Employers say
young people have fewer grammar skills than did their olde-tyme
ancestors, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Sue
Shellenbarger. The
hardest hit include Fort Lauderdale flack Don Silver: 

“I cringe every time I hear” people misuse “is” for “are,” Mr.
Silver says. The company’s chief operations officer, Mr. Silver
also hammers interns to stop peppering sentences with “like.” For
years, he imposed a 25-cent fine on new hires for each offense. “I
am losing the battle,” he says.

Managers are fighting an epidemic of grammar gaffes in the
workplace. Many of them attribute slipping skills to the
informality of email, texting and Twitter where slang and shortcuts
are common. Such looseness with language can create bad impressions
with clients, ruin marketing materials and cause communications
errors, many managers say.

There’s no easy fix.

You can also take a
22-question grammar quiz. (No guarantee on that link.) I got 20
right, barely an A. 

I’m not persuaded that Bryan A. Garner, a grammar entrepreneur
quoted at length, knows about which he talks. Shellenbarger cites
Garner’s condemnation of “I could care less” without mentioning the
controversy over that phrase’s possible origin as a crop of “I
could care less but it would take an effort.”