Friday, January 19, 2007

In my day, we could punctuate

I guess I should start off by saying that I'm a copy editor. That said, I make typos and grammatical errors when I write things like, say, my blog or an e-mail. I also love the Internet.

What's really bothering me is that people seem to have a hard time writing a coherent sentence these days, and I think the Internet and text messaging are to blame. When I'm on MySpace.com, I notice that people can't spell to save their lives. They use NO punctuation and pepper their writing with homophones (not to be confused with homophobes). Today's youths don't seem to know the difference between there, their and they're. And they don't care.

alot oftimes when yur online you see rwiting like this and there isnt any puntuation and its full of misspelled words u know they run sentences together and abbreviate the most useless thigns they have typos everywhere and never heard of a period it just drives me crazy you know because who wants to read this did u

One girl went on a forum and insulted everyone. But her writing was so bad that much of the time you couldn't understand her. Her excuse was she writes like she talks, which is really pathetic. She privately messaged me that I had crossed the line for pointing out that we couldn't understand her because her writing was so awful, even though she appeared proud as punch about her bad grammar. An example would be, "yea yea no so what i dont care i writes hows i talk." And she was a 17-year-old white girl from Pennsylvania.

When I used to go on a wedding chat board, I was relieved to see that when people would write posts like that, other girls would tell them to use punctuation or they weren't going to bother reading it.

((In old lady voice:))
In my day, we used periods at the end of sentences, and you could tell when it ended. We used commas for pauses and capital letters for proper nouns. In my day, you didn't abbreviate words just to save the effort of typing two letters. And you could understand what people were trying to say! And then I walked 2 miles to school in the snow, uphill both ways.

My point is, no, I don't write perfectly when I'm online, but I try to make it readable. That's all I'm asking.

1 comment:

TimMc said...

Robyn,

In the age of text messaging and passing kids on to the next grade level it's only going to get worse. Or perhaps I should say, "goin' 2 get werse."

Tim