The standards of written English in this country are dropping alarmingly. Birmingham City Council has declared that their workers should not use the apostrophe in letters or memos, and the omission of this punctuation is perhaps the most common indication of the falling standards. We sell personalised Christening gifts, mostly bone china plates commemorating the Christening of a child, but also for any other important occasion; and the spelling in some of the orders we receive is so poor. We always face the problem of whether to correct the spelling mistakes: doing so shows the customer that they can’t spell, but if the Christening plate is a gift rather than for the customer’s own use as a keepsake, the recipient of the gift would obviously prefer the wording to be correct. It’s a conundrum.

Of course the spread of texting has contributed to the falling standards. Abbreviations and the lack of punctuation or capital letters when sending a text means the same habits spread to other written output pushing the standards of written English to new lows.