Fellow grammar snobs, I feel I must resign from your ranks.
Sure, we've had some good times—not just when we judged the masses, but especially when we got the chance to snicker about one another’s mistakes.
I do still believe that good communication is important to success. But while you and I were bickering about Byzantine rules, we didn't even notice that our Byzantine
A Farewell to Precision: Stop Judging and Start Experimenting
Grammatical perfection, at this point in the Internet age, has been slain by speed and buried by quantity. Good communication isn't dead, but yesterday's notion of good communication is dead. It's being replaced by visuals, by sounds, by textual shorthands, by a wondrous palette of new possibility.
And while we’ve been judging 13-year-olds for writing "your" instead of "you're," those teens are developing a capacity to speak in a language that's probably superior to ours. I raised an eyebrow when I recently saw how well my young niece and nephew collaborate on games like Minecraft: It dawned on me that they've already developed some forms of intuition and intelligence and communication that are beyond my own reach.
Indeed, the rules for storytelling, interaction and engagement are far too different now for us to nitpick our way through other people's writing. And so typos are on the rise everywhere, yet we're surviving. Major news publications post articles quickly, without the benefit of a rigorous scrubbing. This is painful to classicists. But I sense we classicists are reactionaries, dinosaurs noisily drowning in the tar pits.
The New Literacy Isn't a Science, it's Free-Form Art
Yes, I've penned some pieces on what good grammar looks like, and which mistakes could hurt you in the workplace or reduce your persuasiveness.
Yet the old grammar rules were never a science, even if we acted like they were. Today people speak and respond with GIFs, with Vines, with soundtracks and a full multimedia arsenal. This new literacy is a kind of art, a fast-evolving form of art. Such art has few rules and considerable latitude for improvisation.
So What's Acceptable in 2014?
Look, I'm not calling for federally mandated sloppiness or for English teachers to start giving As to students who don't know the difference between "weather" and "whether." But I am suggesting that grammar snobs concede that as a new kind of literacy emerges, we ourselves may have more to learn than to teach.
Some writers and educators concede that the past era’s standards can’t apply today. “When I was a journalism student, our grades on papers dropped a full grade for each typo that we let slip through—and that was before spell check,” says Lorynne Young, a writer in Los Angeles. “By the time I was the journalism instructor, the spelling and grammar mistakes were so prevalent I would have had to fail all my students if I held them to the same standards.” Still, Young believes that while standards are slacker for everyone, one has to still draw a line somewhere. “I told them that if there were errors in their spelling and grammar, their readers might assume that they were equally sloppy in their research and fact checking,” she says.
"Texting, most emails, status updates, Twitter, and comments on blogs are equivalent to speech,” says Cincinnati-based writer and educator Julie Sweeney, founder of Brave Writer. “It's obnoxious in speech to correct grammar in informal conversations, when the meaning is perfectly clear." She suggests similar charity in the online arena.
Sweeney also is optimistic about the opportunities for new forms of expression. “The proliferation of writing in many contexts frees people to be expressive,” she says, “only if they aren’t constantly barraged by the grammar police, which is a hold-over from high school English red-penning. We should always value content over form anyway.”
Benjamin Hershleder, an AVID editor and instructor in Hollywood, suggests that perfection isn’t an end in itself in human communications, and that attention to detail is mainly a means to ensure that you get your point across. “Film editors borrowed a saying from carpenters,” he says, “and I think it also applies to other communications as well: Measure twice, cut once.”
Bernie Bleske, an English teacher at the American School of Dubai, argues that, even while the rules evolve, everyone should aspire to excellence in the craft of communication. “Regardless of where we are headed, you will be judged, especially by those who have earned the authority," he tells me. "That's just business sense. This would happen in any profession: You can't make mistakes in the game you are playing.”
I would agree. But I also suspect we will all soon spend less time squabbling over how many dots should be in ellipses and more time experimenting freely. And with less fear of judgment.
