Finals Season

It is that time of year again...grading season.  Most students are already off on their well earned holiday breaks, while the professors and teachers slog on for another week grading finals.  It is the way things are.  I do not resent this actually, rather I enjoy the finals grading process.  Normally, as I grade, I am left to my musings on the growth (or lack thereof) of individual students and to ponder what worked and what didn't in engaging their attention and academic improvement (or lack thereof).  This year however, I am left a little bemused.  Two habits I could not break students of in their writing, despite numerous interventions, were: the capitalization of Nouns and the use of elaborate spacing between paragraphs.

Capitalizing nouns, last I heard, was limited to proper nouns and, of course, those starting sentences.  This year however, noun capitalization has gone bonkers...nouns are losing capital letters where they had them or getting capital letters no matter where they fall in the sentence or what they denote.  There is no consistency as to their capitalization.  There might be several reasons for this phenomenon.  One, teachers in K-12 no longer bother to teach capitalization or don't know how to.  Two, maybe common noun status has been upgraded in the English language so as to at times deserve this in-sentence "highlight, or three, perhaps it is because grammar, or the ability to write at all, in the U.S. of A, continues to fall apart at a rapid rate.  Four, possibly twenty somethings use capitalization as a form of expression.  Reviewing these reasons can narrow the possibilities.  I refuse to entertain the first reason, as this feels like betrayal.  Sue me.  I can confidently eliminate the second reason.  The third reason can certainly be said to hold some water, after all the US education system, at least K-12, does not rank very high among developing world nations.  Thus what I am left with is the fourth, more culturally driven reason.  I believe that the tendency to capitalize nouns, regardless of noun classification (proper or common) or sentence placement, is because students are opening up the categorization of the world around them away from mere objective criteria.  Any person, place, thing or idea is bound to be a unique entity and thus is up for capitalization.  Thus summer becomes Summer and a robot becomes a Robot.  Conversely, some proper nouns seem to lack relevance to the student and are not capitalized when then should be.  Sentence structural demands of capitalization might also be seen as unimportant to a writer's intended meaning.  But why?

In the generation currently coming through school, we have a mass of people who have been raised to value the subjective experience and have been largely raised on the child centered approach of parenting.  Grammar becomes as much a vehicle for self expression in this context, as does, say, a particular fashion statement.  Not that there is always a lot of thought put into these expressions, but that they occur both with explicit intentions and with a kind of "gut" feeling.  So, a word like "summer" is seen as important to the individual including it in their essay, and thus the word receives the "upgrade" to "Summer".  Additionally, in practices such as email, blogging, texting and social media posts, capitalization is a matter of taste.  One can adhere to the official standards, such as they are, or play with those standards by ignoring them.  Common nouns in this scenario of writing take on identities and feelings that the writer brings to the word, as well as exhibiting expressions of individuality...in other words, nouns become an intricate part of translating the subjective experience.  In some instances, to not capitalize a noun almost feels as if not giving the word its due and in other instances it is giving the proverbial finger to the grammar gods (or Gods).  Now, I recognize that this is a problem.  I would like and do insist (or their grades suffer) that students learn what they should and should not capitalize in English, but nonetheless I do find this increasingly common phenomenon interesting.  And it is by no means historically unique.  Grammer has ever been a matter of practice and change in any language.  German, for example, a language where all nouns traditionally have been capitalized, some 10 years ago, decided  to do away with this practice (though it does still persist).  The United States Declaration of Independence shows the freewheeling capitalization of all nouns as well.  Grammer is as much an argument about tradition and culture as it is about semantics and writing skill.

As to the second persistent phenomenon of writing encountered this semester/quarter, the elaborate spacing between paragraphs, I have a more mundane approach.  I attribute this to a student's perennial hope of lengthening their paper so that it meets the ever maddening page number criteria of essay assignments.  Note to the wise: it doesn't work.  Neither do large fonts, long (extraneous) quotes and large margins.  End of story.

As final grading winds down, I will feel slightly depressed that I didn't do more or better in teaching my students.  I will cheer up however during a much needed break and at the thought of getting the chance to do it all over again.

May the peace of the season be with you and never leave you.