Ignorance of grammar

Ignorance of grammar has been attributed to increasingly lax university standards, to emphasis on fashionable subjects as opposed to educational basics, to influence of media "sound bites" and catchy expressions, and to exaggerated reliance on computers for the correction of grammatical errors.

According to a 1992 UK interview of 173 tutors, two thirds of university students are "shaky" on grammar, one fifth cannot spell at all, one quarter do not know the rules of punctuation and many cannot use the apostrophe correctly. One tutor reported 84% of pupils could not spell "occurrence" and 20% were unable to spell "weather". A 1991 UK survey found 20% of 11-year-olds and one 15-year-old in 10 were unable to construct 20 lines of prose without making at least 7 grammatical errors.