Almost one third of students are failing a requirement at an Ontario university that they pass an exam on English language skills. The failure rate has jumped five percentage points in the past few years.
The major reason students fail is poor grammar, reports CBC News.
Part of the blame should go to cellphone texting and social networking sites, says Joel Postman, the author of SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate, who has taught Fortune 500 companies how to use social networking.
Bad grammar may be acceptable in an email to friends and family, but it can have a deadly effect on one’s career if used at work.
“It would say to me . . . ‘Well, this person doesn’t think very clearly, and they’re not very good at analyzing complex subjects, and they’re not very good at expressing themselves, or at worse, they can’t spell, they can’t punctuate,’ ” he says.
The good news is that Merit Software has just launched a new, online edition of Grammar Fitness to help students and instructors cope with this problem.