Digital Web Magazine

The web professional's online magazine of choice.

99.9% of Proper Grammar Is Obsolete

Got something to say?

Share your comments on this topic with other web professionals

In: Columns > Wide Open

By David Wertheimer

Published on September 17, 2002

[A parody, with thanks to Jeffrey Zeldman. See also "99.9% of Websites Are Obsolete" elsewhere on Digital Web Magazine.]

An equal opportunity disease afflicts nearly every person now on the Web, from the humblest instant messenger to the multi-million-dollar-salaried heads of corporate giants. Cunning and insidious, the disease goes largely unrecognized because it is based on centuries of convention and grammar-school education. Though these users don't know it yet, 99% of the grammar they type is obsolete.


In the forward-thinking Internet environment, where user preference and societal norms drive innovation, carefully constructed sentences are starting to disappear. As users evolve, becoming accustomed to one another's abbreviations and time constraints, grammar continues to deteriorate.

Depending on needs, the folks on the Internet have taken matters into their own hands, feeding customized "Internet-speak"—a practice elsewhere known as "shorthand." While authors typically treat sophisticated readers to proper grammar on formal Web sites, email gets a condensed version of the original, and instant-messaging fares still worse.

Obviously, grammatical expertise wastes time and money. Neither commodity has been a necessity; civilizations have existed for centuries without formal sentence structure. Besides, these practices fail to solve a problem: Lots of people can't read at a collegiate level. Users are still locked out.

Forward thinking

Peel the skin of any message, from your CEO's internal memo to an IM from Auntie Em. Examine its tortuous grammatical errors, the proprietary acronyms and ill-conceived use of abbreviations—when they're in English at all. It's a wonder such messages are legible.


Obviously, stopping to capitalize or punctuate squanders a writer's time at a cost even the most proactive typist may be at a loss to calculate. The bigger the message and the greater its urgency, the easier it is to condense and simplify words and sentences.

What do IMers mean by "g2g?" They mean "got to go," one of many examples of non-standard, proprietary language slowly making it into every online experience. Proper grammar sounds good in theory, but the effort is too high and the practice has always been to do less.

There is no true backward compatibility. There is always a cut-off point. For instance, very few people know how to identify, much less avoid writing, a dangling modifier. By definition, then, those who don't cannot possibly have the same verbal experience as folks who recognize the most arcane of grammatical laws.



On the Web, the only constant is change. Factor in the increasingly widespread use of non-traditional Internet devices, and the notion of typing to the standards of tight-fisted grammarians at the expense of busy contacts and one's own free time starts looking like the brain-dead decision it is.

Abbreviations make it possible to type short messages for all devices as easily and quickly as for just one. Between the spiraling time commitments of full sentences and the futile efforts of writing for people who can't read well, online shorthand provides the only approach to online communication that makes a lick of sense.

Neither time-wasting editorial techniques nor the deliberate decision to maintain grammatical correctness will help today's writers working in tomorrow's reading environment or thriving in the ever-changing world beyond the printed book. If these practices continue, costs and complexities will only escalate until none but the most empty-scheduled can afford to communicate.


The disease

Early in a student's education, he or she learns the phrase: "Garbage In, Garbage Out." Put simply, in the world of English, if you write your sentence correctly, it works. If you write it incorrectly, it fails. Languages don't merely encourage this, they demand it.

Among the first things an online user learns is that speed helps determine the effectiveness of communication. Start with a high thought, high quality sentence, and the result will be full, but slow. Try to write too windily and the end result won't be worth reading. You can turn a long thought into an abbreviation, but you can't convert a slow comment into a high speed web statement.



Hi gl / ty gl2u2 / nr / gg


"Hello and good luck, my new friend." "Thank you, and good luck to you, too." "Nice roll." "Good game."

(Backgammon, if you're wondering.)

As new users come online, they are becoming increasingly loose in what they expect from a conversation, and thus increasingly tolerant of broken rules. "Garbage in, garbage out" is beginning to take hold in the world of IM and email, making knowledge of web standards a waste for anyone who values time over exactness.


The cure to this disease may be found in a core set of commonly supported abbreviations collectively referred to as "IM-speak." By learning to communicate in the same way, we can guarantee the forward compatibility of discussions between young Web-savvy kids and geriatric surfers alike.


The cure



got it? kewl



Got something to say?

Share your comments  with other professionals (0 comments)

Related Topics: Content



Media Temple

via Ad Packs