As it is spook

The government , as part of its National Literacy Strategy, is producing instructions on the use of grammar, among other things on the use of full stops, question marks and commas. This is published by the Department for Children, Schools and Families. It also includes help to distinguish between nouns and verbs.

Quite right, we think, some children are leaving school without mastering these things. This cannot be bad. But this book is intended for teachers, to help them improve their own performance, although they are supposed to be all graduate and fully educated.

This is partly a reflection of the 1970s and 1980s, when "progressive" education ruled that expression was more important than knowledge of English.

It may be, however, also a sign that while young people speak the language, for more than a generation they have not read or written it to any great extent. Their formative years have been spent watching videos or playing computer games. They have a vocabulary, and can make themselves known in speech, but when it comes to writing with emphasis there is a problem.

This may be illustrated in spelling variants - there/their, our/are, where/were, etc, where many people under 50 struggle to know or emphasise the difference.

The progressives were right - it is important to express yourself, but if you cannot express yourself concisely and accurately in writing then nuances and subtlety are lost and the meaning may not be clear.