Written Language Disorder: Medical researchers fear there's no cure for bad writing

[Joel S. Berson]

Dennis, Too good!  I'm having a hard time discerning what's true and
what's a spoof.  Can you insert some smileys to help the
unsophisticated?  And footnotes, so I can check your sources?

Perhaps you can add examples of some otherwise well known authors
with adult-onset WLD?  Nathaniel Hawthorne?  Others?

Joel

At 5/14/2009 12:46 AM, Dennis Baron wrote:
>There's a new post on the Web of Language:
>
>Written Language Disorder: Medical researchers fear there's no cure
>for bad writing
>
>A group of Mayo Clinic researchers has found that almost 15 percent of
>otherwise normal school-aged children in Rochester, Minnesota, are
>suffering from Written Language Disorder. According to Dr. Slavica K.
>Katusic, while Written Language Disorder, or WLD, does not pose as
>great a threat as the H1N1 virus, it's actually just as common in
>school children as reading problems, with boys twice as likely as
>girls to be symptomatic.
>
>read more about this medical scourge at the Web of Language:
>http://illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage
>____________________
>Dennis Baron
>Professor of English and Linguistics
>Department of English
>University of Illinois
>608 S. Wright St.
>Urbana, IL 61801
>
>office: 217-244-0568
>fax: 217-333-4321
>
>http://illinois.edu/goto/debaron
>
>read the Web of Language:
>http://illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage
>
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org