I only just joined the school paper, or wait, is this a blog? I really could care less, anyhow, this is my first article…yay.. So before I logged in, I decided for a moment that I would take a look at some older posts, just to see what exactly I’m getting into. Thanks to my convenient lack of knowledge about many students in the high school, it wasn’t immediately apparent to me the level of writing many students are at. After a few minutes of review, I’m glad to say my writing should hold up just fine 
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Now, what I really would like to talk about is this, SPELL CHECK. Got it? So why would I randomly decide to talk about spell check? First of all, to be honest, the apparent 5th grade writing level of many students concerns me. Typically issues have to do with punctuation, for example, lack of periods and commas. Really? Did we lose our ability to press the period and comma keys on our keyboards? Or is it really that hard to remember when a sentence ends? I know I know, a lot of people just write for the heck of it, they often don’t even care about their punctuation. Why does this concern me? I’ll tell you why, habits are easier to make then they are to break, and when you consistently decide that even seemingly mundane grammar rules are unimportant, you will eventually not even realize when you are leaving out a period, comma, etc…
My next issues to address would be the differences between their, there, and they’re, your and you’re, and to, too, and two. I’m not going to give a grammar lesson on these evidently hard to remember rules. But honestly, if we’re in high school, shouldn’t we be able to remember the difference? There is NOT possessive, to and much just look moronic in sequence, and if I say “your stupid” I would be talking about someone’s stupid. It doesn’t make any sense does it?
So where might these issues come from? Do the English teachers in the high school encourage their students to sit around throwing paper airplanes during class time? I doubt that, as a matter of fact, I believe the teachers at the high school work very hard to ensure we get the education necessary for continuing into college. I also believe that most all of the students try their best to learn the things taught in class. But the issues remain; we’re still making the basic writing mistakes that we should have to learned to avoid making by now. I think most of the problem is just laziness, if it’s not an assignment, why should I do it well? I understand that, homework is bad enough on it’s own. Who wants to throw perfectly written blog posts and facebook statuses into all that? I think that some of the issue stems not from the students, but from the teachers and staff in general.
When I received all my papers for the first day of school, I read through them and found at least one spelling and/or grammar error per packet, and in some cases per page. Now obviously these things will never be perfect, and a few spelling errors every now and then is fine. But THAT many in one day of papers? I’m only a junior, and I noticed them, why don’t the teachers and staff notice them? I realize that they all must have a lot on their plates, and if we as students had to organize all of the things that the school staff does, well, let’s just say we’d be making a lot more mistakes than that. There’s just some irony in the fact that the school is misspelling that many words. What if you came to school and there was a big banner saying “Welkome two skool”? Wouldn’t that make you a little apprehensive about attending that particular school?
My main point is, maybe we should ALL figure it out and start practicing better grammar, spelling, and, for the love of God, punctuation. You can’t break a bad writing habit unless you consistently watch yourself to make sure you are not falling into it. We know how to write properly, let’s do it.
