By SCOTT DEWING
Published: March 2004

The word “email” itself is a clue that something quite terrible is happening to the English language. We’re killing it slowly by hacking it to bits, shortening its words, gutting its grammar and leaving bloody misspellings strewn about the floor.

Email has quickly become the venue for this grammatical slaughter. Every day there are more and more people online using email. Some recent studies of email usage have estimated that by next year there will be more than 1 billion email users collectively sending more than 30 billion emails every day.

Daily, I cringe at some of the emails I receive that are littered with grammatical errors and misspellings. They’re hard to read and embarrassing. For example, I’m not sure why some people think that email somehow makes proper capitalization no longer necessary. starting a sentence without a capital letter looks wrong and distracts us from what we’re reading.

Then there are the miscreants who only use capitalization in a sentence when they are trying to make a point: “i’m VERY UPSET the project has been delayed, we REALLY REALLY must meet the DEADLINE!” Capital letters don’t make a point. Clear thinking and well-constructed sentences do that. Brevity is key to writing good sentences but when did “ur” become a contraction for “you are”? Sacrilege.

Then there’s the issue of punctuation and either the complete absence of it or glaring misuse. I once received an email from someone who insisted on using three commas in a row,,,like that was supposed to mean something?

Good grammar is the foundation of clear writing, but this kind of writing is dying a digital death at the wayward hands and clumsy keyboards of the millions of reckless and lazy email hacks out there. I know for certain that one of these hacks is sometimes me. One of them may even be you.

Now, before you roll your eyes and go peg me as some crotchety old English teacher with reading glasses permanently pinned at the end of my nose accompanied by a scowl while I thump on a copy of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style like a Southern Baptist preacher thumps on his Bible—let me assure you that I am nothing like that. I’m far from proselytizing about sentence fragments and dangling modifiers. Having said that, the death of grammar begins with terrible things like dangling modifiers. Then sentence fragments. In the end, grammatical chaos ensues and plunges our culture into 100 years of darkness accompanied by the apocalyptic comeback of disco and fondue.

Okay, it probably won’t end that scary, but where did all this start? I’ll bet my bellbottoms it started with the decline of studying grammar in grade school. I’m sure my mother and father studied grammar much more than I did in grade school and I’ll bet that I studied it more than my children will. Combine that trend with a cultural appetite for fast food, quick success and bad TV and you’ll begin to see why good grammar doesn’t stand a chance. We’re always in a hurry. We want everything and we want it now. Meanwhile, learning grammar takes time and there’s seemingly little reward for writing good sentences.

In college, I had to pass an intensive grammar exam to get into the School of Journalism at the University of Oregon. Most students failed the exam the first time because they were young, cocky and incompetent. They didn’t study because the conventional folly was, “I’m a good writer so I know this stuff.” Even though I was young and incompetent, I wasn’t cocky about my writing abilities nor my knowledge of English grammar. The looming exam terrified me. So I studied very hard and missed passing the exam by 1 point. This may or may not have had something to do with the distraction of my girlfriend telling me that she “might be pregnant” the day before I took the exam. Anyway, I studied and took the exam again the next semester. On this second—and final—try, I only missed 1 point.

If you were to give me that same exam today, I’d likely fail. I find English grammar inconsistent, tedious and often confusing. But in an age when most people believe they’re too busy for such trivialities as grammar and our own president thinks that “strategery” is a word, I’m committed to making an effort to write grammatically correct sentences that people can read and, more importantly, understand.

It’s ironic that the chosen medium of communication for both personal and business is email during a time in which fewer and fewer people seem to be able to use writing to communicate effectively. With a combination of increased stress of modern life, less attention to grammar and the false sense of security we get from Spell Check, we mite even get to the point wear no one understands what weave written. Only then can we all laid back, folder our arms behind our head and breath a sign of relieve.