Does Grammar Really Matter Anymore?
Answer: More than ever. Stop the laziness, and improve your communications
Of all the topics that should ring old and stodgy in our Web 2.0 age, grammar would seem to top the list. Schools have stopped teaching it. Authors have stopped using it. Cellphones flatly discourage it. What a strange thing it is, then, that few issues are as hotly debated online as the significance of grammatical guidelines in the digital world. Rigorous debate flows from blog posts that advocate capitalization in E-mail sentences or entries that defend typos as a natural outcome of modern, discursive thinking. But the online disputes ultimately answer their own question: Grammar matters more than ever because we communicate by written word more than ever now, and the viability of online discourse depends on the clarity of our messages. This is not your kindergarten teacher talking. In a recent AOL survey, 68 percent of respondents said E-mails with spelling and punctuation errors annoyed them.
Here are some guidelines for your E-mails and blog entries:
Word misuse: Last month, in the New York Times Book Review, critic Katie Hafner took author Sarah Lacy to task for her use of the word rearchitect. Lacy's writing was "at best, informal," Hafner sniffed. But marketing whiz and blogger Seth Godin crafted a whole post recently on his appreciation for the use of the word architect as a verb.
Misusing words really grinds some people's gears—editors often get steamed when impact is used as a verb—and architect is no different. "That drives architects crazy," says Patricia O'Conner, coauthor of You Send Me: Getting It Right When You Write Online and the Grammarphobia blog. "I get a lot of mail about that."
The Internet has encouraged jargon to spread more rapidly than ever before—even prompting further linguistic manipulation as past jargon becomes trendy, then overused and, ultimately, retired. "Dictionaries may or may not have caught up with the usage. I don't know; does that make it OK?" O'Conner asks. "What really makes something OK," she says, is how well the language conveys the "idea that a person wants to get across." One major problem with trendy language is that the definition may eventually change fashion, and the E-mail or blog entry will be archived and read later in a different context.
Capitalization. Proper E-mail etiquette is not just about image, as is most often suggested; it's about communication. Capitalization is an issue of readability, O'Conner says: "I think that people who don't follow those conventions—it's not just that they're being unconventional and trendy—they are diminishing the readability and usefulness of their message." It conveys a tone, as well, that suggests the writer didn't take the time to use proper grammar because the reader wasn't worth it.
Karen Burns, a blogger at Karen Burns, Working Girl and guest blogger for U.S. News, professes in her blog to be a fanatic about grammar. Burns says good communication "means considering your reader's needs first," and E-mails without capital letters create extra work for readers. "They may spend more energy on mentally correcting each uncapitalized word than on reading and understanding your message," Burns says.
Typos. Penelope Trunk is a sufficiently successful blogger (read: she makes enough money) that she has an editor look over her entries. Even so, mistakes happen. In April, Trunk announced, in the title of a blog entry, that "writing without typos is totally outdated." Trunk argues that a blog writer's limited amount of time is better spent on generating new ideas than fixing comma splices.
Not surprisingly, O'Conner disagrees. She finds the idea a bit "depressing." When a blog isn't carefully edited for typos, it suggests that the content is meant only to be quickly scanned and disposed of—rather than carefully considered, archived, and reread. Blog writers owe it to their readers, and themselves, to ensure that their words last.
Spelling. Misspelled words will kill your blog's usefulness in a search, O'Conner says. Spell "globalization" wrong, and readers will never find your entry on the upside of outsourcing.
Fixing grammatical mistakes and typos or correcting the spelling of words used to be difficult, but computers have made it incredibly simple. Any blogger who's interested in creating something of "perpetual value" needs to treat misspelled words and typos with an equally unflinching red pen, O'Conner says.
There's no great secret solution. Many bloggers don't have access to editors or grammar-minded friends, so all they can do is reread. E-mails are almost never edited, so writers should abide by the same principle. Take the extra seconds to reread your words. Your recipient will certainly appreciate it.
Reader Comments
Grammar Decline
If I were arguing for careful usage but had just written "There is people" and called myself a "writer in Kansas," as above, or some of the several glaring errors by “Southwestern Kansas,” above, I would post anonymously, too.
I have noted the grating split infinitive, such as "to not go," in the New York Times, and even the Wall Street Journal, etc., many times lately—enough, indeed, to make me wonder where this error originates. Incredible errors get past fact and grammar checkers in textbooks. The front pages of the local newspapers out here obviously were never run through an electronic spell check, and grammar, syntax, and usage, much less punctuation, are downright haphazard, with the result that they are largely unintelligible and undecipherable. I have read several articles in print about, and announcements of, scheduled events that omitted so much basic “who, what, when, where, and why” information that you can’t attend.
Many Web comment forms, including this one, do not provide for spelling checks, so, having been born with uncorrectable vision problems that make proofreading impossible, though, fortunately, I can read rapidly if the type is big enough, I compose practically all of my posts in Word. I have turned off parts of Word’s grammar checker because it keeps suggesting grossly bad grammar and usage.
Students in college, much less high school, are no longer required to read many of the classic works, or good contemporary writings, in their entirety. I think this is one of the fundamental causes of this decline. The quantity of reading required is also way down from my college days, and they read only small extracts from many books. I did more formal writing in sixth grade than many of these students do in
their entire academic careers.
A retired lawyer, I have seen too many contracts, laws, and court opinions where a misplaced comma or grammatical error, not to mention pure carelessness in both thought and drafting, compounded by a computer, and never reviewed, created expensive havoc, but must admit that I read the language of one multi-million dollar contract in a recent case on appeal without spotting the million-dollar ambiguity, resolved against the draftsman, the first time through, though it was obvious once you spotted it or it was called to your attention. Those documents are supposed to have been written by one lawyer from the top of his class with a $185,000 starting salary and reviewed by others more experienced and better paid.
The schools have sent me many senior trainees who obviously have never been taught how to alphabetize, much less to analyze and diagram a sentence, something I still use whey trying to decipher often-obtuse legal writing, write a simple business letter, much less an essay or research paper, nor to balance a checkbook—and those were some of the better ones who I actually hired and who turned out well. Until recently, a quarter of the students at the second-tier state university here, many of whom are training to become teachers, could not pass the required Junior Level Essay exam. Too many teachers’ writing, and spoken language, is appalling. A lot of lawyers avoid writing, and are no good at it.
It is amazing what reading some of your own, or others', language over after a good night's sleep can do for the quality of your writing.
Grammar Does Matter
The way we speak and write is a reflection on society; get it done quick, clean up the mess later..As is said in industry, there's not enough time to do it right the first time, but there always time to do it over; not the shining example the United States should be to the rest of the world..which in some places is still looked up to
grammar, matter
I become asthonished when I realize there is people that believe grammar does not matter anymore. without doubt this people lack more than a basic education, and good education, since really good education is what is lacking to many poped-culture people manipulated for the media. Because of that, a few now reach hills in the education ladder. I have heard people that although they were born here and got some basic education, they cannot themselves express clear verbally. What a sad educational landscape in this beautiful land of opportunities.
A writer living in Southwest Kansas.
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