Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Are other Campfire members finding posts hard to decipher?

By issuing a statement where you find certain grammatical styles objectionable you're inviting the respondents to use their brand of colloquialism instead of the Queen's English.





Know what I'm sayin'?

I can live with the dialectic writing. What I cannot stand is "textspeak" like "u want 2 go 4 coffee?"

Then there's the horrible grammar, chief among which is "Me and Bob went..." and the rampant homonym confusion of your/you're, their/there/they're, to/too/two, and many more.

Your writing either gives people the impression that you are intelligent and educated, or the opposite. Many here seem to be the latter.

You mean Moochelle's english?

�Write the way you talk� � well, not exactly.

The third unconscious superstition, the strongest and the worst in its effects on our writing, comes from the fact that when we write, we can�t get away with some of the things that ordinary or even formal speaking lets us get away with.

Speech is lenient. It also has certain side tricks that let us get by and be fairly well understood even though we stumble, say things awkwardly and then resay �em, make bad starts and interrupt ourselves in the middle of a sentence (or even a word) to start over, and generally say reasonably clear things that would turn-out to be gibberish if someone wrote �em all down word for word.

As speakers and hearers of spoken language, we depend also on several adjuncts to the words spoken � facial expressions, vocal intonations and inflections, hand and body gestures, pauses, even several understandable sounds that we have no way to write. When we write, we have none of these to lean-on. The written words, their punctuation and spelling (including calculated and intentional misspellings), and their formatting have to carry the load. A speaker can back-up and plow the same furrow again when he sees by his hearers� expressions that he hasn�t made his point clear enough. A writer can�t. He isn�t there to see his readers� expressions � and even if he were there to watch �em read, he couldn�t rewrite what�s already in print and read.

A deceptively simple way to say all this is �Writing requires special discipline.� When we write, most of us at least sense that writing calls for tighter discipline than speaking ever needs. Fine, so far. The trouble is that we sense this unconsciously, or nearly so, without really knowing or seeing exactly what discipline we need to apply to our writing. This gut sense of a need for discipline then becomes, in our practical struggles, the altogether wrong idea that we have to write in an alien form or dialect, unnaturally. This idea makes writing harder than it needs to be.

The great sea of bad writing all around us reinforces this notion, leading us to feel that the more unnaturally we can write, the more literary or professional our writing becomes. Writing naturally is hard enough. Striving to write unnaturally makes life tougher � especially for the fellow who's already loaded-down with those other two forms of dead weight that we�ve already talked about. Once you get the hang of writing naturally � somewhat like the way that you talk � and well, you�ll find that it�s no harder and is usually simpler than writing unnaturally and poorly.

Writing comparatively undisciplined speech produces gibberish, but the right alternative is not to swing as far from ordinary talk as you can go. This leads only to another breed of gibberish that�s often impossible to figure-out. Good writing uses ordinary words in basic speech patterns whenever possible, with the awkward and the crude dressed-up and the useless extras trimmed away.

One of the best and the simplest things that you can do to learn how to write easily and clearly is to junk the idea that you have to write in a fake or alien form of your natural language.

As you continue in this series, you�ll see that you are incredibly valuable to yourself as a �lab specimen� where you can see in yourself most of what I say in these lessons.

Since you�re a reader, much of what you�ll read later in �The Reader� should ring true to you, possibly even familiar. It�s old but will seem new, and � because it�s old � it will be easy to grasp and to handle in considering the needs and thought processes of other readers.

Since you learned to understand and to speak English unconsciously very early in life, what you�ll learn consciously about it here later will �teach� you �new things� (that aren�t really new, after all) by bringing your deeply buried knowledge of the English language up to where you can look at it and therefore know better how to use it skillfully and consciously as the key tool of the craft of writing.

The next chapter � �Communication� � about the principles and processes of communication � will also bring to your attention certain facts and relationships that you�ve probably never given a lot of conscious thought or study to � but all of which should immediately make sense to you for the simple reason that you�ve been doing all these things, unconsciously at least, nearly your entire life � since before you starting talking. Communication always operates by the same basic principles, processes, and rules, whether you�re listening to a speaker, speaking to a listener, reading, or writing.

You�ve already mastered the unconscious use of all these, so you�re not starting all over again, from scratch, as you become consciously aware of them and learn to consider them in developing the communication skills that are necessary for good writing.

Until now, I�ve been talking about honest, ethical minds reasonably balanced between humility and pride. Unfortunately, self-deception and ego lead many among us to use fake English intentionally to puff themselves up and to over-awe lesser mortals. Someone has accurately translated the attitude that produces this uppity lingo into the subliminal message that it all says � �I�m in the business, and you�re not.�

The writer who uses language this way, in speech or in print, cares little or nothing about passing-along useful information on the subject of his presentation to others. In fact, he prefers that his hearers or readers either not understand what he�s saying or that they have a devil of a time making-out what he�s saying. He�d rather that his readers be impressed with him, at the cost of not understanding what he writes. He is the real subject of his message.

This fellow�s writing is bad enough. What�s even worse is the effect that it has on our writing as we unconsciously feel compelled to write the same way. Since we�re usually conditioned to write more by reflex or feel than by care and principles � and since this kind of writing pops up everywhere we look � the fake language superstition influences us to emulate it. It perpetuates itself when we let it fool us into thinking that�s the way to write.

It�s natural and honorable to be proud of your profession or occupation. It�s normal and appropriate to want others to respect what you do and what you know � and to respect you for doing and knowing. But the honorable way is to seek respect through what you do well, not through how you speak of it.

Once you see not only the wisdom but the necessity of plain words in clear sentences, you see the emptiness, the vanity of such ego-stroking, and you can more easily see through the poses that so many professionals feel that they have to strike to be respected. Porter G Perrin said it well � �Ordinary people are bored by such formality and the intelligentsia is not fooled by the affectation.�

Don't be a hater.

Can't we all just get along?

I sometimes feel like I've inadvertently stumbled into some club with a secret language to which I am not privy.

� the Queen's English.

Yes we can. How does a beer summit sound?

Rocky, I can't decide if they're apathetic or just don't give a schitt.

A friend remarked that somebody SAID he was apathetic and he replied, "I'd take offense if I knew what that meant but to be honest, I don't care."