Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Readin’ and Writin’

As someone whose technology skills are, to be kind, “challenged” I will be the last person to dismiss how advances in that field have basically transformed virtually every process in our lives from the moment we rise until bedtime.

But with anything new and evolutionary there is always a law of unintended consequences. In this case I‘ve always maintained that our dependence on technology has caused us to take a step (or several steps) backward in terms of our basic literacy and writing skills.

Remember when you actually had to put pen (or pencil) to paper?

Maybe that’s just the long-time editor in me. But think about it, how many emails have you gotten over the past, say, six months, fraught with grammatical and spelling errors, incorrect homophones or basic clumsy sentence construction?

Probably more than you think. 

Case in point.

I recently received an email from an acquaintance who lamented on “how much time has past since we’ve saw each other.” Another one planning a group event encouraged everone to meet their at 8 pm.

You get my point.

Okay, to be fair, the above-cited were not official business correspondence, but again, I’ve received more than my share of communications from CPA firms and other businesses replete with enough egregious violations  to the language as to make a hastily composed sophomore English paper look professional by comparison.

Then again one of the wonderful things about a program such as Microsoft Word is the spell check option. Of course if you happen to leave one “a” out of the word “manager” for example it won’t help you since it is now the legitimate word “manger.”

Since I’m on the soapbox and have no intention of stepping down – two other points.

Don’t email something in ALL CAPS to make a point. It’s as annoying as if you’re yelling loudly in my ear.  SO PLEASE STOP!

And lastly, don’t abbreviate out of sheer laziness. “Thx”, NP (no problem), “fave” and of course “How RU”? are among the most annoying – I’m sure each of you has their favorites.

There, I feel so much better.

TTFN

I can’t believe I just wrote that.

No comments:

Post a Comment