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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 do this in text conversations. It takes the place of a certain tone of voice, and is just useful. It's just language changing, 2000s english has a number of errors by the standards of 1900s english, which has errors by the standards of 1800s english, and so on and so on in an often continuous process until eventually it's mutually incomprehensible.
I think people, especially dumber people, have made these sorts of mistakes for a long time, but 1) we see a lot more writing by average people than we did in the past due to the internet, and 2) typing is a lot faster and more casual than writing with a pen so people care less about little mistakes.
Also, though, english spelling conventions are dumb. Why not just have a simpler, understandable correspondence between phonemes and spelling? Like, chinese characters were horrendously complicated until they were Simplified, and there's still a lot more complexity there than is necessary, but it was a net benefit.
Not sure about the news, but there is a lot more science being done today than there was 70 years ago, so the % that are high human capital necessarily decreases.
In law, at least, convention is important. The placement of commas can decide cases. I think this is where written English succeeds, because it's so precise, from the choice of words to the grammar.
There's a reason why there's a plethora of controlled versions of English.
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