COMMENT: Make your language effective

Aug 13 2009 Lewis Harrison for The Journal

PEOPLE have lng cmplnd (sorry, long complained) that modern technologies are ruining the English language.

The first culprit was email. The complaint being that emails encouraged informality and prized speed of response above structure, spelling and punctuation. Next in the firing line was texting, which further eroded standards by actually providing a financial incentive to abbreviate and plump for acronyms instead of long-form words (particularly for teenagers using pay-as-you-go phones).

Now there’s Twitter, which encourages – nay, insists upon – even greater brevity by restricting messages to just 140 characters. If you can’t get across what you wanted to in the requisite number of symbols then, well, ur jus gonna hav 2 shrtn ur wrds evn mor.

I’ve stressed over these issues myself, in the past. As a writer it pains me to see an ampersand (&) used instead of ‘and’, or commas and full stops omitted in a bid to save precious characters. “WOULD IT KILL YOU TO USE AN APOSTROPHE, YOU UNTHINKING BUFFOON?” is a regular cry in the Harrison household, as you can probably imagine.

The question is what should we do about all of this? Does it really matter that children are growing up thinking that it’s OK (ahem, okay, I mean) to overlook correct punctuation.

Never one to sit on the fence, I think the answer is both yes and no. Of course it matters if correct spellings and punctuation marks are ignored for no good reason, or, worse, because they simply aren’t understood. But the fact is that language changes. It always has and always will – and technology is often the driver of this change.

So there’s no point in getting sniffy when the way people use these symbols changes again.

For me, the rule to stick to is this: whatever you’re writing – be it a blog post or email, a formal letter or job application – make it as effective as possible.

What worries me about some of the acronyms or abbreviations used in text messaging and tweets is that unlike, say, punctuation marks, they put the writer’s interests ahead of the reader’s. That’s all wrong. The reader should always come first.

Everything you write should be informed by these factors. If that means that you need to abbreviate in order to get your message across clearly and effectively then go ahead and do it. If it doesn’t, then don’t.

Because if you’re not effective, you’ll soon be forgotten.

Lewis Harrison is communications manager at Codeworks, the North East’s centre for digital innovation.