Gene Weingarten recently wrote a brilliant article summarizing what many of us editors have been thinking for years. The English language, having suffered the slings and arrows of poor copyediting and persistent abuse in both verbal and written forms, has given up the ghost.
Read it here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/13/AR2010091304476.html
My favorite bit: “[English] succumbed last month at the age of 1,617 after a long illness. It is survived by an ignominiously diminished form of itself.”
Well done, Gene. And well edited, too!
Newspapers Have Let Us Down
Gene writes that “newspaper publishers have been cutting back on the use of copy editing, sometimes eliminating it entirely.” He then cites several examples from newspapers both major and minor.
He is absolutely correct. And this is not a new thing. I remember back in high school (in the early 1990s), reading my hometown newspaper in Indianapolis, and being appalled at the number of mistakes I saw. Once, my cheeky teenage self even tore a page out of the newspaper, circled about a dozen mistakes with red marker like an English teacher marking up an essay, and mailed the entire page in to the paper’s editors with a note to the effect of, “Isn’t anyone copyediting this stuff?!” Shockingly, I got no response.
It’s so sad when newspapers let the rules of the English language slide. Many of us grew up thinking of newspapers as respected authorities. After all, they were the professionals. They’d been in the business of producing excellent written work for decades, sometimes hundreds of years. Editors and writers aspired to work for newspapers and were thrilled to land a job at one. If anyone could be counted on to treat the English language with respect, newspapers could, we thought.
Newspapers used to be the heroes of the written word. That’s why it’s so disappointing when they lower their standards. It’s like seeing any hero fall from grace.
I don’t know whether newspapers will survive at all in the long run, with the advent of online media. But I’d hate to watch them succumb to a slow, painful death, beginning with the deterioration of their high standards of quality.
Do Grammar Rules Have a Place in Modern Media?
Many writers, notably Lynne Truss in her book Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, have asked this question before.
Is “correct” English doomed? Does the advent of self-publishing make the rules of good communication irrelevant?
I would argue that grammar rules are, and always will be, valuable and important. Their purpose is to make written language clear and easy to understand. Commas tell us where to pause. Proper spelling and punctuation makes it clear whether we mean their, they’re, or there. With well-structured text, the reader doesn’t have to waste energy tripping over errors and wondering what the author meant.
People who don’t care much for grammar rules seem to feel that the rules are nit-picky, inconvenient, and basically not worth bothering with. They seem to think that they can get their point across without sticking to some arcane rules that they barely remember from junior high English class.
I disagree. To me, poorly written text sends a message to the reader that that the author doesn’t care about whether or not the reader understands the text. And if you, the author, don’t care about my experience as a reader, I find that I care less about your ideas as an author.
As a side note, I’d love to know if this same question has been asked by speakers of other languages. Surely there are plenty of self-publishers in French, Spanish, Swedish, etc., and I’d bet they’re mangling the rules just as English speakers are. Are they, too, bemoaning the state of their beloved language and reporting on its demise?
What do you think? When you read a blog or other self-published work full of mistakes, does it make you have less respect for what you read? Or, are the ideas ultimately more important than how they are communicated?
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