First-year uni students to be taught basic grammar

This story from news.com.au made me weep.

Australia's Monash University is about to begin teaching its first-year students basic grammar - grammar they should have been taught in school, but weren't. How could they have learnt it in school, when their teachers were just as clueless on the difference between a noun and a verb?

Monash lecturer Caron Dann said the majority of her 500 students in communication were strangers to English grammar.

Marking essays, I discovered the majority had no
idea how to use apostrophes, or any other punctuation for that matter; that
random spelling was in and sentence construction out.

Argh!!!! I could see this coming.......

About half thought plurals were formed
by adding an apostrophe-s, as in apple's and banana's.

How to use the Apostrophe

Away from politics for a moment now, but no less an important matter, and something very dear to my heart (dear to my heart, because it causes my blood pressure to skyrocket every time I see it done incorrectly - which is frequently), that is, how to use the humble little apostrophe.

This is an indictment on the educational system in this country, but I see the poor apostrophe abused time and time again. It's left out when it shouldn't be, and (worse) included, and used wrongly.

A few examples of incorrect use:

An ad on an employment website asked that CV's be sent....

Walking past a book store last week: non-fiction book's on sale this week

And, one of my favourites in another job ad, this time in a newspaper: Chef's wanted

In each of the three examples above, the apostrophe must be OMITTED. You do not form the plural of a noun by adding an apostrophe and an 's'. Leave the apostrophe out!

The apostrophe has many other uses, some of which I will go into in a later post, but I just want to touch on one final example:

The apostrophe is used in contractions.

A contraction occurs when two words are combined to make one word, and an apostrophe is inserted to take the place of the missing letter or letters, eg, the contraction for we are is we're; you are = you're; it is = it's. A contraction can also refer to the shortening of a word, such as number being contracted to no. But, as no apostrophe is used here we'll (a contraction for we will) move on!

Finally, two words which are often confused are your and you're. Although they are pronounced exactly the same way, they are not alternative spellings of the same word!! Your means belonging to you, and you're is, as I've said, the contraction of you are.

I once received an invitation to a work function which began: your welcome to attend...

Needless to say, I didn't!