Sister Erin, who proofreads every post I write, recently complained that I am too tied to old school punctuation and other written language conventions. The language is constantly evolving, she quite correctly points out. And I should change some of my ‘rules’, too…
You might have noticed…
… Some changes in my punctuation, hyphenation and even the spelling of some words, lately. It’s not typos or inconsistency (which I consider a despicable trap – one that I do not consistently avoid). And it’s NOT dementia loosening my heretofore rigid standards. It’s a desire to remain current in my mode of expression.
One biggie
The biggest change I’m making is, I’m trying to move over to International English, from British Eng-lish – on which I was raised. It’s not easy.
That means I am, for example, weaning myself off of the British convention of using a ‘s’ instead of a ‘z’ in words such as ‘realize’ and ‘stabilize’. And that brings me in line with the writing software I’m currently using, whose International English spell checker is far more extensive and capable than my old British English version. One major advantage to the new checker is, the developer/custodian of the package is always very prompt at adding new words and slang expressions that come up as life goes on… And nowhere is that phenomenon more rampant than in the Food sphere!
Sentence structure
I am constantly prodded my my Readability Checker to ‘break long sentences into two or three’. I’ve slipped into a bad habit of using conjunctions too freely, creating far too many too-long sentences. How unjournalistic of me!
Nevertheless…
… The most monumental challenge I face is that inconsistency’ thing. I’m hoping that the new spell checker will reach some distance into that dark realm, keeping me on the path of linguistic right-eousness.
And I’m trying to regularize some other, smaller-yet-consequential things, such as dumping the punctuation after titles such as ‘Dr’ and ‘Prof’. After all, we don’t put periods after acronyms, or contractions such as ‘CEO’.
NOTICE:
I will NOT be doing away with the ‘extra’ ‘U’s in words such as ‘neighbour’ and ‘favour’. I tried. I really did. But it’s proven impossible. My fingers just type them the old, British way before I can consciously bid them to do otherwise. And I’m not really sorry about that, so I won’t say I am. I think it must have something to do with my quasi-pathological fear and loathing of things American these days.
First Greenland, then Canada? Alas, perhaps… But never, ever, my ‘U’s!
~ Maggie J.