docbob wrote:Regular annoyance.
The failure to use capital letters at the beginning of sentences, and on proper nouns, commas and full stops, or any form of punctuation when posting on forums and social networking sites.
You are not limited to 140 or 160 characters, so why take shortcuts?
When email became all the rage, I was constantly horrified at the lack of grammar, punctuation etc in messages - it was as if people had just stopped bothering because they were not actually writing the messages. The worst error was beginning sentences without a capital letter and writing colleagues' names without the necessary capital at the beginning - that is such basic stuff, something everyone learns when they first begin to master writing.
What I could never understand was the fact that typed letters and memos typed on a Typewriter had always been written with attention to grammar and punctuation, but it seemed that because email was via a VDU screen, it somehow didn't 'need' the same rules.
It still does my head in to this day, especially when I receive emails from so-called Admin Assistants/Officers/Human Resources staff who are clearly too lazy [or ignorant] to construct even a short sentence correctly; these people are in charge of my bills, my banking, my online orders and they are clearly thick as two short bricks! AARRGGHH!

Something that really does concern me is the debate regarding whether spelling and grammar should be taken into account when marking Finals papers at University; some would argue that the content alone should reflect the mark, whereas others argue that correct grammar and spelling is as essential as the content. Obviously, having to write four answers in 3 hours will result in a few mistakes under pressure, but if a paper is littered with basic errors, surely this demonstrates that the student has learned very little in terms of correct presentation and this does not bode well for when they become the CEO of some Advertising company or Consultancy firm and can barely spell their employees' names [should they even bother to learn them of course]. Given the behaviour of many "senior" peeps in the Public and Private Sector, I suspect that this lack of attention to detail explains a lot...

That said, I appreciate that many people leave full-time education lacking good skills in reading, writing and maths due to a whole host of factors beyond their control, and that this should not necessarily be a barrier to Further Education if they would clearly survive in and benefit from FE; but, if they do go into FE I would certainly expect that these skills do improve over time and be reflected in their Finals papers. Just MHO tho.....