My Taiwanese students, most of whom didn’t read English books outside of their English class, had a very hard time with assigning proper positioning to anything outside of periods and trying to give them rules proved much harder than I thought it would. I can completely understand that it would be hard to get students to even catch up to where they’re supposed to be, never mind have them move beyond that. That’s a lot of reading to catch up on.
Really, I think most of the problems could be fixed by having these students (or future students) read more. When you see enough examples of how it should be, you start doing it yourself. Trust me. In these days of libraries closing due to budget cuts, it’s getting harder and harder to encourage. I speak from experience here – when we were living abroad in places with no public libraries (luckily, we had access to book swaps and private libraries), it was difficult – you have to love books to spend lots of money on them.
Unfortunately, that love of books that I will nurture often starts at a young age, and TV is slowly eating away at that base. It’s a hard battle to fight these days, but I know people who have done it successfully. Like so much else, it just takes time and effort.
