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Get Breaking News on your cellSave the sentence: Or we is doomed
10:53 AM Tue, Jun 17, 2008 | Permalink
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June 2008
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Save the sentence: Or we is doomed Austin's Sarah Bird -- "How Perfect" is this Death Cab for Cutie and Jack Kerouac Monday morning noir -- stop me before I simile again William Shatner: The rest of the story Excerpt: "How Perfect Is That" by Sarah Bird Web-only review: "The Fidelity Files," by Jessica Brody See Jackie Collins' massive tour bus William Shatner on his life, his autobiography, and the secret combination to Captain Kirk's safe Categories
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Alert correspondent Bill Marvel passes along this Washington Post piece on The Fate of the Sentence. Among the signs of doom, writes Linton Weeks: "In a survey, Internet language -- abbreviated wds, :) and txt msging -- seeping into academic writing." Says Librarian of Congress James Billington: "I see creeping inarticulateness." "This assault on the lowly -- and mighty -- sentence, he says, is symptomatic of a disease potentially fatal to civilization. If the sentence croaks, so will critical thought. The chronicling of history. Storytelling itself." I've been fortunate to have had teachers who understood the power of the sentence. Not that my own writing always reflects this. But my high school English teachers were the ones who taught me to read sentence by sentence, and to underline the great ones I came across. This was back in an era when I judged good writing by the number of dead aliens per paragraph, and their approach seemed fairly radical at the time. Later, I had college professors who stressed the power of the individual words, who taught me to live by the Mark Twain dictum: "The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter -- it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning." So if you've read this far -- where did you learn to love sentences? And if you've come across some good ones, share them. The Internet needs more, apparently. |
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Comments
Posted by not so concerned in Colleyville @ 12:13 PM Tue, Jun 17, 2008
I agree that the internet ("teh internets") will play a key role in the destruction of civilization as we know it, but for now this is their counter-culture, their vanguard against normalcy, so i say let them have it and laugh with them (or at them) while still teaching them the correct version of english in school.