the English Language
#TalkingGoodEnglish
By: Colleen Walton
Project Coordinator/Event Management/Social Media Marketing
Brand Acceleration, Inc.
Have you ever
experienced secondhand embarrassment? It's that feeling you get when you
witness someone doing something embarrassing and you sit there cringing,
waiting for it to stop. That's how I
feel when I come across grammatical errors on a company’s web site or hear a presenter
use a word that isn't really a word (e.g.
irregardless). The way we speak
and write greatly impacts the way we are perceived. Whether or not it’s true, the inability to
effectively communicate often makes a person appear… well… unintelligent. In the Brand Acceleration office, we have
near-daily discussions about the gross mistreatment of the English language. The
most bothersome atrocities are the errors we encounter in professional writing. Just the other day I had a little gripe
session about LinkedIn’s suggested subject line, “Can you recommend me?” This all got me thinking: has our love affair
with technology ruined our ability to speak proper English?
In high school, I
experienced the rise of Facebook, and Twitter broke through into the mainstream
early in my college career. Thanks to social
media, we are able to communicate more easily than ever before. Unfortunately,
many people spend more time Instagramming a picture of their lunch
(#turkeyburger #yum) or tweeting about a boring meeting with no regard for how
the 140-character mindset affects the way we think. Every once in a while, I catch myself saying
something like “BTW,” and that’s when I know I need to reconsider my life
choices. Social media allows us to be a
little lax in our grammar and spelling.
Using proper punctuation might put you at 143 characters, so you delete
a few commas here and there. No big
deal, right? For now, but how long is it
until you forget what proper punctuation looks like? Suddenly, you find yourself leaving commas
out of company emails and RFPs. It’s a
slippery slope, my friend. A very
slippery slope…
The problem expands
far beyond social media and the dreaded character limit. Some television programing has made a habit
of glorifying the uncouth. I love an
occasional mindless television show as much as the next person, but I
experience some severe secondhand embarrassment when a show has to have
subtitles for a person who is speaking English.
On the whole, Americans are lazy speakers. We mumble, run our words together, and don’t
enunciate very well. “Would have”
becomes “woudda” and “to” becomes “tuh.”
Anyone who’s travelled knows how easy it is to pick up an accent, so it
would stand to reason that we can just as easily pick up the speech patterns of
people we watch on television. If you
don’t think you have a problem with enunciation, I challenge you to spend one
day really listening to yourself speak.
I think you’ll be amazed to find you don’t speak as clearly as you think
you do.
While I could
probably go on for days about how to improve the way we communicate, I decided
to give you three general suggestions I think will get you on your way to
becoming a better writer and speaker:
1. Don’t be
complacent. It really gets my goat
when I hear people say “I’m a terrible speller” or “I’m bad at grammar.” I know I’ve been pretty hard on technology,
but I’m aware it can be a great resource.
Google (or Bing, I’m not biased) “common grammatical mistakes” and have
a gander at what comes up. If there are
almost three million web pages on that topic alone, imagine what else is out
there! Don’t know what a word
means? Look it up. Not sure if that should be a comma or a
semicolon? Look it up. Even though I consider myself a fairly decent
writer, my search history is still sprinkled with such queries as "Is
'everyone' singular or plural?" and "continuous vs. continual." With the myriad resources available to you,
there is no excuse for being “bad at grammar.”
2. Read. From a very young age, my parents instilled
in me a love a reading. As I grew, I saw
how my bibliophilic tendencies made me a better communicator. Reading expanded my vocabulary and showed me
how to express myself with words. To
this day, I am an avid reader and this pushes me to be a better writer. I can hear you saying, “I don’t have time to
read!” You’re reading this, aren’t
you? I’m not saying you have to commit
to epic novels, but take a few minutes every day to read something for
fun. Put down the proposals and the
budgets, and pick up a magazine or read an article online. Pay attention to sentence structure,
vocabulary, and writing style. The more
you read, the more you’ll learn about effective communication and be able to
improve your own writing.
3. Be an example. If you set the bar high for yourself, the
people around you will likely follow suit.
My friends don’t send me texts that say “Where u at?” because they know
a text like that will force me to seriously reevaluate our relationship. Take a quick second to think about how many
people you emailed yesterday. How many
people did those people email? Without
getting too deep into the “butterfly effect,” you can see how a small change in
your behavior can cause a ripple effect throughout your professional
network. If we all make a conscious
effort to speak and write properly, and make it clear we expect the same level
of commitment from those around us, we might begin to make a dent in this
issue.
In today’s
environment of status updates, quick emails, and some pretty inane television,
it takes work to maintain a grasp of proper English. Take some time to really assess how you
communicate and the impression it gives those around you. Do your writing and speech accurately portray
your level of knowledge and intelligence, or are you selling yourself short
because you’re (quick frankly) lazy?
If you would like to share your personal stories or pet peeves, please feel free to do so below.
Colleen Walton
Project Coordinator/Event Management/Social Media
Marketing
A newcomer to the
Brand Acceleration team, Colleen brings a deep understanding of Social Media
Marketing and works with clients to establish a solid position on such
platforms as Blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and others.
She also works with clients on event marketing strategies and project coordination.
