Alphabet Soup, Anyone?
Okay, count me in with the old fogies, the curmudgeons, those who speak of the good old days (even when, lurking in the backs of our minds, is the sure knowledge that there never was any such thing).
I love email. I love the fact that I don’t have to wait days or weeks for replies to questions I send out. I love the fact that I can email twice as many people in half the time it used to take me to write a note by hand or typewriter.
But … but. There’s email, which is a semi (at least) articulate form of communication, where typos may exist but are regarded with friendly acceptance, and yet which obey the general grammatical and stylistic rules to which we have all become accustomed.
And then there’s text-messaging-speech.
A member on a list to which I subscribe writes incessantly in text-message format. It’s not the silly abbreviations that bother me as much as the punctuation (or lack thereof) that follows no rule with which I am familiar, an almost complete absence of capital letters, and a rigorousness of thought to match.
It’s like reading messages written with alphabet cereal … in the bowl.
Perhaps as we move toward a new year we can remember that the point of all this is communication, and that rules of grammar and usage are in place for a reason: to facilitate said communication. And then we’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in About Writing, Grammar, Words on December 26th, 2007