The current state of literacy is getting me down.
I do not think that it is only a romantic notion that our society was at one point quite adept at writing letters. At one point, I believe that people actually cared about composition and spelling and grammar. That appears to no longer be the case, at least for the majority of the population.
Although the speed of communication today is remarkable and desirable, it also has the drawback of being almost too fast. Once upon a time, we wrote letters to one another and sent them by post. The time it takes to write and mail a letter meant that we gave more thought to what it was that we were writing. We no longer take careful thought and consideration before communicating our ideas; instead, we simply type them into an e-mail and hit the “send” button without properly re-reading it. The most we’ll do is scan the e-mail quickly to ensure it says what we want it to say.
What upsets me about this is that public relations representatives for companies are some of the worst at doing this. As a health blogger and review writer, I receive many requests from companies to write reviews for their products. An astonishing number of their media contacts will write to me with a word or punctuation missing from a sentence. These are common typos; mistakes that arise from carelessness and a belief that communicating quickly is more important than communicating in an articulate fashion.
It only takes a minute or two to copy and paste the e-mail into a Word document to check for spelling. It only takes an extra hour to set aside the e-mail correspondence after writing it, to return to it and read it over again and edit it for mistakes. I appreciate a prompt reply if I am corresponding with someone in the media, but I also appreciate seeing that the person has taken the time to consider what they are saying and how they are saying it.
Our work can never be edited too many times. There is always one more thing that we can change and improve. It doesn’t have to be perfect when it goes public, but it should be as perfect as you can make it in the allotted time space that you have. Put the effort in to show that you care, and people will respond in kind.
I agree, and it will only get worse due to “shorthand” that so many people are using now, such as “idk”, “u” for you, etc. I have received e-mails from professional people who, as you say, should know better with errors and shorthand. I hope we can reverse the trend, but idk if it’s possible. LOL. Wow, I got two in. 🙂 (make that three with the emoticon.
Using shorthand really lacks a professional demeanor. And it just seems unnecessary… when writing e-mails, it doesn’t take much more than a few extra seconds to write out an entire word or phrase rather than shortening it down.
I’m an abberration… I edit my emails far more than my letters.
Also on the topic of shorthand, various forms of shorthand has always existed. And research has found texting actually to be improving young peoples’ spelling, mostly based on word prediction, and that there is a lot less shorthand (and more correct uses of words and punctuation) going on than most people think.
Ha, that’s funny that you edit your e-mails more than your letters! I’ve heard of conflicting research with regards to texting improving spelling, however… I want to see your research. I will lend you a book which backs up my position 😀
I also think twitter has a hand in this (unknowingly). If you only have 140 characters to get your point across, naturally you are going to shorten things as best you can. And that’s ok in informal communication like that. Westwood does have a point, but I am speaking from an educator’s point of view as well. I have students who truly don’t see the error in inserting common shorthand phrases that we see in e-mail into a paper or even test answer.
On a not too related note, this discussion reminded me of my favorite scenes from a Laura Ingalls Wilder book where her mother received a letter from a relative and they had written on both sides, then turned the paper 90 degrees around and filled up the margins. I used to love imagining that.
I remember that scene! So good. And yes: for INFORMAL communication, shorthand makes sense, but from a professional point of view, there’s definitely a problem with it. And if it has a negative impact on our ability to put a sentence together, then we’ve got some real issues to sort out.