By coincidence I received a request from two different people at the same moment to post the same information to our site. The style of the requests were completely different and goes to illustrate a couple of different things that have evolved during the electronic age.
Request one: can u post
Request two: Can we post this on our alert page? (followed by the page url)
Evolution one would have to be the loss of politeness. It is not always what you ask, as in the case, but how you ask. As you can imagine my response to the one request was probably similar to being barked at by a dog and my response to the other was probably a little more reasonable.
Evolution two may assist in the clarification of the loss of politeness. Evolution two is the loss of grammar or possibly the eradication of grammar. I recall a conversation I had with a colleague almost twenty-years ago in which we discussed the loss of eloquence. At the time my colleague had just seen an exhibit of letters from the second World War. Someone at the exhibit had relayed their dismay at how young people could no longer write properly. Not in concern to handwriting but regarding storytelling and the use of the English language. I am sure some of the dismay had to be about poor grammar. I often fall prey to poor grammar but it is typically the result of me being excessively complicated and not from over simplifying. The amount of green lines that appear in some of my documents often outnumber the number of hyperbolic statements I make.
Being grammatically correct is a form of politeness. It states to the reader that the writer cares enough about both the subject matter in which he or she is writing about and cares enough about the reader to take the time to write correctly. I can come up with several reasons why in the electronic age we use abbreviated words in a grammar-less message: keyboard and screen size, on the move, it has become the convention, it doesn’t matter as long as the message is conveyed. As many lawyers may tell you “there are always exceptions to the rules but the truth be told I believe we should always make the effort to use proper grammar. Certainly in our writing, conversational grammar versus colloquial speech is a horse of a different color all together.
As an advanced society with great number of tools to correct our grammar, spelling and generally atrocious writing, as well as teaching tools, style guides, grammar podcasts, and with social media hounding our every slip-up I might think or even expect our grammar and our writing to improve. I will make a promise the few people who read this blog, I will make every effort possible to use proper grammar when writing entries to this blog. I will even go so far as to promise the same when I tweet. Although, 140 characters can be a limit, thankfully it can also be a blessing.
*Any grammatical errors ain’t my fault.
