Write it right ~ plural words

Why people can't spell

I've been teaching my writing classes why pronouns must agree with their antecedents.  While reading blogs this morning, I ran across this sentence:

"...some artist risk their lives to create and speak in a hostile environment."

artist = singular subject
their = plural pronoun

The pronoun their refers back to artist.  One or the other is incorrect.  I read the whole paragraph and know the writer intended the plural artists, yet she consistently used the singular word artist instead;

"We learn about many Haitian artist."

many = more than one
artist = singular

I think the problem is not about spelling, but about hearing.  It's hard to distinguish between the spoken words artist and artists, but they look different on a page.  A careful reader should notice that one word has an "s" on the end and the other does not.  People cannot spell correctly because they don't read and thus are unable to really hear what is said.  Here are other examples of writers having problems with plurals that I've run across today:

"I may be one of the rare person who has not read this book."
"I picked up seven novels and six DVD."
"...a countless amounts of dreams..." (The whole phrase is a mess.)

Cheating in class

I discovered another reason why students may be confused about plurals.  During yesterday's grammar test, one young man was was looking up something on his large-screen cell phone, which I confiscated until the end of class.  I teach at a college, yet his screen showed me that he was looking up "PLURAL."  Could you tell me the plurals of bird and baby?  Those were two of the eight words on the test.  It occurred to me that he didn't know the meaning of the word plural.  Maybe I should start with vocabulary:

plural = more than one
antecedent = preceding

I told my early class yesterday their biggest writing problem was failing to listen to the instructions.  A few minutes later one young man said, "Would you repeat that?  I was working on something else."  No one seemed to notice the irony, and I am rapidly losing hope that I can get through to some of them.

This is the first in a new series about words and writing.