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Passage Four

Email has brought the art of letter writing back to life, but some experts think the resulting spread of bad English does more harm than good.

“Email has increased the spread of careless writing habits,” says Naomi Baron, a professor of linguistics. She says the poor spelling, grammar, punctuation and sentence structure of emails reflect a growing unconcern about the way we write.

But other experts say that despite its poor prose, email has accomplished what several generations of English teachers couldnt: It has made writing fashionable again. “Email is a new communication technology,” says Ian Lancashire, a university professor of English. “It fills the gap between spoken language and formal methods of writing that existed before email. It is the purest form of written speech.” Lancashire says email has the mysterious ability to make people who are usually scared of writing get their thoughts to flow easily onto a blank screen. He says this is because of emails close similarity to speech. But he accepts that this new found freedom to express themselves often gets people into trouble. “Almost every day I get emails that are apologies of previous emails,” he reports.

In the US, the number of emails sent in a day exceeds the number of letters mailed in a year. But more people are recognizing the content of a typical email message is often imprecise. Professor Baron says that many people are being fooled by emails into thinking that spelling and grammar are not important in the electronic medium. “I wouldnt be surprised if 30 or 40 years from now we get disgusted with how unclear and careless our writing has become.”

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