Essay and drawing copyright 1996 by Barrie Maguire
...hi...i have to get something off my chest...its about a brand new custom that most of my cyber friends have embraced...i bet you can guess where im headed...theyre sending me emails and knowingly making them hard to read...and these are people who normally care about writing and communicating...some of them are professional writers and editors...
...now i can understand their love of email...emails so convenient so cool so much fun...you dont have to spend five or ten minutes on the phone talking...you can just leave this silent message...its like sneaking into someones office or house and leaving a postit note stuck to their chair while theyre in the bathroom...its even better than a fax...i agree with them on this...
...what bothers me...and what im attempting to demonstrate right now...is the special look and language of email...your not supposed to use punctuation...or capital letters...you dont even have to corect your spelling mistakes if you dont want to...im sorry but this drives me crazy...i guess this is a good spot to use one of those little frown or smile faces that you make with parentheses and colons...like this :( or :)
...im not saying that this behavior represents the death of the english language or even the death of grammar...i just cant figure out how anyone who is capable of writing a correct sentence or paragraph can stand to spell dont or isnt without an apostrophe...no wonder they dont have spellcheckers for email...probably all this is because the internet is ruled by genius teenagers who never had to learn to spell or use commas and by millionaires in plaid shirts who dont even own suits...gee...if im not careful ill make myself ill..
I have to stop! This is making my eyes hurt.
I'm not kidding. It's too hard remembering to make that "i" lower case, back-spacing to delete that apostrophe, leaving that typo uncorrected. I can't keep my little finger off that shift key. I can't stop proof-reading before I click on "Send."
I know to my lower-case, unpunctuated, cyber-buddies, I'll come across as some kind of dinosaur, some throw-back to the Word Processing Age. Well, all I can say is, " :)"