Death (of the) Sentence

I'm making progress on the letter writing project: the first letter, to The Mistress of the Dark, will be mailed today, and the second one, to Amanda in Palembang, is about half-written. The other three will follow as I have the time to devote to their writing.

And speaking of writing...

Yesterday's Washington Post ran an interesting story titled, The Fate of The Sentence: Is the Writing On the Wall? The article discussed, in some detail, the sorry state of writing skills on the part of many people, and looked at some of the reasons for said sorry state. Text messaging is one obvious cause of the decline in effective writing, and although I send perhaps one text message per year, I've grown used to seeing comments to my posts containing things like LOL, ROFLMAO, YGBSM, and so on. Speed of composition and transmission often trumps elegance (or even completeness) of expression.

But the key issue here is how we define "effective writing." If the recipient of the message understands it and the desired response is elicited, one can argue that the writing is "effective," even if it violates all the established rules of grammar, punctuation, spelling, and composition that we (at least, those of my age and older) learned in school.

The Post article quotes James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, as seeing a "creeping inarticulateness," which is true to some extent. Tom Schactman's elegant book The Inarticulate Society made the same point a few years ago, and the Post article quotes an essay titled "Death of the Sentence" from Atlantic magazine...in the October 1937 issue.

As a linguist, I know that language is in a constant state of change. We can't stop that change any more than Canute could hold back the tide. But what we can do is insist on clarity of expression, accuracy of spelling, and more attention to composition that effectively transmits complex ideas and information. I spend much of my time at work reviewing and commenting on documents prepared by others, and I'm appalled at the quality of much of what I read that has supposedly been written by college graduates.

Now, I don't mean to suggest that I'm the supreme paragon of literary excellence...but I believe in good, well-thought-out, effective writing. I wish others did, too.

Have a good day. Watch your spelling. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo