Links from the feedreader. January 25, 2008
The best of my feeds today.
Are Bloggers and Blogs Ruining the English Language?
Anyone who has had to read Shakespeare in high school knows that the English language is organic. As such, it changes over the decades and centuries. Many words fall into disuse and many new words are added. Back in the late 1980s, researchers suggested that the average adult in North America knew had a vocabulary of at least 100,000 words. Since that time, many thousands of new terms have come into popular use. But fast forward to today and it seems that grammar is rapidly changing too.
A glance at the writing of some bloggers suggests that we might have collectively regressed, or are heading that way. Grammar is rapidly changing online, and not just from bloggers but also journalists writing at the websites of print publications. It goes beyond misspellings and typos, and includes the lack of proper punctuation, resulting sentences that technically say something very different than what was intended. I see more of this in 2008 than I did in 2005, and I read/browse about the same number of articles daily.
After finally pushing myself into learning about jQuery plugins, I was left saying, “That’s it?!” It turns out it’s ridiculously easy and I have no idea why I haven’t been doing this from day one.
Sentence Structure: Are you Following Stale Advice?
Strunk and White, in the Elements of Style, recommend that the words you would most like to emphasize ought to be left until the end of the sentence. A sort of “save the best for last” method. As bloggers, should we be following standards like these? Or are blogs, as a medium, the opportunity to create all new style elements?