5 ms·
You may be overestimating the writing ability of native English speakers.
by differentView 7y ago
You may be overestimating the writing ability of native English speakers.
- WalterBright 7y agoThe kind of mistakes a non-native English speaker makes tend to be different than ones an uneducated native speaker does.
- hdfbdtbcdg 7y agoI think that lack of an article 'the' is typical of native speakers of Slavic languages?
- vkou 7y agoIt is. It took my father ~20 years of working in an English-speaking country to be consistent with his usage of that article.
- asveikau 7y agoSlavs aren't the only ones though! Romance languages, while not completely lacking articles like Slavic ones, have slightly different requirements for articles. (They tend to use them more for abstract concepts, eg. "the reality" when we would say "reality", or "the <noun>(s)" for describing general behavior/attributes of that noun -- this difference may make speakers over-correct by using articles less in English)
- DFHippie 7y agoCertain nouns are "inherently definite" -- names of people or places, for example, or abstractions or things which are inherently unique. Languages which mark definiteness often differ as to whether these inherently definite nouns, or which ones of them, should be marked as such. English generally treats them like proper names -- no article, definite or indefinite. Romance languages more often require the definite article. These are just two different ways of indicating the same underlying category.
- remote_phone 7y agoAgreed. The best example of this for me is nextdoor. The spelling and grammar for most of the posts are terrible and the posters are predominantly white and over 50.
- rcthompson 7y agoYou're right that most native English speakers don't have anywhere near immaculate grammar. However, the grammar errors that native speakers make are generally quite different from those that non-native speakers make.
- CydeWeys 7y agoIf you're going to involve someone specifically for the purpose of writing English, then obviously you'd pick someone who's good at it. It's not a native/non-native distinction so much as it is "good at writing in English" vs not.