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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?
Old writing can be turgid at times. Modern writing is easier to read, but sometimes you can tell if it's written by AI or a freelancer, as there are quirks in the writing or it seems overly formal to the point or hurting readability, or it comes off as awkward. For example "the Bitcoin price fell today" instead of "the price of Bitcoin fell today". But overall , from the blogs and articles I have read, new writing is not bad. There are many bloggers and journalists who are competent writers, such as Freddie deBoer and James Altucher. Some of Freddie's recent stuff, in terms of the prose, organization, and the flow of the writing, is top tier. Individual skill varies greatly. Back in the 'old' days, it tended to only the most educated, in a formal sense, who wrote, but nowadays literacy is been commoditized, so there is more quantity and consequently variability of skill. But it's not worse, but more like needing to know where to look.
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