I always associate the inability to communicate clearly with the inability to think clearly.

When receiving a business document or proposal containing grammatical errors, I am frequently inclined to disregard the document and the person from whom it came. Grammatical errors reflect a lack of education and an inability to communicate effectively.

Yesterday I received a proposal from a leading Australian travel agency offering alternatives for an upcoming trip to the US and Europe. While I had several locations to visit and only one key date that could not be moved, the proposal was written in such a convoluted manner and was so difficult to fathom, that it was impossible to determine the various fares and the itinerary. I have completely lost confidence in this travel agent's ability to get me to my destinations with surety.

When will we realise that the most important thing which separates us from animals is COMMUNICATION? Lose our superior ability to communicate and we may well eventually become little better than .....well, animals!

We are animals.

Excellent points all round.

Writing well is a skill that takes years to refine and develop. So like any skill, there is an opportunity cost involved in developing it. Some people do not find writing well to be sufficiently rewarding to make it worth the years of effort required to become masterful writers.

Plumbing well is a skill that takes years to refine and develop. So like any skill, there is an opportunity cost involved in developing it. Some people do not find plumbing well to be sufficiently rewarding to them to make it worth the years of effort required to become master plumbers.

You get my point?

How many days, weeks, months, years have you spent sitting at your desk, honing the craft of putting words together? Why didn't you spend it learning how to kick goals, knit, hanglide or build a house?

By its very nature, OLO attracts (mostly) those whose writing skills are at the upper end of the normal distribution. By its very nature, OLO excludes those who have not developed their skills to the same degree.

So it's a bit rich for skilled writers to use a textual forum to dump on those less skilled in writing, as though writing is the most important skill to possess. Just like it's a bit rich for prize footballers to be dumping on those (such as myself) who have two left feet.

People choose to develop those skills which they find most rewarding. Perhaps there is no more mystery to it than that.

A contemporary of Liz, I had the benefit of lots of grammar in my education. This was enhanced by further study of Latin and other languages, and then a long stint as a teacher of English as a foreign language.

As an undergraduate in the mid-seventies, I remember hearing lecturers complaining that students were leaving school devoid of writing skills, and calling for remedial writing courses. They’re still doing it today, and I’m not convinced that writing skills have suffered because the English curriculum changed.

However I believe that there has been a shift in the types of skills people bring to their writing today, and I suspect that people who bemoan a lack of formal accuracy are unable to see what has replaced it.

In my view, younger writers concentrate more on the communication, rather than accuracy in their writing. They’ve been taught the importance of a coherent beginning, middle and an end, rather than piling together a set of finite sentences. They’ve also been taught that the context of a piece of writing is just as important as its structure, so we see young writers skilfully moving between email, text messages, online chat and formal writing.

In short, they’ve been equipped to provide quick effective communication in a range of contexts, but sometimes it’s not very elegant.

My answer to those who complain about the inelegance is, get over it. Read a few kids’ blogs – there are many great examples of vibrant and communicative use of English, and the rough edges only add to the charm. In addition, many are powerful examples of kids using writing as a platform for reflection.

There will always be some who use the language gracefully, and we will continue to value them. However for most of us language is a tool, not a decoration, and in my experience young people are being taught to use that tool appropriately.

trade: Speak for yourself! I am not an animal, I am a human being!

Bruce: I agree with you, though I could be pedantic and say that I might be able to think clearly, yet not be able to communicate it to someone in a foreign language. It could possibly even be the same with speakers of the same language, though I think you're probably right and I always get very suspicious of any company that can't get its point across very clearly to me, or even when I see or hear some meathead sportsman who can barely string three words together or who chews his words. Dipper and Gary Lyon spring instantly to mind. Maybe they just speak strangely. Actually, now that I think about it, I kind of make the same associations with people with particular accents (especially a lot of regional or Cockney accents in Britain, or with southern U.S. accents). I figure there's a problem if a native speaker can't or won't pronounce half the letters of the alphabet correctly (eg. throttle as fro-oow.)

Mercurius: I think you're probably right about writing to a fair degree (especially if people don't have need to write very much, though it could become a problem if someone had to deal with legal or financial documents), but I'm not so sure about the spoken word (not that you mentioned that) since it underpins so many other things.

Shorbe, I feel that the ugliness of modern architecture is as nothing compared to the ugliness of modern architectural writing. Take ths random example from Architecture Australia, 2005:

"throughout this process, the architects’ virtuosity is expressed not as wilful insistence (aka “conviction” and regretful compromise), but as a persistent manipulation that oscillates between yielding and affirmation."

Of course it is not just architecture writing that pursues this style of indigestible sub-Foucaultian (Foucauldian?) waffle; most contemporary art criticism is similarly vacuous cant dressed up with meaningful references to discourse, text, paradigm etc etc. Of course, given the propensity of such publications to publish tiny grey text on black backgrounds means that (fortunately) you can't read it anyway.

For more of this go to the Postmodernism Generator http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo . Every time you visit this site it generates a new meaningless postmodern essay, My wife and I laughed ourselves silly every time we reloaded the page.

I remeber complaining to a magazine designer years ago about the atrocious quality of the writing. "THE TEXT!!" he exclaimed, "nobody reads THE TEXT, it is just there to fill up the space between the pictures"....