Where have English language skills gone?

Question

Why is it that I see such poor spelling, punctuation and sentence structure here on Y!A? While one obvious answer is the lack of decent education, it would seem likely that people who wish to use a written form of communication might eventually improve their skills, what I'm seeing instead is more like a complete lack of respect or care for any precision in communication.

I see comments such as "You KNOW what I meant." Unfortunately, this isn't always true. While one may GUESS, the only way to be certain one is understood is to write in an unambiguous fashion. This is facilitated by using good writing skills. Do people no longer care if they are understood?

Answer 1

First, based on the quality of grammar, syntax and spelling I see in this forum, I’m certain that English is not the first language of many of these users. With that said, I’m not sure that some of the users have a first language, or a second, for that matter.
Second, good writing is a by-product of good reading, if you pardon my own faux pas. People whose primary source of information is not the well written word will reflect that in their writing.
Finally, one must understand that our culture has evolved a communications style that is very visual and high-speed in nature. This style drives many users to take shortcuts that make spelling and clarity secondary to speed. This is a symptom of our high velocity life style which doesn’t leave time for leisurely reading and writing. This prime cause is actually more worrisome to me. We used to fret about the “rat race” in the last millennia, but that was nothing compared to where we are now.

Editor’s note: While the following sentence of yours passed my grammar checker, I would have inserted the conjunction BUT or a semi-colon for readability, but that’s just me.
“While one obvious answer is the lack of decent education, it would seem likely that people who wish to use a written form of communication might eventually improve their skills, BUT what I'm seeing instead is more like a complete lack of respect or care for any precision in communication.”

Answer 2

I agree. This is NOT myspace where you type like this, for example:
Going to bed now, leave me comments ->
q0iing 2 beEeD N0W, l3@u3 m3 c0mm3nT$.

And it is so much better to be reading an okay-decently written answer/question than one typed like the above example.

Answer 3

You know, I was thinking almost the exact same thing myself just the other day. I thought about posting it on Y!A myself, but now I don't feel the need to. Thank you. I completely agree.