Like everyone else today, I have succumbed to communicating with others via text messages and emails. I say that I have succumbed, because I feel that phone conversations convey so much more secondary information through vocal inflection. I have almost lost friends as a result of shooting off a text message that I thought was communicating one thought, but that ended up communicating a completely different one.
But one aspect of shooting written messages back and forth lately, is that the ones I receive frequently convey either a total lack of knowledge of grammar or else a total sloppiness in its usage. Here I am not talking about some barely educated people from Podunk U.S.A. I am talking about well-educated people who have taken a goodly number of English courses during the trajectory of their studies. Because so many of the people with whom I have grammar problems have been well-educated, I am initially inclined to ascribe their problems to sloppiness and mental laziness. But then I start thinking that perhaps for some reason, in spite of all their years in school, the grammatical lessons were just not properly absorbed. I am talking here about fundamental problems in the ways that they have learned to think.
In essence, grammar is the application of principles to turn our flowing blendable continual stream of thought into defined discrete units such that we can have a better sense of control over what we are thinking in the conversion of our thought to writing. In this way, we can be sure that when we want to communicate something to others, we are communicating precisely that which we want to communicate. A stream of consciousness is wonderful for poetic thinking, but poetic thinking, when verbalized can lend itself to many different interpretations, something which is not appropriate for day-to-day communication or for most narratives. So, for most written communication, good grammar is necessary for presenting clear thinking to others and preventing the kind of miscommunication that can lead to misunderstanding and even conflict.
But good grammar is not only a tool for effective communication with others. It is also important as a tool for helping us to really understand what we are thinking ourselves in a clear way. In other words, good grammar helps us to be able to raise our consciousness. Poor grammar is representative of fuzzy thinking. It is also representative of fuzzy self-direction. Good grammar leads to clear thinking which leads to orderly action. Orderly action leads to the ability to build complex processes which of course is one of the secrets to achieving complex goals. If one uses short-cuts in grammatical expression, one is likely to short-cut one’s plans, one’s actions and one’s goals.
Now the question arises as to why it is that there are so many well-educated people who are demonstrating such poor grammar usage in their communications in text messages and emails. It seems to me that, in particular, all the run-on sentences and the apparent inability to break up thoughts with appropriate punctuation are a reaction to having to deal with too many defined discrete things and phenomena as a normal part of everyday life in modern technological society. This excess of defined discrete things and phenomena becomes too difficult for people to properly sort out and just turns into one enormous tension-pocket. This tension-pocket is very overstimulating and eventually the defined discrete things and phenomena that compose it start to melt together, start to undifferentiate into a coherent flow in the person’s mind. The overstimulating abrasive stimulation of the defined discrete things and phenomena turns into a more manageable flowing blendable continual organic stimulation that is then kept separate from the sensory distortion emanating from the modern technological living environment. And this strong organic stimulation becomes the foundation for the fuzzy thinking that then expresses itself in the sloppy blurry grammar that we see in the communications of so many of the people with whom we stay connected in different manifestations of the Internet.
So, although within the context of my articles, a flowing blendable continual organic stimulation mode of behavior is usually treated as something positive, there are situations where there should be at least an admixture of defined discrete mechanistic stimulation to facilitate a stronger bonding between people in the process of their written communication with one another.
Apart from run-on sentences and lack of punctuation, another problem today is the use of single letter abbreviations to represent words. For instance, u, r, ty, etc. One of the aspects of sloppy thinking is speeded up thinking. So, the use of abbreviations can contribute to the over-all velocity of what is being presented. A lot of overly fast thinking can contribute to sloppy thinking. Which, in turn can contribute to blurry communication which can contribute to conflict. And at a time in the history of the world where the effects of conflict can be exacerbated by modern technological weaponry, if we can use improved grammar as a means of tamping conflict down, then we can say that we have used good grammar as a means of preventing humanity from blowing itself up.
© 2023 Laurence Mesirow
Artículos Relacionados: