I spoke to a technical writing professor here at OSU. When I first came back to school I wanted to go into tech writing, but with all the outsourcing and temp contracting I wanted a little more stability.
My instructor has long noticed that there is no pattern to which of her students have a good grasp of grammar and who doesn’t. Personal and cultural background seems to be irrelevant. Regardless of comprehension, she is not bothered by students’ lack of grammar skills. At this point the basics should be largely taken care of, and she feels that if an instructor gets extremely bothered by such things it would interfere with his or her enjoyment of the teaching profession at large.
Writing styles and grammatical usage have grown more informal over the years, perhaps largely due to the proliferation of e-mail. Most of the outright mistakes seem to be sentence fragments and inconsistencies in the writer’s point of view.
The instructor has worked as a consultant for many tech organizations and states that a lack of grammatical skill doesn’t necessarily hold someone back in the tech writing field so much as mastery of these skills helps them move ahead and excel.

Grammar Differences

There are many differences between AP style and MLA style, but that doesn’t mean that errors are any less prevalent.
“In journalism the writing is more fact based,” said newspaper editor X. “You have to spit out the facts.”
X went on to say the biggest difference is in a news article quotes stand alone, where as in a regular MLA paper the quotes are integrated into the paragraphs.
According to X another difference that beginning reporters are unaware of is the use of listing commas. When listing in MLA it’s acceptable to put a comma before the “and”, however that comma is omitted in AP format.
The most common errors X sees in AP format are the type of errors that can be made in any writing format. “Their, there and they’re,” said X. “That really pisses me off.”
Along the same lines, X said that words with similar sounds are often confused by his reporters, and “that pisses me off to no end,” said X.
Those errors may make X unhappy, but the mistake that makes X adamant enough to get out a piece of paper and scribble down the error with vigor is apostrophes.
On the paper X wrote the same word twice with the apostrophe in different places. The paper read, “Beaver’s Beavers’,” and X said if his reporters could consistently use apostrophes correctly he would be a happy man.
So while there are differences, most often the errors made by reporters are the same errors made in other fields.

News of grammar

* Note to Readers: I wrote this in news style because the professor I interviewed is a newspaper journalist, and I thought it would be an appropriate and interesting change. There are several punctuation differences between news style and MLA writing, see if you can find them.

It's slipping. Their grammar is slipping, he said.

John Doe is the managing editor of a Willamette Valley newspaper, and teaches the only two news writing classes remaining from OSU's defunct journalism department.

In the many years he's worked as a teacher he has noticed a steady decline of basic grammar skills.

"The best today don't match the best of yesterday," he said "And the worst of today don't match the worst of tomorrow. Performance continues to slide across the board."

Some of the most common errors Doe comes across are homonym mix-ups, such as "site," "cite" and "sight," and pronoun-number disagreement.

"A singular entity like a group or team takes the singular pronouns "it" and "its," but I get "their" and "theirs" all the time," he said. "Pronoun-number disagreements really grate on my ears."

Wrong uses of "that," "who," "whom" and "which" show up quite often as well.

What Doe expects of students has "fallen way, way behind my desires in recent years."

So low, he said, even a small acquaintance with "basic grammar and usage starts looking like a plus."

News writing is a different style, which Doe said his students sometimes struggle with.

"In newspaper work, we stress short words, in short sentences, in short paragraphs, in short stories," Doe said. "The emphasis is on clarity and readability for a mass mixed-age audience.

"I think it's a good approach in general, but seems to run counter to what gets rewarded in academic circles. A lot of profs seem to put a premium on long convoluted sentences full of stiff, stilted, bureaucratic language and insider jargon. When sociologists talk to sociologists, that may work. But heaven help us when they try to communicate with lay people."

For writing tips, Doe directs his students to the old stand by, Strunk & White: "Omit needless words, stress clarity and economy."

Crisp, clear quality are what Doe expects of himself and his newsroom, "and I demand them of my students. I'm very hard on incomprehensible gobbledygook."

Grammar After High School

I chose to talk to one of my practicum teachers at a local high school, this teacher works in a learning lab helping students keep up on the work that they fall behind in. Some of the most common classes students fall behind in or need extra help in include language arts classes like: English, Humanities and Writing. X feels that grammar is important in all language arts classes, yet it is commonly forgotten. X wants to send students into the collegiate world well prepared for the courses that lay ahead such as Writing 121. Grammar at the high school level in the local high schools is almost non-existent. One of the teachers in the lab corrects papers, writes what the students did wrong, but offers no explanations. I have even corrected student’s papers. X says that power of language within different groups of students is noticeable. In some student writing it is apparent that they have either studied grammar or picked up proper grammar along the way in school, but in other student writing it is apparent that they have not had enough exposure to the subject. Since X is not an English teacher but does help students to complete their work she feels it is easy for her to see where the students need the most work, but explaining their grammar errors isn’t something that her position allows time for. X admits that English teachers have schedules and a variety of subjects to keep up with and grammar has fallen pretty low on that list. I asked X if she felt a high school grammar class would be helpful for college preparation. She felt it would be an excellent idea but couldn’t see such a class being offered due to district budgets.

Kilee Buckmiller