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I’ve read a ton of student papers over the past two weeks, and based on this batch and those from the last couple of years, I’m starting to get the impression that a greater percentage of my students every year are dropping inflectional suffixes (plurals, tense-markers) and finding it difficult to notice the omissions when proofreading (I haven’t been formally counting, so I could be mistaking something I’ve just noticed for a trend, though). I’ve always seen some of this in examples where the suffix isn’t audible in normal speech, particularly if the suffix is well on the way to being a kind of fossil in the particular expression(e.g. “ice tea” – you can’t hear the realization of the {-ed} suffix before [t], and “iced” in that expression is probably a unitary adjective rather than a participle for most speakers who do use the –ed in writing). That’s absolutely normal, and over time the suffix-less form can become the norm (“ice cream” used to be “iced cream”).
What I’m seeing, though, are forms like “I was read this book” or “These short story are….”; they’re in papers written by native English-speakers who don’t speak any of the dialects that would normally drop those suffixes, and the same students do use the suffixes in speech (it’s exactly the reverse of the usual situation, in which students don’t know they have to write bits that they don’t say). If I draw attention to a line in which there’s a missing –ing, etc., the students frequently *can’t* see anything unusual about it; their usual reaction is to look at it for a minute, then get rid of a comma (if there is one) or add one (if there isn’t). It’s that inability to notice the “gap” that I’m particularly intrigued by. If I read the section out loud, they immediately notice the omission (and I then tell them that they need to coerce friends into reading papers out loud for them as a coping strategy). It’s not a language issue at all; it’s just an orthographic one.
I know similar effects can be associated with mild forms of dyslexia, but I find it hard to believe that fully 15 - 25% of the student population is even mildly dyslexic. I realize this is starting to sound like a variant of “Geezer Rant #325A; Those Darn Kids Won’t Write Right” but I’m curious about whether anyone else is noticing similar patterns, or whether this has been common all along and I’ve somehow managed not to notice it (which, given the rest of this post, would be rather amusing for everyone but me…).
---- Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University
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Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/