Employers can help win the war on bad grammar

Michael Skapinker:

While the British summer sun was shining more brightly than it had in years, a stormy email arrived about English grammar.

"The whole downward process could well be becoming virtually irreversible," my correspondent said. "My experience is very much that the teachers, anyway in England (and I expect it is even worse in the US), now are incapable of teaching grammar and the proper writing of English, having themselves never been taught it."

Commenting on a column I wrote asking why parents were not more worried about their children's poor writing, he said: "I am not really surprised . . . So many of them - probably virtually all of them - will not have been taught grammar and writing, possibly at all but anyway properly, when they were at school, and therefore will have little or no idea of the importance and benefits of it."

My emailer was NM Gwynne, author of a popular book called Gwynne's Grammar. A former businessman, Mr Gwynne is now a teacher of everything from Latin to starting your own business, but is particularly in demand to teach English grammar to pupils aged "from two years old to over 70".

Posted by Jim Zellmer at September 24, 2013 3:24 AM
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