Apart from that, the general level of literacy was execrable (engineers and scientists have to write a good deal more than is popularly imagined). I’m not talking about simple betises such as confusing ‘effect’ and ‘affect’. No, I had to grade work from young adults who seemed incapable of grasping subject-verb agreement. The comma was a mysterious thing, to be scattered, about the page at, will; the semicolon a near-divine object whose workings were not vouchsafed to the unititiate. Proper construction of multi-clause sentences was almost unkown, with sentence fragments abounding. Which was a nuisance.

Political correctness being what it is, I couldn’t simply scrawl, “this is the biggest load of utter bollocks I’ve ever read in my life,” and fail them ignominiously. It wore you down, I tell you. A period instructing the little buggers (I called them my ‘special needs class’) was almost equally enervating, and usually led to heavy drinking punctuated with bitter imprecations upon the state of British education.

Even 25 years ago, it had become a standing joke that the best (meaning clearest, most succinct, and most grammatically accurate) writing was to be found in memos written by the station’s chief engineer, a graduate of a big-city technical high school who had dropped out of Purdue after two years (“because they wouldn’t teach me anything I wanted to know”).

The writing by the students (who were, generally, bright and committed) was frequently appalling, and some of the stuff by the faculty wasn’t a great deal better. The cry, “and this is supposed to be a Communications Department?” was frequent and dispiriting.

One of the biggest problems, it seems, is the inability to be concise and succinct (of course almost anyone can benefit from a talented wielder of the blue pencil). I once wrote my Congressman’s office requesting tickets for the White House tour. The reply was a page and a half long and amounted to “we’ll try”.

However, I find the writing in much of the MSM to be barely any better and they have editors. What’s their excuse? What passes for writing in a lot of newspaper articles is execrable. Not only are syntax and copy-editing apparently a thing of the past, but titles and headlines frequently bear no relation to the content, and the content is disorganized, spotty, and frequently brings up people’s names with no explanation of who they are.

The crawl (scrawl?) at the bottom of Fox’s screen very often has the most obvious misspellings.

This is all a torment to anyone who takes pleasure in reading good writing, but it seems ubiquitous now.

Don’t blame me I am a poduct of the American educational system.

Kids can’t read and write when they hit the job market and schools are worried about whether or not a Christian teacher might actually be allowing children read the Declaration of Independence.

They should be worried about whether or not they can read period.

Maybe the Times would like to write an article on how the Teacher’s unions are more worried about their pension funds than the illiterate.