daily black diary: defective or effective mode of writing

When it comes to the teaching of writing, I wonder at times if it would be easier to teach writing skills in Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese or any other languages which are not constrained by a particular writing convention - like having to revert to capital letters at the start of a sentence, a proper noun or even the first person pronoun 'I' or the royal 'We', as would be the case for the English language.

I would imagine that while we English teachers and lecturers have to look out for such features we call 'mistakes", when marking students' work or when editing materials written in English, those who teach languages like the ones mentioned above (and many other world languages), would not have to spend time nor bother about looking out for such discrepancies when grading students or when editing other people's work.

And, because the written Malay language as it is widely used today, has adopted the Romanised (notice the capital M and R?) script, Malay teachers and those who write in the language, using what we call the 'rumi' (or Romanised) script, have to observe the same ruling as in English writing. Thus, we make a fuss of youngsters today who are influenced by sms language at the expense of supposedly good writing skills.

However, considering that hanyu pinyin, the script used by speakers of Mandarin, Arabic, the Japanese kanji (notice the capital M, A and J?), and some other languages which are free from the rigid rules of Romanised scripts, are extensively used and well understood by speakers of the respective languages, I would say that there are stark weaknesses in Romanised scripts compared to those not carrying the old Western imperial baggage. Therefore, why are we penalising learners or criticising those who fail (or choose not) to observe the rudiments of the Romanised script adopted by whatever world language?

Could it be fate or destiny that natives of Malaysia and some other ASEAN countries, which were once ruled by Western Colonial Masters (notice all the capital letters here?), have to bear the burden borne of a defective writing system of yonder years? And yet feel smug about criticising those who choose not to be part of a weak writing system...

How about the use of the masculine personal pronouns in English when referring to God and thus insinuating that masculinity is a divine trait...? This is not at all an issue for speakers of a language (like Malay) which does not observe gender differences in the use of pronouns?

Time to take a break and start on some other pressing matters...