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Am I imagining it or are spelling, punctuation, and grammar rapidly getting worse? For example, it's become very common to put question marks at the ends of statements to indicate uncertainty. No one seems to know how to spell led, no one, all right, or its (my phone autocorrects it to it's every time, which may be the reason). And the past participle seems to be going extinct. People are saying things that sound, to my ear, utterly retarded, like "should have went". The only one I haven't heard yet is was instead of been. But I'm sure that's coming soon.
Is this just normal language evolution or is it an actual degradation? I think it's actual degradation because I actually am finding it increasingly difficult to parse these grammatically off sentences. For example, the situations in which you can use singular 'they' have expanded to include specific known people and I usually have to take a second to figure out that the speaker isn't referring to multiple people.
Spelling has been stable for a long time, but now people are pushing up against the limits of what their autocorrect will allow them to get away with. If an incorrect spelling is the correct spelling for a different word, it's going to be used and frequently. Are people just spelling at the level of third graders and their phones are saving them from looking like complete imbeciles?
But it seems to be getting worse. Is it because the average intelligence online is falling as it gets easier to use the internet? I don't think so, because I see otherwise intelligent people make a lot of these mistakes. Maybe it's because it used to be that most of what we read had been written (had was wrote for my future audience) by professional writers instead of average people.
There also seems to be a general decades long decline in the quality of even professional writing of unknown cause. Compare a newspaper article or even worse a scientific journal article from today versus 70 years. The fact that even proofreading for missing words, spelling mistakes, or the terrible grammar of a Chinese scientist seems to be a thing of the past, suggests that the problem is partly one of demand. We just don't care that what we read is well written anymore. Why is that?
I notice what you're noticing, but apart from some extreme outliers, it never actually affects my ability to understand what the person writing is saying.
I think I have a different opinion on this depending on the day or the direction of the wind - one day I'm cringing to myself because a friend keeps using "than" when she means "then" in private text messages between the two of us that no one else will ever read, the next day I'm defending on principle that "ain't" as a replacement for both "isn't" and "am not" is perfectly reasonable, comprehensible, has long-since achieved its legitimacy, and that anyone who would judge someone negatively for using it is a nitpicking pedant.
At the edges of this, my instinct is to say that lots of the examples you brought up, on their own, seem minor to me and don't seem like signals of a linguistic descent into madness and incomprehensibility. I do the question mark thing sometimes, for example. There's a certain threshold for variation that I can tolerate just fine if the actual intent remains clear. But, like I said, I come from the viewpoint of someone who's almost always able to understand imperfect English writing without any fuss. Maybe a lot of these deviations would make the intent much less clear to someone who speaks English as a second language.
At the core of it though ... I'm with you. I wish people considered it more important to try to write well. I wish more people wanted to write well in text messages, facebook posts, youtube comments, magazine articles, newspaper columns, job cover letters, classified ads, yelp reviews, and birthday cards. I wish more young people, middle-aged people and older people wanted to write well, and I wish they wanted to do it without other people telling them they should want to. I think my standards for "writing well" are probably much lower than yours. I don't even write particularly well, from an objective standpoint. But I do have standards, and they do mean something to me.
At the end of the day, maybe it doesn't amount to more than just a strong aesthetic preference. I feel like I'll be able to easily comprehend any writing shifts, trends, degradation, or shortcuts for efficiency that may lie ahead. But is it enough to just be able to literally understand people?
Efficiency and comprehensibility are what are being lost. When you reduce the size of your vocabulary, mix up words, and misuse punctuation, it causes me to have to do a double take to understand. I can read much more efficiently when something is written properly. It's even making me read properly written text more slowly, because for example I'll read the word than and think they probably meant then and then I get to the end of the sentence and realize it makes no sense and they really did mean than. This additional post-processing of the sentence slows me down. It's very frustrating and I didn't use to do it.
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