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.
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.
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