5. Verily, I say unto thee, this day thou shalt be with me in Paradise.
6. Verily, I say unto thee this day, thou shalt be with me in Paradise.
7. Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompous prolixity and vintriloquial verbosity.
8. Early in one’s development, high-quality learning environments are a necessary precondition for facilitation and enhancement of the ongoing learning process.
11. If there are any points on which you require explanation or further particulars we shall be glad to furnish such additional details as may be required by telephone.
We are no longer reading and writing, we’re sending and receiving. The immediacy of Internet communication has taken away our buffer zone. Back in the day, when we were dictating letters, having them typed up, and then signing before sending, we had plenty of time to reconsider our message. The letters would take 3-5 days to get to wherever they were going and it would be at least a week before we would get a response. If we did write something we shouldn’t have and if we did send it before we’d realised what we’d done, the chances of anyone other than the addressee reading it were slim. We had a certain degree of control over our communication. Now, sitting at our PCs, we think as we type and then we send. And the minute we press the send button, we lose control. In a matter of hours, millions of people may read our message. The Internet has turned the world into a village – and just as each village has its village gossip, so, too, does the Internet. Once you’ve sent it, it’s out there. It’s on record. Posting personal information on the Web might seem innocuous, but everything about you, your browsing history, your likes/dislikes, and the information you share with your friends, it’s all being collated. So much for privacy! In effect, we now have a generation of young people who don’t put a value on privacy. They’re completely transparent, using blogs, Facebook, YouTube, to share their lives with the world and they expect you to share with them, too. And why not? They have are used to having messages spelled out for them. They’ve lost the ability to ‘read between the lines’ – to understand the subtleties. Now you would think that this would make us more careful! But it hasn’t. Next generation of diplomatsAnd it’s not just written communication. Podcasts are an increasingly popular way of communicating. When I started recording podcasts last year, my producer showed me how easy it is to play with the text – to move it around so that what I end up saying bears little resemblance to what I actually said. Our attention spans are shortening; we’re getting more and more impatient; and we’re getting lazy. We’re constantly plugged in: PCs, iPhones, Blackberries, mobile phones, iPods, DVDs, Kindles. Levels of interpersonal communication are waning. How many of us would rather send a email to our colleague asking them something, rather than getting up, walking 10 metres, and asking them in person? Concerns about climate change and increasing transportation costs are resulting in more online meetings. We’re creating a virtual reality for ourselves and we need to learn the language to deal with it. Social media have arguably made us more efficient but they’ve also made us a lot lazier. With such a wide variety of communication methods available, we really should be thinking more of how we use them. Is our tone appropriate? Are we using a suitable style? And being lazy in our use of English can have drastic results.
Punctuation is disappearing. How many of you send SMSs? How many of you punctuate them? Just taking one punctuation mark – the comma – let’s have a look at the how its misuse can completely change a message’s meaning.
Punctuation is disappearing. How many of you send SMSs? How many of you punctuate them? Just taking one punctuation mark – the comma – let’s have a look at the how its misuse can completely change a message’s meaning.
You would think that with our shorter attention spans and the narrow parameters of media such as Twitter and SMSs we would have mastered the essence of simple English. Not so. If anything, because we are so unsure of what constitutes online etiquette, we’re tending to compensate by using complicated English when plain English would suffice. It’s ironic really, that standard of written English of non-native-English speakers often
