The Colby Echo

Issue date: 4/30/08 Section: Opinions

Media Credit: Margie Gribbell

This being the last Bassett column for this school year, I had hoped to leave you all in stitches with some howlers dominating the newspapers and magazines I read. But an article by Anick Jesdanun, an AP Internet writer, tripped me up. So this last effort features Bassett the curmudgeon :(, not Bassett the sweet old man :).

The AP piece documents the informal teenage "style" that seems to be creeping into written assignments for courses in the schools. Like the smiley or frowney faces above that so cutely convey personal states of mind among the hormonally enraptured writers. Who see no distinction between formal writing (to be submitted to semi-public venue like a teacher or in a letter or on a posting on a blog or e-mail) and person-to-person sloppiness.

Now, we're talking real teenage artifice-no capital letters, no visible punctuation, lots of abbreviations like LOL (non-teens need a translation: "laughing out loud"). The clever generation often has instruments from which "text messaging" can become "writing" in the same way that an essay for your professor in classics is "writing." And we hear moans of grief from the tappy-tappers when that mean old professor demands something different from what you and Buffy think is communication personified (LOL).

What we're talking about here is a gap that most often favors the older, stuffier generation, who are used to periods at the end of sentences and capitalization of all kinds of words-someone must have mentioned capital letters in primary school. But capitals are passe for a generation who allow their cute intra-generational electronic "anything goes" communications to serve their purposes both as Buffy's confidant and as the author of a classics paper. Is it obvious that the writer does not know his/her AUDIENCE and its expectations.

I have no hope to change the tappy-tappers or even the e-mail writers. We live in a world that features students on Mayflower Hill with cell phones seemingly welded to their ears as they make plans to meet Lance for lunch at Bobs (they left Lance ten minutes ago). But I'll just bet that the Colby English Department (supposedly the official grammar police and mechanics mavens) still requires "formal" writing in assignments. I can't imagine ANY writing for college credit that doesn't require correct punctuation and spelling. Government's Sandy Maisel is particularly meticulous here. Nasty old people :(.

Hey, Jen Cox, my Echo editor, would not let my writing through to the Opinions page if I started ignoring capitals or commas or spelling. She knows what kind of writing a newspaper demands. She writes her own column, which has all kinds of punctuation and capitals and correct spelling. Maybe she sends run-together messages to a friend, who loves to decipher the stuff. But she knows formal from informal writing, and she knows where the line of difference is. She knows audience.

So when your writing appears in the public sphere, even on the Colby "ride to Portland" (note capital) or "Lost and Found" board, use "formal" writing :). Otherwise, some boss in the next few years is going to let you go because you can't write standard English :(. LOL.

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