Punctuation errors are huge, and apostrophe errors. Students seem to have absolutely no idea what an apostrophe is for.

Poor grammar is the major reason students fail

one in 10 new students are not qualified to take the mandatory writing courses required for graduation.

Emoticons, truncated and butchered words such as 'cuz,' are just some of the writing horrors being handed in

"Little happy faces ... or a sad face ... little abbreviations," show up even in letters of academic appeal

"spelling is getting better because of Spellcheck,"

committee will immediately get their backs up when they see that kind of written style."

"Punctuation errors are huge, and apostrophe errors. Students seem to have absolutely no idea what an apostrophe is for. None. Absolutely none."

Cellphone texting and social networking on Internet sites are degrading writing skills

The Internet norm of ignoring punctuation and capitalization as well as using emoticons may be acceptable in an e-mail to friends and family, but it can have a deadly effect on one's career if used at work.

"It would say to me ... 'well, this person doesn't think very clearly, and they're not very good at analyzing complex subjects, and they're not very good at expressing themselves, or at worse, they can't spell, they can't punctuate,'

short-change themselves,

words 'a lot' have become one word, for everyone, as far as I can tell. 'Definitely' is always spelled with an 'a' - 'definately'.

"There's a notion of a golden age in the past that students were wonderful, unlike now. I'm not sure that golden age ever existed," he says.

You can go back and read Plato and see Socrates talking about the allegations that this generation isn't as not as good as previous ones," he notes.