Righting the wrongs of e-mail writing

Communication World, Dec, 2002 by Patricia O'Conner, Stewart Kellerman

Internet users sent a total of 31 billion I mail messages daily in 2002, according to IDC, a Framingham, Mass.-based provider of technology intelligence. It's a safe bet that a couple of million were plagued with misspellings, incorrect punctuation and incomplete sentences. Some probably contained few words, relying more on emoticons, such as :), to deliver the message. Whatever happened to the wonderful--and proper--use of the written language and large vocabularies?

That's the question asked by Patricia O'Conner, author of "Woe Is I" and "Words Fail Me," and her journalist husband Stewart Kellerman in "You Send Me: Getting It Right When You Write Online." It's nor that e-mail has created a deluge of bad writing across the board, they argue, but that "we will have to upgrade our language and social skills or suffer the cyber-consequences."

As for typecasting e-mail, O'Conner and Kellerman put it somewhere between a letter and a phone call. Not surprisingly, those who think e-mail is closer to letter writing are pickier about spelling and grammar. Those who think it's closer to speech are more forgiving about typos and creative punctuation.

Rather than examining why online writing is so undisciplined, O'Conner and Kellerman seem determined to impose good writing habits on those who write for the web, and, particularly, on email users. "Right now online writing is pretty much in its Wild West stage, with everybody shooting from the hip and no sheriff in sight," they write. "The outlaws claim that rules are so 'analog,' so 'print,' so 'old media.' But law and order will gradually replace frontier justice, and now is our chance to have a say in what the laws will be." O'Conner and Kellerman administer their own brand of frontier justice, rounding up e-mail and web-writing horror stories to serve as cautionary tales to linguistic lawbreakers.

It's possible for writers and e-writers to live harmoniously together, claim O'Conner and Kellerman, as long as they abide by a few simple rules. These rules are laid out in the book, which is divided into three sections: "The Virtual Mensch" (protocol); "Alpha Mail" (writing); and "Words of Passage" (language). In addition to a look at the evolution of online writing, "You Send Me" offers a number of writing tips to brush up on-or, for some, to learn.

"Words, whether etched in stone, written in sand, sent by Morse code, inked on parchment or transmitted in bytes, serve only one purpose: to connect us with other people," O'Conner and Kellerman point out. "When you write badly, you don't."