There’s a debate raging on the website I edit . You know the old debate: should we be slaves to grammar? People are moaning about ‘kids nowadays’ and their ‘ridiculous text speak’.
I personally believe in informal situations, such as forums, chat rooms and text etc, people shouldn’t feel like they need to adhere to strict grammatical rules. As long as the msg is understood, ryt? Ha ha. But you see what I mean. That’s the whole point of it being informal! Just because someone uses ‘gr8′ instead of ‘great’ in a message doesn’t make them illiterate. Kids are very bilingual – get them to write an essay or article and those who are naturally gifted writers will do a fab job, despite the fact that they may have just messaged their friend a moment earlier with ‘C u l8r’. Those who don’t do a fab job usually have skills elsewhere (art, design etc). They are incredibly astute – they know how to adapt their language for certain situations and to me, that’s a gift.
Many of our greatest writers (Joyce, Beckett etc) talked about the fact that language is a tower that needs to be knocked down to expose its true beauty. If writers stuck to grammatical conventions, some of the most beautiful work out there wouldn’t have been created. As my fave poet Tony Harrison said:
How you became a poet’s a mystery!
Wherever did you get your talent from?
I say: I had two uncles, Joe and Harry-
one was a stammerer, the other dumb.
However, saying all this, when it comes to the novel I’ve just finished working on, I have kept to pretty conventional language cos the main objective is to tell a story. It’s all about plot and characters; about driving the story one. But don’t worry, one day, I will write that literary masterpiece and get all Beckett on your ass!
