/lit/ - Literature

>>17515469
>>17515461
I think I can explain why most college and highschool students these days have a poor grasp of the english language. As a zoomer, I attended public school in the 2000s, and upon middle school I noticed that our school's english classes were extremely lacking.
Every year, we were taught the exact same lessons. We learned how to write a paragraph (specifically the 5 paragraph essay format), we learned hoe to write a research paper, we'd go over elementary level grammar and punctuation lessons, and then finally we would read 2-3 books. Every single year, from the 6th grade all the way to the 12th, we followed this pattern without any sense of divergence.
Basic punctuation was something most of my peers never mastered. For instance, if you pulled a student aside from my middle or highschool, they would not be able to define a semicolon or an em dash.
The education for my generation was so bad that we were never encouraged to stray from the formulatic five paragraph essay format, nor were we put upon the path to learn the more complex aspects of grammar. For example, in the 9th grade I was in Honors English, and yet we still did not know what a linking verb was, when the teacher asked us to identify what part of speech "is" was, no one could answer but me.
And yet, I consider myself subpar to most writers in spite of my teachers constantly praising me for my "incredible" writing. I aced all of the standardized tests for English and consistently got "A"s on my essays and yet my writing was still choppy, stilted, awkward and full of comma splices until recently. In some respects, I feel like an ESL even though I excelled in English throughout my academic career