English is getting worser...

I'm being followed by typos.

I'm not talking about the miss-spellings of crayon wielding kindergartners or lazy ESL students: famous newspapers, popular magazines, freshly printed best-selling books, and most of all websites are failing to carefully proofread their material.

Even proofreading and copyediting websites are not immune to spelling errors, grammatical mistakes and bad writing in general.

Modern society is leaping from one hot topic to the next, and everybody wants to put in their two cents before their opinion becomes outdated. The need for speed has led to a lack of concern about errors - after all, a mistake in print will only be seen until tomorrow's paper or next month's issue.

And besides, people care about the meaning, not the accuracy. With the rise of blogging, sloppy, careless and unedited stream of thought writing has become the norm rather than the exception. People are just getting used to it.

Add to this the fact that an enormous percent of the people using English these days are not native speakers - rather than just clumsy fingers, writers are using hybrid meta-languages based on loose translations from their native tongue. Although this globalizing trend is fascinating and is certainly increasing communication and the viral spread of information, it can't help but lead to a breakdown of English in general.

Good English and Good Writing will always be recognized as such. Sloppy writing, while acceptable on MSN, blogs and emails, won't cut it on a TOEFL test or College Application Essay. The good news is, if you can learn to write well, even just marginally well, you'll stand out. Great writing will give you instant credibility. The trick is to proofread your work carefully - or, hire someone to do it for you.