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Email
has brought the art of letter writing back to life, but some experts think the
resulting spread of bad English does more harm than good.
Email
is a form of communication that is changing, for the worse, the way we write
and use language, say some communication researchers. It is also changing the
way we interact(交流) and build relationship. These are a few of recently
recognized features of email, say experts, that should cause individual and
organizations to rethink the way they use email.
"Email has increased the spread of careless writing habits,
"says Naomi Baron, a professor of linguistics at American University. She
says the poor spelling, grammar, punctuation(标点符号) and sentence structure
of emails reflect a growing unconcern to the way we write.
Baron
argues that we should not forgive and forget the poor writing often shown in
emails. "The more we use email and its tasteless writing, the more it
becomes the normal way of writing," the professor says.
Others say that despite its poor prose(文字), email has finished what
several generations of English teachers couldn't: it has made writing
fashionable again.
"Email is a critical new communication technology," says Ian
Lancashire, a University of Toronto professor of English." It fills the
gap between spoken language and the formal methods of writing that existed
before email. It is the purest form of written speech."
Lancashire says email has the mysterious ability to get people who are
scared by writing to get their thoughts flowing easily onto a blank screen. He
says this is because of email's close similarity to speech." It's like a
circle of four or five people around a campfire," he says.
Still, he accepts that this new found freedom to express themselves
often gets people into trouble. "Almost everyday I get emails that
apologies of previous emails," he reports.
In the US, the number of emails sent in a
day exceeds(超过) the number of letters mailed in a year. But more people are
recognizing the content of a typical email message is not often exact.
