Being a townie I have never seen a chicken come home to roost, but if a recent coachee of mine is correct, there's a huge flock on its way to our coop. The issue is English Grammar; or rather the lack of it. My coachee was nervous that her lack of  grammatical know-how meant that writing (reports, minutes, memos, emails) has become a terrible chore - a constant doubting that each word, phrase, clause and subclause is out of place or just isn't right. Puncutation is also the cause of much anguish with this Thatcher generation. If you went to school in the 70s and 80s, chances are that your teachers eschewed formal grammar lessons in favour of free-form 'anything goes as long as it's got writin' on it' projects. Teaching the comma came to a full stop around 1975 and now a whole generation has become semi-literate about the semicolon. And don't even mention the apostrophe. Thats' / that's / thats a cause for much gnashing of teeth (or is it 'gnashings of tooth'?) 

The dropping of English grammar from the curriculum was a crime against the Humanities. If we don't know how our language works, how can we (a) make it run smoothly and (b) learn other people's tongues?  If we are adverb adverse or nervous about nouns - how can we be sure that what we write is right? All this calls for a simple yet powerful solution: the return of basic grammar knowledge; an understanding that sentence structure is easy and can be fun. It is just a matter of applying a few simple common sense rules and then puttting them into practice. 

There are some very easy ways to master grammar: take a look at any piece of decent  writing and deconstruct it. It's like looking under the bonnet of your car, the more you look, the more sense all that wiring makes. Once you see how language works, with the bonnet raised as it were, the grammar rules just pop out at you. It does help if English is your native language: we already know 99 per cent of good grammar just bye the way we talk. But somehow, once we transfer our fluent thoughts on to paper, the grammatical gubbins seem to get in the way: 'should this be singular or plural?', 'should this be 's or s' or neither?'

Grammar is common sense and with a tiny bit of effort can be easily mastered. If you can speak English you can do grammar; have a go at it and if you see those chickens on their way back home, say 'hello' from me. 

Mike Levy coaches in writing and presentation skills and is developing a new one-day course in grammar.