For someone trying to be pedantic about the use of English, the writer has a number of misplaced commas in his article!

Guess it's not the school curriculum that's entirely at fault.

Better look up the word pedant Petal. You're a classic example. Comma's? I rest my case.

Thank you Malcolm. Seeing the daily abuse of the humble apostrophe on signage along any Australian High Street almost makes me weep.

But the web has some answers - if only people would surf the right breaks. Try http://www.bartleby.com/116/ for instance.

While people may try to trivialise your points you only have to see a film like "Idiocracy" to glimpse where we might find ourselves a few generations from here if we don't draw the line somewhere.

The author is muddle-headed, especially in his historical analysis of the alleged literacy problem.

Initially he claims that, 'The three-way “prang” of half-baked leftist ideology, the mumbo-jumbo of post modernist thinking and the introduction of new media in school curriculums, has been an unmitigated disaster for the teaching of English in Australia.' With the exception, possibly, of the first of the three (and that depends on what he means by "half-baked leftist ideology") the two other vehicles in the three-way "prang" came long after his alleged collapse of the learning of English in Australia.

On his own reckoning, 'The disappearance of grammar from the classroom in the 1970s and 1980s meant that both students and their teachers cannot tell a gerund from a split infinitive, an adverb from an adjective.' They and apostrophes and capitalisation have been 'sucked from the classroom like a road map out of the window of a speeding car'.

Even making allowances for his contorted metaphor, his grasp of chronology betrays yet another well-meaning, but ill-informed, critic of a system barely understood. 'As a former university selection officer and lecturer in professional writing,' he tells us, 'I was astounded by the poor spelling and grammar of 17 and 18-year-olds - and of their parents'. Their parents too?

So which is it: the three-way “prang” - half-baked leftist ideology, post modernist thinking and new media in school curriculums (phenomena of the 90s) or the so-called disappearance of grammar from the classroom in the 1970s and 1980s?

And pray tell: when was 'the golden age' when everyone could tell a gerund from a split infinitive, an adverb from an adjective and the rules for the use of apostrophes and capitalisation.

If 'only a fool believes that “multiple interpretations“ allows multiple errors of grammar, syntax and spelling', then only a fool believes that multiple interpretations are the cause of multiple errors in grammar, syntax and spelling. Or that Malcolm King's own imperfect English expression is a result of his multiple interpretations of the history of Australian education.

Malcolm, more research next time - and do watch your punctuation. C-

What an excellent article. Thank you.

It appalls me how little people read. It appalls me that teachers put so much emphasis on what the author correctly calls "relativist twaddle" - as if their analysis of Dickens is as good as David Lodge's. It appalls me that people somehow think the passive voice makes them sound clever.

This article has nothing to do with pedantry. We're losing sight of the deep glamour of grammar by focusing debate on boring arguments about whether text messaging is destroying the English language. Text messaging isn't destroying the English language - failing to read great books in it is. Our failure to teach children correct grammar is. Once you know grammar you can play all sorts of funny games with it, including with your phone. Grammar unlocks literature. I can't imagine reading Henry James without explicitly appreciating what he's doing to the subject-verb-object sentence structure.

Structuring one's sentences and spelling correctly is important, and fosters one's love of this gorgeous, elastic language of ours. But no one is perfect and mistakes happen. (I didn't notice the misplaced commas in this article - unless you're talking about the Oxford comma Petal - but I did notice the clanger of spelling McEwan as "McEwin." Hells bells!) What annoys me is when people simply and very clearly do not give a ha'penny jizz about style - who fail to even *try* to spell and structure correctly. Those types abound on this forum. Perhaps this would encourage them to download Firefox, within which they can spell-check their posts before unleashing them on the world.

A.S. Byatt's Babel Tower is an excellent novel exploring the language wars of the 1960s.

Hurrah for Malcolm!

So many targets, so few bullets, as the Leavises eventually came to realise. (My computer complains that I spell 'realise' with an 's.')

I also think your article would have a bit more authority if you had edited it a bit more tightly, given its subject matter -- but then how superficial a critique is that?

In a similar vein, note how many employer bodies (ACCI did this recently) call for graduates who can write properly, but stuff up the spelling and/or punctuation of their pleas.

If I have a point, it is that we know it matters when someone else stuffs it up.