.... Illiteracy in America shows up here as well.

**Axeager** · 05-20-07, 01:08 AM

It's Homey G-Dawg foo Gangster language. It's the style these days.

**yungryder** · 05-20-07, 01:10 AM

werd 50cent.

**capnemo314** · 05-20-07, 08:38 AM

Years ago, I forced myself to learn how to type properly. Now it doesn't take any effort at all to add in punctuation, like these commas, or even add capital letters LIKE THIS. Amazing.

**Benandorf** · 05-20-07, 09:43 AM

Originally Posted by Blackhawkc99

It's Homey G-Dawg foo Gangster language. It's the style these days.

Lay em down and smack em yack em! Shee...

It just takes a little time and effort to teach yourself to not look like a moron online. But no one wants to spend that time, it seems.

**MotoZ** · 05-20-07, 04:32 PM

When I was in grade school I was terrible at grammar. So terrible in fact that I just gave up. Back then English was my second language and there was no way that I was going to catch up with my classmates in a few school years. I decided to be content with failure for a while. One of the things that made writing a challenge for me was that I wrote the way I spoke. I finally had a bright teacher that told me writing the way you talk can work for some people. She gave me a Newberry Medal-winning book to read which was written in significant part in African-American English, i.e. Ebonics. Reading that book gave me some encouragement that even if I didn't master the English language I could still communicate effectively.

To this day I still can't identify parts of a sentence. Sure, I can spot a noun and verb, but ask me to find a subject or write a past participle of umpty-squat or make a sentence tree and I'm clueless. And don't try to teach me. I'll spit venom if another English teacher tells me that I need to know how to do those things. I graduated from college with a D in English and I'm damn proud of it. Not because I got a D like a dumb ass, but because I am confident that I have overcome more communication challenges than most of my English teachers ever knew. Also, having grown up in a multicultural and multilingual environment I learned what I feel is the more important side of writing and communicating, which is empathetic reading and listening.

**SpecOpsScott** · 05-20-07, 04:52 PM

All of you who have taken the time to post in here are most certainly not the shinning examples if illiteracy that we so often see. I, myself, have no formal education to speak of, well, a few months of business school but no degrees to flaunt. But, as ebaconjr surmised, its not all about the text book English education you receive, but your own personal desire to communicate effectively and project yourself as more than uneducated buffoon. And as Benandorf said, it just takes a little more time and effort to teach yourself not to look like a moron. That time spent spell checking, checking grammer and the like is not without reward. Well written posts garner respect and a willingness to continue the dialog on the part of the reader, and isn't that why we are here, in the forums?