Is Technology Harming There*Their*They're Grammar?

      In this country, we are surrounded by native English speakers. From a young age, we were taught to read, write and speak English so fluency in the language was inevitable. But just how much about  the language do we truly know? While all languages have grammar that can be easily taught, English is known to be one of the more difficult ones with all of its sets of rules and sets of exceptions which contradict the very same rules! Certainly our Language Arts and English teachers covered the topic and assessed our knowledge of the contradictory rules to the English grammar but from my experience and from the experience of my family and friends, we memorized our way through the assessments and spell-checked our way through the papers. So let me ask again, just how much about the language do we truly know? I believe that while technology has surely gotten us ahead, that it has also pushed us back. If we did not have constant access to tools such as auto correct, then maybe we would spend more time learning the right grammar instead of relying on technology to do it for us.

Being that I am what you might call a ‘grammar police’ and from the way I cringe when people write ‘then’ instead of ‘than’, I know just how important grammar is to our language. I went to a blue ribbon high school yet it took me until my freshman year of college to understand the difference between ‘effect’ and ‘affect’ and when I edit my friends’ papers I can not comprehend some of the mistakes they make in their grammar. Just because English grammar may be difficult to teach does not mean it can not be learned. Therefore teachers should not simply feed their students with information for them to memorize, they should make sure their students actually understand. We go to school to prepare ourselves for the real world and the real world is telling us to go back to our Language Arts class. Our iPhones on the other hand are saying, "dont wry ur good"

 

In such a competitive society where how we communicate our thoughts is constantly being judged and is, in more ways than we know, a representation of how we carry ourselves, it is important that we do not mix up our “there, their, and they’re”’s and our “then and than”’s. Clearly, changes need to be made to the curriculum and in doing so I believe that grammar should be added as its own course. Even though we are surrounded by English speakers and have been hearing the language from an early age, what we hear and pick up in our surroundings is not always correct especially since much of what we hear is coming from people who memorized their way through their assessments and spell-checked their way through their papers. I do not think that schools are giving grammar as much thought as it needs in the classrooms and I think that in order for students to be grammatically prepared for the real world, they will need to read, write and speak grammar until they are fluent in it so that they won't rely as much on autocorrect.