Today's Times had a story about findings from a Pew study indicating that the informal language style common in electronic messaging has creeped into school work. In addition to the use of obvious faux pas like "LOL" and emoticons within academic work, students were also omitting more basic tenets of linguistic arts such as punctuation and capitalization.
Before more ranting occurs, please consider the following snippet from said article:
“I think this is not a worrying issue at all,” said Richard Sterling, emeritus executive director of the National Writing Project, which aims to improve the teaching of writing.
“I think in the future, capitalization will disappear,” said Professor Sterling, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. In fact, he said, when his teenage son asked what the presence of the capital letter added to what the period at the end of the sentence signified, he had no answer.
Good god. Not only am I mortified that he is a professor at my alma mater, I cannot imagine a humanities-minded academic who doesn't appreciate the well-placed comma, period, hyphen, etc., let alone have no answer for their significance.
Before I get into a discussion of punctuation, first let me admit that I'm not the biggest fan of capitalization myself; it slows me down when I'm editing anything, and I appreciate e.e. cummings' disuse of it -- all the same, it certainly serves a purpose. Imagine if I asked you to have a drink at death after work. You might think it a poorly veiled (and constructed) threat. On the other hand, if I asked you to meet me at Death, you might know it's a location.
More importantly in my mind, though, is a disregard for punctuation. Punctuation is how we communicate pauses, emphases, stops, and more. The written word, without the benefit of facial expressions (unless the emoticon becomes standard), gestures, and vocal cadence, must depend on word choice and punctuation to relay nuance from writer to reader. This is communication. This is the very essence of the written medium. It is an art and a craft, and it is beautiful.
Yes, language is alive and must evolve. At some point, though, we must ask if we are succumbing to it's retrogradation rather than its progress.
:P
