THE CAIN'T BRIGADE

There’s something about bad grammar that, for many of us, is way too memorable.

University professors and columnists, especially, all cry “foul” when the basic rules and regs of English writing are violated. 

Even dating site Match, after asking 5,000 users if language mattered, discovered it did.  Big time.  Eighty-eight percent of women, 75 percent of men agreed that the proper syntax was far more important in a prospective date than confidence or good teeth.  [Gnaw on that one for a while.]

Depending on who responds, the blame goes to social media, where gaffes are as common as abbreviations like ‘soups awk’ [you guess].  On the educational system … but never aimed at a particular teacher.  On contemporary “it’s gotta be Millennial” qualities like laziness, carelessness, inaccuracy, even inconsiderateness.

Let’s stop here.  And agree:  It’s our responsibility as language gurus – communicators, brand experts, marketers – to frame the dispute.  After all, there is an informal English, one that we speak and message and tweet.  Punctuation might be absent, at times.  Abbreviations, dominant.  And dialects become noticeable. 

The other practice?  Emails, memos, presentations, and all the other accoutrements of corporate and marketing and brand communications, from annual reports to Web sites.  There, though informal lingo might be present, the rest of the grammatical snafus need to be gone.

Then there’s Oklahoma’s Ado Annie …

SAY IT AIN'T SO [with not-so-abject apologies]

Sometimes, it’s just tough to think of a compelling headline

We toyed with “Loose lips sink businesses.”    Or:  “Parse the ones you want to keep.”

We’ll spare you (and us).   We’re talking the decline of grammar, at work and at home, a subject that’s engaged (and often enraged) more than quite a few writers, journalists, and columnists in a literal war of words.  

The reasons for misusing affect-effect, I and me, dangling modifiers and the like are multifarious:   Little educational emphasis on writing principles, the domination of social media, even the informality of our world today.   The rise of OMG, LOL, pictorial emoticons and 140 characters, by themselves, negate elegant phrasing and paragraphs.

No one agrees on one overriding cause.  Nor, unfortunately, about the solutions.   Nearly 50 percent of the 400-something employers surveyed in 2012 by SHRM (the Society for Human Resource Management) and AARP (we hope you know the acronym) indicated they were increasing training, and offering more printed and online guidelines, coaches, and templates.  Again, no single panacea.

Generally, those most alarmed by the trend underscore its negative outcomes, from mistakes in marketing materials that have to be corrected to not-so-great client/customer perceptions.  The conclusion by most?   Good grammar, which shouldn’t be an oxymoron, is the architecture of good writing and, by extension, good thinking and clear understanding.

Which brings us to a remedy.  How about reviving the antique art of sentence diagramming? Created in the mid 1800s by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, it’s an illustrated map, also called a parse tree, of the logic behind a sentence.  It combines visuals with the appeal of a puzzle, showing how each word fits into the structure of a sentence.  Think building blocks, with easy-to-use lines and diagonals.

No doubt, this elementary school module had its foes.  After all, parsing a sentence is akin to eating canned non-gourmet peas that have been cooked to mush (thanks to my Mom).  But then I hear her voice:  “Do it; it’ll be good for you.” 

THE ART OF THE COMEBACK

Diane von Furstenberg’s little wrap dress.

Telephone booths.

U.S. denim mills now manufacturing high-end jeans.

What’s old, so the saying goes, is new again. 

Thank the media, in part, for paying homage to stuff that, quite frankly, doesn’t seem so ancient to us.  Like PBS’ “Antiques Roadshow,” credited with a resurgence of interest in all things with years of patina.  A few months ago, The (august) New York Times, as part of the re-design of its Sunday magazine, launched a series called “Who Made That?” - using as its subjects such everyday objects as Kraft’s Velveeta and clothespins.  Recent culinary op-eds noted the revival of cast-iron cookware, yet mistakenly called it “marginal in the age we live in.”

Sometimes, baby boomer and other generations either re-acquaint themselves with or stumble on artifacts that might possess new lives, giving them new marketing twists.  Von Furstenberg’s eagle eye noticed that significant-for-flea-market prices were being asked (and paid for) her ‘70s-status dress.  High-end demand for authentic blue-jeans enticed an old North Carolina mill out of hibernation, and its workers, into better-paying livelihoods.  Today, telephone booths, no longer dressing rooms for Super-people or hang-outs for serial conversationalists, maintain a proud position in offices and creative firms. 

On the other hand, we fervently wish that some items in our portfolios (and our financial one, too) would experience a comeback.  Like good grammar, the craft of pairing the right nouns with the right verbs and avoiding dangling modifiers.  Like simple easy-to-understand design embedded in social media and Web sites and print media.  Like straightforward conversation, where understanding was the overriding, single, number-one objective of dialogue. 

What else deserves a comeback?  We’ll continue this list … with your help (at cbyd.co).