Eats, Shoots & Leaves
A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots into the air.
"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
"I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up."
The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves"
This is an old joke about the importance of punctuation and also a delightful little book about that same topic by a British editor, Lynne Truss.
In the book, she quotes a story from the Washington Post about email. [Email] "increased employees' productivity by 1.8 hours a day because they took less time to formulate their thoughts."
This is a telling story. I read so many press releases, stories and articles that show the results of that benefit. Taking time to think clearly is perhaps a lost art. You'd think that with all the college-educated people in the country these days, that the level of discourse would improve. Instead, it appears that more people think they can publish any thought bouncing around their heads without ever applying any concentrated, logical thinking to the process.
I'm researching for an article that will discuss online collaboration for product development and manufacturing. Talking about that and kids with Automation World editorial director Jane Gerold, she mentioned how kids today are growing up experiencing world-wide collaboration over the Internet as an every-day experience (playing games, of course). While many of my generation are not always sure about how to use this new tool.
I've partcipated in online chats since about 1991. I was a very early member of AOL, when it promoted the idea of communities and chat rooms. What I found, and still find, is a forum for poorly thought out and articulated opinions. I seldom saw a real conversation. And in many cases, that is still the case. Although Tony Perkins (late of Red Herring fame) has started the Always On Network attempting to elevate the level of discourse on the Web.
Going back to the story. I think we've slipped too far in allowing poor thinking--at all levels of society. It's even happening at the highest levels of business and government. Punctuation helps organize sentences, which are thoughts. Organized thoughts advance a discourse. Disorganized thoughts are just ramblings and ravings going nowhere. There's just too much of that going around.
6:07:10 AM 
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