My 7th graders were without Chromebooks to begin the school year, so we did some old-school education involving paper and pencil work. This doesn’t happen much anymore in my classroom, but it was very interesting.
I taught a lesson on capitalization. We spent a week going over all the rules and writing examples and figuring out things that, mostly, I assumed they should know. For instance, you should always capitalize the first word in a sentence. Simple, right? Well…
I found it fascinating that, while correcting some handwritten sentences, I found copious errors when the whole point was to write samples of sentences that used specific types of capitalization. I asked the kids to write a sentence using a holiday. The number of times I saw, “My favorite holiday is christmas,” was mind-boggling. If you’re unsure why, since many kids love Christmas, go back and look at how I typed the name of the holiday. Yep, in an assignment focused solely on capitalization, a number of students failed to do the one thing I was looking for.
Why is that? The simple answer lies in the devices they all carry around. Why would they capitalize? That takes extra work to hit the shift key on your phone, and there’s no time to waste when you’re dashing off a text message, Snapchat, etc. I would imagine some of my adult readers are guilty of the same thing.
When did we get in such a rush? When did we decide to put aside these rules of not just our language, but most languages? And does it really take that much extra time to capitalize certain words? I’ve watched the fingers fly over a phone and been amazed as I plod along, typing out a message with one finger.
Things change. I get that. But there are just some ideas that should remain. When we say capitalization isn’t that important, we take away some of the power of words. Your name is capitalized because it is important; it is who you are. The name of our school is important, as is the town in which you reside. There’s a reason those are called proper nouns, compared to their non-capitalized cousins, the common nouns. You are not common!
To take it a step further, I was teaching about capitalizing titles of works. This includes the titles of articles and columns in newspapers and magazines. I paused as I taught, remembering that my own column titles do not have all the major words capitalized, just the first one. This is not my doing; I send in every column with all the important words capitalized. Then I looked at the Owatonna paper and saw the same thing. And the Star Tribune - same thing. What in God’s name (another important proper noun) was going on?
So I relied on Google once again. The search engine told me that most editors follow the Associated Press Stylebook, which says you only need to capitalize the first word in a headline, plus any names that would normally be so. This saves on space, since capital letters are larger and use more ink, so this is about saving money as well. (This is also why you don’t see the Oxford comma in newspapers, another hill I will die upon, defending its use.)
So in the interest of saving money and space, we’re demonstrating to our younger generations that they don’t have to follow the rules. (I know, I know, when I’m done with this, I’ll go chase some kids off my lawn.) But it is hard to teach the lessons that students will need for their resume and scholarship letters and college papers if they point out that the rules don’t apply to everyone.
I have seen resumes submitted to our school that have ignored/forgotten some of these basic ideas. They have not gotten an interview. This is what I tell kids: You and someone else might be equally qualified, but if you don’t have a clean resume, you might not get that job. Your lack of proper grammar could be the one factor that differentiates you and drops you below the other candidate.
As I thought about how much extra space a capital letter takes up, I was reminded of how many kids also struggled with handwriting those letters. I told them to make sure a capital W or C or others that resemble their lowercase versions was clearly larger than the letters following it. That was a tough task.
By the time you read this, the kids will have their Chromebooks. Then we can go back to them ignoring the shift key when it is most needed.
Word of the Week: This week’s word is anachronistic, which means out of fashion or outdated, as in, “The columnist’s views on basic rules of English were considered anachronistic by his editor.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!