So much bad English

How come so many people who claim in their profile to live in English speaking countries have such bad written English?
I'm not talking about people who live in countries where English isn't the main language.
I don't even mean spelling mistakes.
I'm talking about bad tense use. Not using words properly.
I get the feeling that these are bot or fake accounts.
Has anyone else noticed this?

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SomeMichGuy · M

I think the truth is that few people have the love of the language which persons such as Shakespeare, S. Johnson, Milton, etc., to Churchill have had.

Consider that native speakers are pretty much always at a disadvantage in that they have nearly always had their ideas of grammar "set" in their neuropathways LONG before they are ever formally taught grammar. So the latter endeavor is an after-the-fact attempt to reset stones long fast in their mental mortar.

Were we to teach native English speakers German as a first foreign language, we would be helping them to learn grammar which would help them with English as well as most other non-English languages which they might wish to study.

katydidnt · 61-69, F

@SomeMichGuy ...at a disadvantage in that they have nearly always had their ideas of grammar "set" in their neuropathways LONG before they are ever taught grammar.

Agree. Even the concept of a unified grammar has hardly occurred to most until brought up in school. Up to then we learn only "rules" given piecemeal by our parents and close elders. I've asked several 40-somethings about how grammar was taught them. They responded--to name just one aspect--that they have only a vague memory that the parts of speech were ever covered.

I fear this failure is widespread; many individuals are rising to their level of intelligibility commensurate with those of their parents. Those 40-somethings I spoke with are at the age of being grandparents, so two generations of children are already learning grammar by rote repetition of dubious examples.

SomeMichGuy · M

@katydidnt We had parts of speech in ~7th - 8th grade, but it was at a time when diagramming sentences was going out of style.

One person at our high school still did that, but I did not have him for the cattle call classes (9th, 10th grade English).

katydidnt · 61-69, F

@SomeMichGuy Diagramming sentences was still alive and well in our school, thanks to an older teacher still loath to split an infinitive. I loved diagramming but most of my classmates were "meh" long before meh was a thing. All through high school.

SomeMichGuy · M

@katydidnt It had just been dropped by most in mine.

Just as we still had a huge slide rule on the wall in an algebra / trig classroom, but they had just gone to calculators (mostly; we were shown how to perform a linear interpolation between table values).

Mamapolo2016 · F

@SomeMichGuy Speaking of influences, the King James Bible had a lot to do with speaking and writing lyrically.