She blames the decline on the failure of schools to teach the basic rules, and on the explosion of communication technologies that have allowed punctuation ignoramuses everywhere to deluge others with their poorly organized thoughts.

"People who don't know their apostrophe from their elbow are positively invited to disseminate their writings to anyone on the planet stupid enough to double-click and scroll," she writes.

I agree with a lot of what she says--misplaced apostrophes drive me nuts, too, and I'm very picky about commas. But I thought that quote above was a little harsh. It's my opinion that the internet has allowed a lot of people who would otherwise have no outlet to, as she says, "disseminate their writings" to the world, and yes, a lot of it would be better left undisseminated, but a lot of it is very worthwhile.

I'll admit that when I run across a website packed with punctuation errors, I tend not to visit it again, but that's my choice. We can't all have editors. We have to be our own editors, and most people aren't up to the task.

CNN.com - Forces of 'barbaric illiteracy' too strong - Apr 19, 2004