Written in English
Posted on
Working where I do, I'm frequently asked to proof read a variety of documents: usually marketing literature or magazines that we're sending to our customers. It's something I don't really mind doing—it beats real work and passes the time quite well. There's also a part of me that relishes finding and correcting spelling or grammatical errors and ensuring that the documents the company I work for sends out are of a suitably high standard. Put simply, I like the English language and prefer to see it used properly.
The thing is, I don't think what I do is particularly unusual. For the most part, my education, adequate as it was, wasn't exactly impressive by any means, least of all in the subject of English language. I'm certainly not an Oxonian, Cantabrigian or even Etonian, and yet I seem to be in a shocking minority of individuals who like to write properly, using well-structured English. I find the amount of documents, correspondence and printed literature I see with blatant errors in it to be quite shocking.
There's a growing culture of modern shorthand. It takes the form of text speak (sometimes abbreviated to 'txt spk' because vowels are presumably too tricky to master), which is popular on mobile phones, but frequently appears in other forms of electronic media; email, internet forums, chat rooms and instant messaging applications being among the main candidates. The shorthand often abbreviates words, sometimes to the extent of changing the letters of the original entirely to create a sort of forced phoneticism. Initially, it was used to fit more words into a text message (the limit for most SMS messages being 160 characters), but the trend caught on and spread, encouraging a lazy use of the language. This is, perhaps, at least in part responsible for the growing nonchalance towards so many forms of written communication.
Languages adapt and evolve as time goes by. Writing from even just one hundred years ago might seem strange today in the same country in which it was written. Nevertheless, standards of literacy seem to have tumbled in recent years and it would be a pity to see such a worrying decline continue.
To this day, I still use plain English, with correct punctuation as required, as much as is reasonably possible in emails and text messages. Perhaps it is a solitary protest, but I am nevertheless pround to be able to do my part to preserve English literacy. And I'm still learning.
To those, like me, who are interested in preserving the language, I recommend reading the work of Lynne Truss; in particular, her now famous book, Eats, Shoots and Leaves (978 184668 035 9). The author also has some exceptional articles on the topic in her 'Journalism' archive on her website at www.lynnetruss.com (I can highly recommend the one entitled Why arnt childrun being tort how 2 rite?).