I was fired from my first job in journalism.
It was 1998, and I was a senior in high school who had worked for several months as a sport agate clerk for the Belleville News-Democrat in southern Illinois. You know the Scoreboard page in the Sports section that’s full of game schedules and box scores? I collected all of that information from Associated Press wire services, formated the data, and then laid out that page.
I thought I had been doing a good job, but three major mistakes over a couple of weeks sealed my fate. I forgot to include the golf scores the day after the first round of the Masters golf tournament. (I was never a fan of golf, so I had forgotten that it was occurring.) I forgot to change the A.P.‘s baseball schedules from Eastern to Central time, so an unknown number of St. Louis Cardinals fans — who are just as passionate as Red Sox fans — arrived at Busch Stadium in the third inning. On the phone the next day, Saturday morning, I endured my first angry diatribe from an editor.
The editor-in-chief wanted to fire me following those two events, but the sports editor, Joe Ostermeier, persuaded him to give me another chance. I suppose he thought that I had learned my lesson. But my final mistake was indefensible.
Now, agate clerks could not run spell-check on the Scoreboard page because the listing of hundreds of players’ names would cause the program to take hours to finish. So we had to be sure that everything was spelled correctly while typing and formating box scores. Unfortunately, I had been making one not-so-tiny error while typing the baseball box scores: I had been spelling the hometown team as the “St. Louis Cardnials,” not the “St. Louis Cardinals.”
Many baseball fans — like the sports editor — clip every single game’s box score as a momento. To have such a error enshrined in a person’s baseball history was beyond the pale. I was fired.
I’m telling this story because it is a personal example of a trend that has been growing more and more pronounced over the past ten or fifteen years: People, particularly those who are young, are increasingly unable to write well and spell correctly. Television was the first blow because people started to read less often — good readers turn into good writers. (But only when they read quality prose.) The invention of spell-check also eliminated the need to know, well, spelling. (The Boston Globe’s computers, as a matter of fact, did not have spell-check when I worked there in 2000 because the editors wanted their reporters to know how to spell. I don’t know if this has changed.) The Internet and text messaging, however, may be the final nail in the dictionary’s coffin.
The very nature of the Internet decreases attention spans — much more so than television ever did. We multi-task while attempting to operate as quickly and efficiently as possible. Speed becomes much more important than quality. How often does one read a long, complex, well-written essay on a blog? (I hope mine is an exception.) Are proper grammar and spelling in e-mails, instant messages and text messages important as long as one’s point is communicated?
If the need for these language skills decreases, then people will use them less often. If people use these skills less often, then they will lose those skills. If these skills are lost, then the ability to communicate effectively will eventually disappear altogether. The “slippery-slope” argument is usually a logical fallacy, but I think it is relevant in this context because an overall trend is observable and measurable. Here is just a few examples: High school students are now using instant-messaging slang in academic papers and everyday life (see here, here and here). I weep for the future.
Still, this article in today’s Boston Globe on a local “Grammar Vandal” is giving me hope:
Nothing is immune to the Grammar Vandal’s keen eye, not even the blue T-shirt she wore on a recent walk to point out grammar errors along Newbury Street. McCulley couldn’t possibly walk around wearing a shirt saying “Without Me Its Just Aweso.” So she took a Sharpie to the shirt, adding a comma after “me” and an apostrophe to “it’s.”
“Of course, I’m obsessive,” she said.
On her walk around Back Bay, the grammar vigilante’s judgments were sure and steady. Though Newbury Street is considered among the classiest of thoroughfares in an educated city, its signs are riddled with errors.
The fact that this Grammar Vandal exists is proof enough that language skills are on the decline. I doubt that her efforts will lead to an increased public awareness of the importance of proper English; old-school, anal-retentive purists will continue to disparage contemporary illiteracy while fewer and fewer people (not “less” and “less”) confuse “its” and “it’s.” But I’m hopeful that her efforts will gradually make people in Boston, a highly-educated city, realize that not even they are immune.
One of the most important aims of a liberal-arts education — which may be becoming less important in today’s globalized world — is to teach people how to communicate effectively and efficiently, but I still see people who are even majoring in English and journalism who cannot write well. As my high-school experience shows, I used to be one of them. But I hope that I have regained that ability after years of studying, writing and editing — though I’m still nowhere near perfect. I just hope that everyone will do the same.
