Me thinks the end of beautifully written English is close at hand — most emphatically at one’s fingertips. Once, written communication was accomplished by dipping a nib point in an inkwell and painstakingly moving across delicate paper with flourish and style. No more.
Sadly, we’ve eclipsed even the rudimentary elements of the written word. I hate to say it, but one of the most marvelous inventions is at fault: the personal computer.
I would wager that at least five times a day I receive an email with no proper names capitalized. Some poor blokes don’t even bother to capitalize “I” when citing self. My business education teacher is bound to be rolling over in her proverbial grave.
Oh, I know nobody wants to go back to the days of manual typewriters and carriages that chimed at the end of a line. Nobody wants to revert to carbon paper, stencils using only brute force minus a ribbon. Nobody wants to return to the day when one mistake plunged the writer into another entire page of typed copy. But, where, I ask is simple pride?
First came the electric typewriter. For those of us who learned on an old manual machine, the electric successor was really impressive. Not only was it much quicker with a lighter touch, but much quieter. Next came the early word processors and the electric wonder could store text and type it repeatedly. I recall the IBM “Selectric” was very popular in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Then, the age of the personal computer hit.
It existed far back into the 1970s, but ownership was narrow and few households owned one. My first Apple dates back to the 80s. A 512K, it featured a boxy, fairly heavy monitor and a separate keyboard. Over the years, I have been a “Mac” user. Not susceptible to viruses, Apple’s Macs are very user friendly and are the tool of choice for both graphic artists and publishers.
How is it, then, that the pride people once took in written letters on company stationery or personal notepaper is not reflected in their ordinary Internet communications? I don’t have the answer. As for me, I take as much care in an email as I do a formal letter that I put into the mail.
To me, it’s just a matter of courtesy to send a note or letter to someone and not corrupt the King’s English. It doesn’t take that much time to capitalize a letter. I did it just now. Did you note that I was not “i”. Maybe it’s as much a statement of how the writer judges him or herself as the attitude taken toward the recipient. If you think of yourself as a lower case “i”, then I’m sorry for you.
It only takes a second to write a proper salutation… a few moments to compose a proper sentence… a minute or two to review the message before you send it off into Cyberspace. Be polite. Write well. If you are — as some put it — what you read, then aren’t you also what you write? Think about it.