The piece, by John Guiniven, notes that the writing skills of younger people are steadily eroding and cites futurists Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker, who suggest that "language is an endangered species, morphing and mutating right before our eyes – tribalized, more symbols than words."
Guniven also quotes Joe Gennaro of Kinetic Communications in Los Angles as saying that e-mail [and text messaging, too] has led people to believe that they can ignore sound writing principles.
We've all witnessed and likely participated in that game. How many e-mails or text messages have you sent that ignore capitalization, punctuation or proper spelling? You might say, "Who cares, as long as the message gets across?" OK. I'll concede that. But is the message getting across? Not all the time. My guess is that the flaws in our casual writing often reflect our not knowing the correct way to do things. So we mask it by pretending we don't care, that it doesn't matter, and besides, everybody else does it.
But is a sloppy approach to grammar, usage, punctuation and the structure of sound writing hamstringing our ability to communicate beyond our own small world of friends and co-workers?
I say yes. I see it every semester in my writing class: bright university students groping their way through the task of putting a few sentences together to form a meaningful piece of writing. They know what they want to say, but years of e-mailing and text messaging their buds hasn't given them the tools to communicate in the broader universe. Out there it's cold and lonely and you need potent rocketry to travel from one star to another. You need to know the fundamentals of writing, spelling, punctuation and grammar.
So let's not drive a stake through the heart of language just yet. Let's be brave enough to scrutinize our writing and ask ourselves the hard question: Does this really say what I want it to say? If the answer's no, let's figure out why and do something about it.
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