Don't look like a jester when making a gesture...

The era of formal communications is dead, would you agree?  The notion of a communication starting with a salutation, date in the upper right corner, and handwritten sentiment appears to have moved into a novelty status reserved for our grandparent's generation, weddings, and holidays card. I’m okay with this downgrading of formality as it was bound to happen with the immediacy of today’s communication tools. Text, Twitter, FB, email, and blogs are all forms of communication that have an agreed upon level of informality built into them.  The most egregious of them, in my opinion, being twitter. I still refuse to get a twitter account because I do not want to be limited to 140 characters when expressing myself.  When I explained that reasoning to an acquaintance he informed me that there was an app for that...an app that would hold the rest of your “tweet” that people could go view and read.   My inner child face palmed, while outwardly I said, “oh cool”.  But truthfully, I don’t get the point of bastardizing language just because we can. Is there a “cool” factor associated with writing in abbreviations and generally rejecting capitalization and punctuation? 
 

Overheard joke:  What’s the difference between screwing a 18 y.o. and a 28 y.o.?  The 28 y.o. old screams “oh my god!” when she comes, the 18 y.o. screams “O.M.G.!”

So why the set up on formality of speech? What point is she getting to? And what’d Twitter ever do to her?!

In a world where “omg ur bff is dtf! brb b!” is understood by a majority of the population I find myself asking just because we can understand shorthand, should that be the default quality level in all scenarios?  Shorthand, born of a necessity to adhere to character limits and mask activities from nosey parents, has crept into more formal communication platforms and I see no end in sight.  Even when writing this little post I have had to prevent myself from shortening words and emoticoning all over the place.  We are the "lol" generation and naturally trend towards informal...where is that new line for how casual we should be?  Its a legitimate question and also kind of my point for this post. This is a blog. This is the other end of the spectrum for “casual” communication and as such should have some sort of editing applied to it before posting. Yes/No? Not so much editing that the conversational, carefree whimsy of blogging is lost, but enough that we aren’t mocking your grammar instead of digesting your words.

To be clear, I’m not talking about an occasional your/you’re, their/they’re kind of mistakes. Everyone makes those, and in no way should our enjoyment of a good blog hinge on 100% adherence to the correct use of grammar.  We all know to just replace the word in our head and continue reading. No harm, no foul. (ß see that sentence. It wasn’t an actual sentence as it lacked a verb, but you knew the intent.)  I’m talking about running across bloggers who have a rampant disregard for any semblance of the written language.  Whose lack of proof reading actually pulls the reader from the enjoyment of the story because they have to figure out what s/he meant. Just a few examples… examples are always good…

As written:          allot, ive,  wont, im  (across multiple posts, multiple times)

As intended:       a lot, I’ve, won’t, I’m 
 

As written:          I like a moron fell…

As intended:       I, like a moron, fell…
 

As written:          women want to be swept off their feet with little jesters like that…
As intended:       women want to be swept off their feet with little gestures like that…

 

All I am saying is if you are going to stand on a soapbox and judge others as being idiots, you had best be sure you don’t end up looking like the fool.

 

Jester: (noun) a professional fool or clown, especially at a medieval court.