For Collegiate Writers, It’s a Doggie-Dog World

The first major dictionary of the 21st century is appropriately directed at the deteriorating writing skills of college students.

The Microsoft Encarta College Dictionary, published last month by St. Martin’s Press, addresses today’s students’ problems with English grammar, usage, spelling and vocabulary.

How bad is it? Ask any college professor who has to slog through student essays.

That’s what the editors of this new dictionary did: They consulted a panel of 80 authorities, including 32 English professors, mostly at public universities in 24 states and four Canadian provinces. Examples submitted to the editors will ring bells from community colleges to Harvard:

“Reading Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff never fails to make an impression.”

“The villain use to be seen lurking on foggy streets late at night.”

“In his plight to find the treasure, he perished on the dessert island.”

“There’s players all over the field.”

“Shakespeare’s plays had alot of strong women.”

“It’s a doggie-dog world out there.”

“Our society has a dog-eat-dog pecking order.”

These are just several examples. Students don’t know the difference between “they’re,” “their” and “there,” the professors said. They routinely confuse “its” and “it’s.” They don’t know the difference between “blatant” and “flagrant,” “pretext” and “pretense.” They think that “although” means “however,” as in “Although, everyone did know the murderer.”

And because computer spell-checking software doesn’t flag words that sound alike but are spelled differently, constructions such as “It prayed on her mind” are handed in uncorrected.

A dictionary, of course, can’t solve all of these problems, but this one takes a stab at some of them. It features more than 600 usage notes alerting students to common errors. The dictionary also lists words that are often misspelled.

Perhaps most ironic, given Microsoft’s role in the ascendancy of computer spelling checkers, there are 400 notes warning of homophones. Students looking up “stare,” for example, are advised: “Do not confuse ‘stare’ with ‘stair,’ which has a similar sound. Beware: Your spell-checker will not catch this error.”

Anne H. Soukhanov, editor of the dictionary’s American edition, said the panel of professors convinced her to include the spell-check warnings. The spell-check traps are listed in alphabetical order in the front of the dictionary, and Soukhanov said she hopes students will refer to the list first and then look up specific words in the body of the dictionary.

You’d expect a dictionary sponsored by Microsoft to include up-to-the-minute definitions of all things technological, and Encarta doesn’t disappoint. Computer and Internet words are marked with a lightning-bolt symbol (not “cymbal”), and there’s one on almost every page.

Many of them--”bot,” for example, the word for a computer program performing routine tasks--have little meaning to Joe Blow. Which, by the way, is in the dictionary, along with “Joe Six-Pack.” So is “NY-LON,” an adjective relating to “a trans-Atlantic lifestyle divided between New York and London, as lived by successful business executives.”

(“Microsoft” isn’t among the book’s 320,000 definitions, and Chairman Bill Gates is modestly described as a “U.S. business executive.” Steve Jobs, by contrast, is defined as “co-founder of the Apple Computer Co.”)

Constructing dictionaries is tricky business. The lexicographers have to decide whether to be descriptive, capturing a moment in a language’s history, or prescriptive--making value judgments about the use and spelling of the language.

No dictionary, including the Encarta, is all one or the other, Soukhanov said from her office in Bedford, Va., “but I tend to be on the conservative side.”

Her dictionary shows it. It advises against using “issues” to denote intentionally unstated emotional or mental problems, as in “He came to see me because he has some issues.”

Similarly, “irregardless is a double negative and regarded as nonstandard. As such, it should be avoided.” And “like,” when deployed “as a meaningless filler,” should be shunned.

Said Soukhanov, “We would never have known about the issue of ‘issue’ if we hadn’t heard from our professors.”

In the introduction to the 1,678-page tome, Soukhanov writes about a “clear and present crisis in many students’ use of the English language.” The Encarta is an attempt to help ease the crisis.

For now, it’s available only in print.