Elipsed Era

Nobody uses the period properly anymore. As to my last post, I will concede that there is a necessary difference in style between a research paper and a blog. However, what I meant by it, is that the blog shouldn't be used as an excuse to propogate bad english. Since one's [public] blog is presumably written for oneself, and for one's friends, it is logical to assume that one would want one's friends to be able to understand one's blogs. I'm not expecting blogs to be of newspaper calibre (although I personally abhore newspapers and their alleged linguistic standard). However, I do feel that if everybody at least wrote in natural english and employed basic punctuation, the reader would have a significantly easier time understanding the author.

And now, to the period.

It's extraordinary to see more and more decadence in the world as I venture further and further in to the "real" world. All e-mails internal and external to my company employ equally bad grammar. For a business, this is particularly concerning to me, as I would expect those who have 15 years' experience to know a little better than writing unintelligible e-mails, and expect them to be used as a basis for a new project. Especially since we deal primarily with schools. Am I supposed to now believe that our contemporary educators are about as capable as their students? In which case, school truely is a waste of time.

Anyway, by bad grammar I don't even mean nit-picky things like "too" instead of "to", or "twenty" instead of "20" for quantifiers. I mean entire sentence fragments.

e.g. "...a few corrections. The proper spelling for S. Abraham, D. Dunlope, J. Sinclair, and L. Ming not I. Ming."

Good luck finding the verb in that sentence...

I especially like it when they don't bother with periods at all, and don't bother making new lines either to make up for it. Just a large "paragraph" of text. It gets particularly confusing when they choose to use the period to note a short form, but not the end of a sentence.

e.g. "[product name] was not done plz. fix soon"

It helps me go crazy at work, when I already have oodles to do. I suppose part of my pickiness stems from my STFU-personality. (Or, as my [psych-major] sister would say, my INTP-personality. Read more about me here.)

It's kinda extraordinary, really, to see the sort of errors that alleged native speakers of English would make when they've spent all their time in English-speaking nations, with fellow native English-speakers. I can understand that not everyone has an aptitude for language, and that I shouldn't expect all ESL'ers to eventually speak fluent English in five years' time, but how does one manage to muck up one's mother tongue? General idiocy, I'd like to believe.

So really, people, how hard is it? Simply write what you mean, and mean what you write! That's it! Unless, of course, you're maintaining a secret cryptic society in which you write in code, but if that were the case, why would you so openly make it known that you were writing in code?

"He who would keep a secret must keep it secret that he has a secret to keep."