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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 feel like putting all this together is mixing very different categories of errors.
There are errors more common with native speakers that stem from learning the language phonetically and unconsciously, without thinking about the logic or formal meaning of what you're saying, such as "should of", then/than mixups or "irregardless".
There are errors more common with ESL people that stem from English spelling and grammar being arbitrary nonsense. It is impossible to derive irregular verb forms of which there are many, and impossible to derive the spelling of a word from hearing it.
As a mix of both, many ESL people struggle with using the correct article because their language doesn't have an analogous concept of definite vs indefinite nouns.
And there are "errors" which are prescriptivist nonsense. By whose measure is "noone" not an acceptable compound but "someone" is? Why does the moronic norm that the comma and period at the end my second paragraph should be inside the quotation marks persist?
If the punctuation goes inside or outside is a matter of debate and taste. Having it inside looks nicer because it's adjacent to the quote and the letter, so it's somewhat hidden. .
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As a programmer I just see that as stupid. I don't particularly mind punctuation inside quotation marks, but if you are going to have it then you must also have extra punctuation outside the quotation mark too, otherwise it's just like mismatched parentheses.
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