KEY POINTS:
Trade Me members and other online message board users are being attacked for their mangling of the English language - and about time too.
While I can accept that some people truncate words and drop punctuation altogether in texts, there's simply no excuse for doing so in online communication. You're not charged by the letter, there are no time imperatives - I agree with Victoria University's associate professor of communication studies: the only reason for misspellings like "brooach", "signifigence" and "recieve" is ignorance. With maybe a dash of laziness thrown in.
When I'm writing, if I'm unsure of the correct spelling of a word, I'll look it up in the dictionary. I don't trust spell check - it's the dictionary for me and always will be. Misplaced apostrophes also wound me - seeing the Rupa's Bushells Coffee sign above the dairy in Freeman's Bay causes me a little pang of physical pain every time I drive past it. It's been years now and I still haven't got used to that ridiculously superfluous piece of punctuation.
Does it matter? In this age of relativism and anything goes, very little does matter these days. Unwed mothers, atheists, gay men and women - it's practically de rigeur for families to have at least one of these among their ranks to show they're up with the times. All of these I'm fine with but I'm right behind the punctuation purists and grammar guardians when it comes to trying to maintain standards.
Backsliders argue that if the message gets through, it doesn't matter how it's delivered. Well, it does. I would never buy anything from a Trade Me user whose post was littered with poor spelling and bad grammar. I would assume that they were as careless with their personal effects as they were with their language and that the product would be grubby, in poor condition and generally substandard.
Furthermore, I wouldn't hire a tradesman or shop at a store if their advertising material or shop signage contained errors. If they're not prepared to pay attention to the little details when it comes to their livelihoods, why would they care about the work they do for me?
Putting myself in the firing line, I met a thinlipped man at a function this year who said he hadn't read my column since he found a grammatical error in the first paragraph. I rather think I may have been a bit politically flabby for him anyway, but it's a fair point. Why on earth should anyone take the time to read something that the author has either failed to proofread or has proofread sloppily? Besides, bad English is costing money.
According to NBC News, a survey of Fortune 500 companies found they were spending more than US$3 billion a year retraining employees in basic English. And they weren't all second language speakers either. While I was surfing the net, looking for English language massacres on message boards (they're there and simply too numerous to list), I found a great debate going on between Geek Culture forum members who were taking a new member to task for failing to use basic grammar and correct spelling in his postings.
Sxeptomaniac put it best: "Spelling and grammar are about organising your thoughts in ways that will make sense to others without requiring them to consciously work at it. That's why lack of grammar and spelling is seen as rude here; you're asking us to expend extra effort to read your posts, because you were too lazy to expend that effort yourself when typing them."
Couldn't have put it better myself.
