Eats chutes and leave's

Why can't people spell any more? It seems that nearly everyone under 40 has only a vague idea of correct grammar, punctuation and spelling, and the younger you are the greater your problems are likely to be. Thanks to my old-fashioned grammar school education I'm one of the lucky ones, although I agree that 'grammar is descriptive, not prescriptive', and I don't worry about the odd split infinitive - that's common usage. But we need to write accurately if we want to be understood, and the success of Lynn Truss's book Eats, Shoots and Leaves shows how many people are concerned about it.

I was puzzled about this apparent crisis until I got to know the current education system from the inside. Despite many years of government initiatives, targets, SATs, prescribed teaching methods and even lesson plans rolled out across the country, standards have hardly risen and are generally thought to be still in decline. Employers and even universities continue to complain about school leavers' literacy, or the lack of it.

The answer turned out to be depressingly simple: you don't need a good standard of grammar or spelling to pass GCSEs, even English. The reason is that examiners want to test how much students know, and it is considered unfair to penalise their poor language skills if they show understanding of the topic.

Although much time is spent by English teachers explaining the details of grammar and punctuation, there is no consistent expectation that students must apply them. There are so many other things that must be taught and tested, and time is short; if teachers of other subjects don't insist on good written English, the students get the message that it's not all that important, and forget all too quickly. English teachers already spend many hours on marking, so they can't correct every single error on every homework. In any case this is discouraged because a child will feel discouraged if their work is returned covered in red ink. (Or even green ink, which is the recommended colour these days, considered less aggressive. Whoever came up with that idea obviously didn't know it's the favoured colour of crazy poison pen writers.)

When I left school in the early seventies there was an accepted standard of good written English, with rules which everyone obeyed. Now there's a whole variety: computer software creates many - for example, while writing this document my computer told me I was wrong to put 'any more' in the first sentence. American usage is 'anymore'. How dare Microsoft tell the English their own language conventions are wrong? And they often re-arrange your page layout, and insist on their own idea of paragraphing. It's no wonder that the simple structure of a paragraph is a complete mystery to most young people now. Then there's the influence of e-mail and texting and who knows what next - no doubt when computers can recognise voices, students will think learning to write is a waste of time.

Each generation seems to have its own preferred style, and young people are fluently multi-lingual in so many ways that it's almost unreasonable to expect them to perfect the old style as well. But in the globalised world of the twenty-first century it's more important than ever to communicate accurately, and a commonly agreed standard English is vital. Perhaps if the government abandoned the SATs and targets which have distorted our education system so disastrously, and introduced sensible exam requirements, then teachers would have the time to concentrate on ensuring their students learn the basics properly.