A Little Blogging Grammar

Sometimes I think that blogging is the great hope for the survival of literacy in the modern world. It requires that the blogger be able to write and that readers read; plus, it has the great advantage of being a cool and trendy thing to do. Hence the birth of new blogs by the thousand every day.

There is the threat of voice blogs and video blogs, of course, and now we have the dreaded podcast to contend with too. But my hope is that they will never succeed in eradicating the written blog completely. And while blogs continue to communicate mainly through text, there is still a chance that writing and reading skills will not die.

The problem is what form the writing will take. Already blogging has dictated a change in style to suit the restrictions and limitations of its medium. Blog-writing has to be brief, to the point, and use short, easily digested paragraphs, if it is to hold a reader's attention long enough for the message to be delivered. This I can cope with; I find my own style has adjusted to fit the medium without much conscious thought from me.

What worries me, however, is the decay in much more basic writing skills than the length of sentences and paragraphs. Spelling becomes an esoteric art known only to a few, sentence construction departs into the realm of "well yeah, I think I know what you mean (although it's not what you said)."

I know what people will say to counter this; that as long as the meaning gets across, a few grammatical errors don't matter. Increasingly I see the meaning not getting across, however. I come across the occasional blog that is virtually incomprehensible, so bad is the sentence structure and spelling. And, if we see this as a trend, it will not be long before most blogs are talking a language that makes no sense to anyone.

It is so unnecessary, this descent into gobbledygook. With a few simple rules and principles, most grammatical errors can be overcome. And the first and most obvious rule is: edit before posting. Part of editing should be that we read the post aloud, to see whether we have actually said what we intended to. If we get lost halfway through a sentence, the likelihood is that we're trying to squeeze too many steps of logic into it. Cut it into smaller ones, making sure that each follows the other in a logical sequence.

I am the worst offender when it comes to long sentences; indeed, if I notice that a sentence is getting a bit long, I'll throw in a few extra phrases just to rub it in. But the thing is, I can get away with it because I use these things - ,,, ::: ;;;. I don't expect most people know exactly how each is supposed to function, but I'll bet we all know that they're an opportunity to pause and take a breath. My advice is, if you're not sure how to use them, don't - just write shorter sentences.

That last sentence contains two instances of the dreaded apostrophe, the ' that dances around happily in so many blogger words. But it's so easy to tell when to use it and where to put it. It always indicates a missing letter or letters. This is true even when we're (we are) talking of possession: in early English we indicated possession with the words "his" or "her", so we might talk of Simon, his house (Simon's house) or the car, her wheels (car's wheels). Yes, cars are always female. Note that the apostrophe goes where the letters disappeared.

Once we understand this principle, there is no longer any need to wonder whether a word needs an apostrophe or not. Just ask the question: is it a shortened form? So "you're" is the shortened form of "you are" and "your" refers to something that belongs to you. There is a banner ad that I see far too frequently that maintains, "Sometimes your the bug, sometimes your the windscreen." A literal translation is, "Sometimes belonging to you the bug, sometimes belonging to you the windscreen." I am hoping that it's superfluous for me to point out that what is actually meant is, "Sometimes you're the bug, sometimes you're the windscreen." We can laugh at this but it represents one more step down the road to mutual incomprehension.

Incidentally, if we stick an "s" on the end of "your", we get one of the two exceptions to the rule. "Yours" has no apostrophe and neither does "its" when indicating ownership. "It's" is short for "it is". Just one of those things to remember; there aren't many of them.

Spelling should be less of a problem now that we have spell checkers (just copy and paste the text into a word processor - it'll {it will} tell you if there are any glaring errors in it). But, of course, spell checkers can't tell you whether the word should be "to", "too" or "two", for instance. With that example, the thing is to think "Too has too many "o"s in it, two has a doubleyoo (double = 2), and all the rest have only one "o".

So spell checkers can let you down when a word sounds the same but means different things according to how it's spelled. But I don't think this is a serious problem; generally it's pretty obvious which meaning is intended.

And that's about it; just those few, simple tips and tricks should be enough to improve the literacy standards of the blogosphere, if only bloggers would remember them. Of course, I don't flatter myself that anyone who actually needs this advice will read this post, let alone memorize any of it...