From: "Zachary Steiner" <zsteiner@butler.edu> Date: Sat, 7 Dec 2002 15:13:40 -0500
One contributing factor to the decline of written English is all this wonderful technology we have. The phone started the trend; we no longer have to write letters. Television and cinema continued the trend reducing the amount reading. The Internet is the nasty culprit currently. Email--what seemed like a return to written communication--turned out to amplify the laziness of spoken language. Very few people pay attention to punctuation, capitalization, or spelling, let alone more advanced grammatical concerns in their emails. Most charge through the writing of an email and shoot it off as quickly as possible. Is it really too difficult to use spell check?
The Net is a great scapegoat. Religious nuts and newscasters love to say that it's destroying the youth of today, etc.. I don't believe that letters that were written with pens/pencils/typewriters were necessarily more thoughtful. It's actually easier to re-type and correct a letter on a computer (I find, at least). It always has to do with who's the author. As you point out, there's plenty of people on this list who have intelligent things to say.
The current American educational system, of which I am a part, is also to blame.
There's no question that it's a huge problem! Best, Jason Perfect Sound Forever online music magazine with warped perspectives perfect-sound@furious.com http://www.perfectsoundforever.com