posted: September 8, 2003
In college writing courses and, well, almost any other kind of writing course, one is constantly admonished to "write like you speak". My own department advisor, Professor Meyer, said this to me at least thrice that I can recall with clarity and probably many more times which I have since then mercifully forgotten. How he would roll about in his grave (if he were dead, yet, that is), could he but see the execrable extremes to which this homely writers' advice has been dragged since the advent of the Internet.
"Write like you speak" is not an invitation to swap homophones, use numbers or single letters instead of words, dump punctuation or spell with the cacophonous phonetics of star-crossed manual typewriters plunging to their unfortunately delayed deaths on the rocks below Wuthering Heights.
Most especially, in this age of the Internet, please, don't rite lik u speek (or more often, "lik u im"). It may be true that some words sound the same, but people shouldn't have to repeat everything aloud just to figure out your meaning. And even then, they may not. Right, rite, wright and write are homophones, not homonyms. No more interchangeable are those lovely your, you're and yore, nor here, hear and here're. There is no "there" in Their or They're. And words which look similar aren't the same. This is an exact-matching game, so "were" is not a location and "weired" means neither strange nor strung with electrical cable. Close may count in horseshoes, but not in Comprehensible English and people with any sort of education are rightfully confuzzled when they encounter the such swappage.
"Well, you know what I meant!" Maybe. Maybe I didn't. "Your horse" doesn't mean the same thing as "you're hoarse" or "you're whores". Hoar frost has nothing to do with getting the cold shoulder from prostitutes, but if all words which sound the same were interchangeable, it would. I'd rather whet my appetite that wet it, wouldn't you? While it may be amusing to contemplate the occasional Spoonerism or Malapropism, all forms of pun are best when applied with restraint and a sharp wit, rather than laid on with an inadvertent trowel (or possibly lain upon with an introverted towel.) They lose their meaning and their fun when the words, themselves, mean nothing more than their sound like a series of grunts and whistles from a hog.
Beyond merely using the correct word and spelling it right, these slippery little demons need to be nailed down with some punctuation and capital letters. While I can figure out that "dont" is the same as "don't", "John's" has quite a different meaning from "johns". Don't just fling that punctuation around like confetti, either. Apostrophes weren't invented to graft the letter S on for pluralizations, like a spike through a board. A period, once in a while, like the commercial pause which refreshes, would be nice. So long as it's not every other. Word.
If sentences were drinks, they'd at least get a swizzle stick, but a lot of them come to the communications table these days as raw and clumsy as a bottle of Night Train in a greasy paper bag. Some of them seem to have been the victim of phonetic moths which have nibbled holes where their articles and modifiers should be. Perfect grammar and punctuation isn't necessary for every sentence, but an idea--and just one at a time, usually--is.
The most amazing and abusive thing about the "write like you speak rule" is that it's total bullshit. If we all did, indeed, write the same way that we speak, sentences would be three times as long from the pauses and stumblings, alone. And most people don't really speak well or fluidly, especially extemporaneously--which explains a great many famous political gaffes (Hoobert Heever, anyone?) and the number of times the average person says "uhmm". We throw in odd words, toss sentences off the top of our heads and barely notice as they crash to the ground like fledglings with short wings. We get by with it because we are able to just keep on tossing and most listeners automatically edit much of the everyday face-to-face conversation they hear, without giving it any thought at all. Unfortunately, in print, one's tossings look... well, like tossings. And they tend to stick around.
The effect of verbal tossing-off can be minimized, however, if we'd all cease to write like we speak and started writing as we believe we speak, or as the smooth and super-cool movie version of us would speak. I, myself, intend to start writing in the polished bad-girl voice of Rene Russo any day now....
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