phywriter.com|Prone to occasional grandiloquence

As a professional writer, I am always very aware of the audience for whom I am writing and the comparative restrictions that accompany them, and I draft my writing accordingly. In that regard, I notice that I use six different levels of  writing in my daily activities:

* SMS: Since I’m typing out messages on a phone using only the number keys, there is only one criteria here – communicate the best possible with the fewest possible characters. “r u cming hm soon?” I only SMS with my daughter (who has her phone with her in school). It’s a great way to stay in touch with a teenager (who might normally be hard to communicate with under the best circumstances – I’ll do anything I can to stay in touch, and this works surprisingly well).

* IM: The two crucial criteria here are speed and comprehension. I never capitalize, I rarely correct mistakes, and I frequently employ some of the pigeon-English shorthand abbreviations that you refer to here; lol, plz, ttyl, cya, things of that nature. Even then, I don’t do “r u coming” because I’m just not that lazy.

* Casual E-mail / Forum posts: I type with more typical English usage – I use capitalization, paragraphs, and punctuation. I don’t, however, spend a great deal of time concentrating on spelling or grammar. I do this enough that it’s not often that I make a mistake, but it happens. I don’t dwell on it.

* News Posts: This is a category all of its own. I employ more rigor with regard to spelling and grammar, but have had to edit my posts more than once because I didn’t spend enough time spell-checking or re-reading. My favorite tool of choice for this is The Texturizer, essentially Notepad on Steroids. I have set up a number of macros for inserting links from the clipboard, plopping in the tags, and so forth. It is nearly professional quality, but I don’t agonize over it the way I do with other writing.

* Professional Technical Writing: This is where the rubber meets the road – I am careful to write in active voice where necessary, passive voice where it has the most punch, spell-check rigorously, re-read my entire work one more time than I feel necessary, and generally pull out all the stops to write the clearest possible material in the fewest possible words. Sometimes, that’s a 450 page book. Sometimes, it doesn’t cover one sheet. It all depends on the subject material, the end-user audience, the amount and quality of graphics I add, whether the material will be “single-sourced” (fulfilling more roles than simply print, example, .pdf, HTML. and online compiled Help). There’s much more to it than just this, but you get the picture.

* Creative Writing: This sort of writing is completely different. It is writing for entertainment, for flights of fancy instead of rigorous how-to language, for fun instead of profit (ahem). I have learned a great deal about the different types of grammar at work here that does not apply to classic technical writing (putting punctuation inside quotes, for example). This is a style and scope of writing that is at once carefree and rigorous. Rules of grammar are still in play (and punctuation rules are of even greater value) but there is a freedom that exists with creative writing that you can’t ignore or understate, and if you can make a solid case for bending a rule, you may just get away with it as long as the reader is entertained and buys your logic long enough to embrace your creativity. In short, you can get away with whatever your genius allows. If you’re looking to bend or break a rule, be creative or talented enough to make it worth an editor’s while to overlook your trangressions.

If you’re a hack or a new writer on your way up, I suggest learning and using classic grammar and punctuation – you are going to want to save your energy for editorial disputes for defending and improving your actual fiction.

Therefore, my observation is that some people write in forums using level 1 writing (at the great risk of missed comprehension or inducing frustration in people that don’t want to try to decipher that degree of shorthand), and some use level 2 writing (with similar risks because capitalization and paragraphs really help quite a bit in forum posts). If we gently suggest that writers using level 1 or level 2 styles would receive greater comprehension (and perhaps greater approval of their ideas) if they used the characteristics I’ve already mentioned with level 3 writing, it’s possible to gradually (and politely) raise the level of writing without being strident.

I’ve played the Grammar Cop before, and it’s generally a thankless job that has the tendency to raise hackles and create division. However, when you play Grammar Mentor (taking a more open approach to it), you may find greater success and less resistance.