My day job is teaching English, mostly Composition I and II to college freshmen. What this means is that, on a regular basis, I get to see some very, very…erm…grammatically challenged student essays.

In my line of work, a person has to be prepared for all the usual beasts of composition unleashed by the inexperienced lad or lass in the classroom. There's the tricky-tricky Fragment ("After we escaped the rabid dog." Um, yeah? After that, what?). There's the nimble and breath-defying Run On and/or Comma Splice ("The alien landed his spaceship right in front of my drunk friend and me, he leaped out and started waving at us I threw my beer can at him."). And there is, of course, that old bane of English teachers everywhere: the Awkward Sentence ("When went the actors of the stage where we wanted to go but we couldn't, the mall across the street looked betterer.).

Those sorts of problematic sentences and constructions are to be expected. If nothing else, they provide English teachers with something to laugh about over a pint of brew down at Shakespeare's Pub (wherever two or more English teachers are gathered there is sure to be a "Shakespeare's Pub" or some similar, literarily-themed edifice).

But a trend that I've been noticing of late is far more insidious. It sneaks into the works of young writers like a mixed metaphor catapulting a snake in the grass over a river without a paddle. It happens whenever they try to spell anything.

Anything at all.

In their essays, short stories, and random musings on the nature of the universe, the word "where" becomes "were," "whether" becomes "weather," "wonder" becomes "wander," "write" becomes "right" -- and that's just the 'W's. If we work our way back to the beginning of the alphabet, it gets even worse.

The cause of this spelling Armageddon? Unknown. It's possible that in our otherwise wonderful world of computers we may have come to depend too much on our word processors' spell checking capabilities. Alas, in English, there are far too many words which sound the same, but are spelled differently, and mean something else altogether when splatted down on the page. For instance, let's take a look at that sentence I just wrote. In the hands of the student it becomes, "Unfortunately, inn English, their our far two many words witch sound the same, butt air spilled differentially…" -- well, you get the idea. A spell checker won't tell you if you've used the RIGHT word; it'll only tell you if the word you've used is misspelled. Troublesome.

Or it's possible -- as a colleague of mine would point out -- that excessive use of text messages and e-mails has rendered the cell phone using population illiterate when it comes to spelling. It may be impossible to spell well (or even gooder) when you've grown up writing "R U 4 RL? ROTFL" (loosely translated into traditional English, this means: "Golly gee whiz, Bobby Sue, are you for real? I'm rolling on the floor laughing here.")

Oh, there are some who would argue that the spelling doesn't matter as long as the meaning gets across, but to them I say this: your philosophy is un-patriotic and un-American. Then I stick my tongue out at them. After all, we live in a culture that's all about the packaging. Imagine this: we have two identical products (say, a pair of rubber duckie for the bathtub) in two different packages. Package One is shiny, pretty, and wrapped in glitter ribbon. Package Two is beat up, torn in places, and has so much magic marker graffiti on it that you would think someone had tried to use it in place of a New York subway car. Each package, with its unharmed rubber duckie safe and sound within, is the same price. Which one do you buy? (Okay, I have an ex-girlfriend who would buy the beat up one just because she'd feel sorry for it, but how about everyone else?) I'm betting people would go for the pretty packaging.

Formatting, grammar and spelling is the packaging of writing. Sure, the content has to be the writing equivalent of a pretty rubber duckie that floats, but if it's in a package that reminds the reader of a fraternity house the day after a mythic frat party, then no one will ever know.

Solution? Eye dont no. U?

The author will readily admit that sometimes his sentences are less than grammatically correct (in the column above, there are no fewer than five fragments -- excluding the one he used as an example). If you would like to make fun of him for that, feel free.