Given my own propensity for glitches and typos, I hate to bust on “Poor in Ohio” for her error. On the other hand, it is apparent that at some point since I finished college a quarter-century ago, English teachers stopped deducting points for errors of spelling, capitalization and punctuation.
We have witnessed the triumph of what might be called the “expressive” school of composition, where the whole point is to share what one truly feels. Concern for orthography is deemed incompatible with such sharing and feeling.
Frankly, I never thought I’d become so nostalgic for the grim and grizzled teachers of my youth, who wielded their red grading pens with an emphatic indifference to their student’s feelings.
