Not Your Mother's Marketing

The World’s A “Twitter” About #National Grammar Day March 4, 2010

We’re in the middle of “Words Matter Week,” a subject very close to my ghostwriting heart. Words help define who we are, what business we’re in and, most importantly, what benefits we provide to our clients and customers.

Words are beautiful; they can pull at the heart-strings, motivate millions and help a child tell you where it hurts.

Today is also National Grammar Day, which I believe started in 2008. It is an authorized day of celebration (who knew?). There have been a lot of people tweeting a range of clever, almost-humorous and serious posts. There are also the all too-expected tweets purposely full of misspellings and grammatical mistakes.

So far my favorite post is both sarcastic and all too true at the same time. It said “celebrating National Grammar Day on Twitter is like holding an AA meeting in the middle of Mardi Gras.” I’m not sure who the actual author is given the stream of re-tweets, but kudos to you on a great analogy.

The speed with which we communicate through email and online makes for shortening words and phrases, like LOL, LMAO, and BFF. The casual atmosphere of online communications also makes it acceptable to ignore grammar altogether, as does the post size restrictions of many social media websites.

I certainly never thought I would find myself using “2” for the words “to, too or two” and be comfortable about doing so. Actually, I’m not sure I’m okay about using those mock abbreviations, but use them I do when necessary.

The rules of grammar have changed since I was in college, as I learned when I bought an updated copy of Strunk and White a few years ago. I had just completed some articles and my editor told me there were grammatical mistakes. Mistakes – from someone who aced the English Regents test – I couldn’t believe it. I asked several of my contemporaries who all agreed my use of punctuation was correct.

Low and behold, the updated Strunk and White had different rules about punctuation, especially about the use of periods and brackets. My editor explained that the changes were largely due to making things easier to read on the internet. Luckily, I’m an old dog who can learn new tricks.

So, what have I learned about current grammar?

• I’ve learned that the constants really do make it easier to understand what is written.
• Grammar can and should be flexible when it needs to be. This is great news to me because I hate sacrificing a client’s personality to punctuation.
• There are other people in the modern world, outside of academia, who love words and think grammar counts.

Of course, I wrote this blog post rather quickly so I’m sure there are grammatical mistakes in it. Let me know if you find any.

Take good care,