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| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
- First of all, speaking and writing are completely different phenomena. A child naturally learns to speak as long as there's some stimulus (i.e. you won't speak if there's no one talking around you). Our brain is prepared to recognise "vocal symbols" as a form of communication. All healthy humans living in society speak.
That's not what happens with writing. Not all languages are written, and no one spontaneously begins to write. That's why you can be illiterate even if your language can be written (actually, all languages can be written in some way, but that's not the point).
- Not all of us have access to good education. If you never had the chance to learn how punctuation marks are used, you probably won't acquire this ability by osmosis. You can learn how to say a question by imitating the way others ask questions to you, but how are you supposed to do that in writing, specially in a language (such as English) where the syntax can make it perfectly clear that a sentence is a question by just changing the word order?
And that's why foreigners tend to write in English better than the natives themselves: most foreigners that do speak English often had the chance to go to good schools, otherwise they wouldn't have learnt a foreign language. Also, foreign languages don't mean bugger all to us at first, and we often need to resort to written language in order to learn the spoken variety. I certainly read in English a lot more than I do in Portuguese, and TA has helped me a lot. Finally, we're used to speaking a different language in which homophones might not sound alike: that's why I hardly ever mix up words like "accept" and "except" - they're completely different in Portuguese. That's why "the Dutch and ze German" are less prone to make spelling mistakes. And, on top of that, their mistakes are often different from the kind of mistakes native speakers do, so they're often less stigmatised.
- Writing in English is a bit more difficult than it should be. Thanks to the Great Vowel Shift, spelling words in English has become a bit of a challenge ("break" and "brake" rhyme, whereas "though" and "through" don't), and the spelling reforms in the Renaissance didn't help at all (they're the ones to blame for many silent letters, such as the "s" in "island" and the "b" in "debt"). And, unfortunately, English is now spread across all continents and comes in many different flavours. Most Americans could easily spell "caught" and "cot" the same way, for example, but Australians would probably find that confusing.
Therefore, don't take your good writing skills for granted.
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All valid points which I agree with.
However, I'm not talking about kids living in slums with no education.
I'm talking about well-educated people with privileged upbringings good jobs, who still speak and write like absolute fuck wits.
Plus, I definitely agree with your "osmosis" idea of speaking vs writing, however people in English speaking countries ARE exposed to written English, all day.
On advertisements, on menu's [sic], on television. Everywhere.
There is no excuse for making basic spelling/grammar mistakes consistently, unless you are prepared to admit that you are, in fact, retarded.
By the way, this isn't limited to writing. You hear people say incorrect things all the time, such as "vica versa", "I been there", "I done that", "I was more colder than I've ever been", "I felt asleep", "I rung the police", etc etc.
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