Is this one form or example of a PLOG ?

Klogs, Mblogs, Ablogs, the original Blogs ... now Plogs :)

1:14:00 PM    comment []  trackback []

Flemming shares his own 'rules for writing' and makes some interesting observations about Correct Writing, in response to Dave Pollard's post about punctuation, which referred to a New York Times op-ed piece on the same subject. All of them talk of new 'rules' of grammar, syntax and punctuations in writing, with a special focus on how the youth today, with its oral culture is changing the rules of the written word.  And the revolution in language cultures as a result of the conflict between the 'old school' and the new.

Flemming says :

"I frequently start sentences with 'and' or 'but' or 'so'. I often write sentences without any verb. The rule says that if you need a comma after a section in quotes, the comma goes inside the quotes. It looks stupid and I ain't doing it. I feel a little guilty using an apostrophe to say MP3's, but it just happens to be more clear. I guess I've found that I communicate better if I write somewhat like I speak. So, I tend to use commas as much to indicate natural pauses as in any references to where they're 'supposed' to be.

So, yes, maybe the different cultures will clash. Or maybe the old rules will just die quietly as nobody cares any longer. To be understood is more important than being correct."

Made me think about the way i write at my blog - it is as i speak.  Conversational and closer to the oral culture than the written.  The dashes and dots are the flows in conversation often replacing fullstops, the '...' s are the emphases, or sometimes mean 'so-to-speak' within a context, the commas are the pauses.

In a related note, I discovered TextAlyser the other day.  This is an online text analysis tool that gives you the readability fog index of any text or a webpage, based on length of sentence and degree of difficulty in the words.  Thanks Sameer for the link.  I put some of my blog posts to test.  Interesting to note that i veer on the 'simple'  - with a readability index at 6-7.

Perhaps too simple for business writing ... i know some that say that it should be around 8-11. 

I wonder! 

1:06:38 PM    comment []  trackback []