More Casualties of Wokeness: Grammar and Spelling… Ain’t That Grate? by PF Whalen

For those of us who pay attention to such things, over the past several years we’ve seen a noticeable decline in the proper use of the English language in our culture. What once would have been considered embarrassing grammatical errors within online news articles are now commonplace; so much so, we can only conclude that publishers either don’t care about quality or were stoned during most of their high school English classes.

The phenomenon, unfortunately, isn’t limited to online news. Online retailers seem incapable of, or indifferent to, punctuation. Basic sentence structure and syntax appear to elude television producers responsible for chyrons and text boxes. And if we spend only a few minutes perusing social media posts, it becomes clear that a significant portion of our population doesn’t understand the difference between their, there, and they’re. Anyone who was educated in a Catholic school can hear a nun in the back of their head tut-tutting and lamenting the decay of our educational standards. But if you think the state of affairs with the English language in America is bad now, just wait… there about to get allot worser.

In an effort to satisfy the ever-increasing demands of The Woke, many of our institutes of higher learning have decided to either minimize or disregard the importance of grammar and spelling. The University of Nebraska proudly declares that they “advocate for writers from historically marginalized or oppressed groups and for writing that counters traditional accounts of ‘standard’ academic English by extending conceptions of audience, purpose, and meaning.” A well-written and articulate statement that translates as, “we will no longer require well-written and articulate writings from students if we like the color of their skin.”