Friday, August 19, 2005

a few words on grammar and such...

here's the thing. i was an english major in college, i have been trained to do all this properly, but i don't. i don't spell check because i generally don't capitalize and the spell check, oh it gets mad at me for that! and why don't i capitalize? well..i don't really know. partially because i am a crap typist and it has always seemed to work better for me if i just forget about that part. recently, i have become a slightly less crap typist and i've been thinking i should put more effort into proper capitalization, spelling and punctuation. then again....i'm pretty lazy. but here's the thing...grammar is fairly arbitrary. many of the rules were pretty much decided by some guy a long time ago. and language, i think it is safe to say, is a living, evolving thing. we add new words to our lexicon on a regular basis, we embrace slang, we allow things that simply weren't permissable before (starting a sentence with and or but being the one that i haven't come to accept yet). and something like a blog or a journal, this is personal writing, and by that i mean both about myself and reflecting myself. i think it should "sound" like me. i tend to pause a lot when i talk, for the joke or to consider my words. i find that i represent that in my writng with the use of ellipses. this is perhapse not acceptable in a formal sense, but in a conversational sense, i think it's fine.

as far as the capitalization goes...yeah it's about being lazy. but i realize that when i write longhand, i don't always capitalize. in fact, i find that my capitalization and even my choice of how i write (cursve or printing) tends to mix according to what i am wrting about.

now, this is all about personal expression, mind you. i wouldn't do this in a legal letter or a formal letter. this is about day to day, conversational writing.

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