Internet Linguistics and Informality

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When I first started teaching, I admit that I was very dismayed to receive very informal emails from students. To give you a sense, the most formal ones began with “Hey Professor,” and then would actually follow a letter format. I know that colleagues will spend time during their first class session to teach students how to properly write an email to their professor, thinking that this would later help their students in their professional careers.

My thoughts on this began to change when I read an interview with a young CEO in her 20s, who advised others (particularly young women) to send quick one-sentence emails. She made the case that this is what people (particularly men) who have powerful and time-sensitive positions are doing, who respond right away from their smartphones and do not have time for formality.

I believe, of course, that there is a context for everything, and sometimes it is important to be more formal, even today, but emails and text messages do not need to follow the same time-honored formulas that Catherine of Siena did as she echoed the Pope, invoked God and the Virgin, and put herself in an extremely subordinate position to her addressee. We know who has sent an email because their email provider generally supplies their name, and we know who we are. When our students do submit an inquiry email to apply for a job, it is probably best to be formal, but if once they are hired they notice no one else uses “Dear” and “Kind regards” they should probably follow suit, which makes the case that it is perhaps more worthwhile to teach critical thinking skills rather than formulaic email standards.

As I previously touched on in my post on Digital Writing, I believe that it is important for educators to give some leeway to the changing language that younger students are working with and helping to shape. Even newspapers are accommodating – an article by Elliot Ross published on The Guardian closes with a paragraph that begins with “Btw” instead of the slightly more formal “by the way.”

Dante’s Tomb, Ravenna || Lisa Tagliaferri, 2013

Shifting language is nothing new, one only needs to look to the move from Latin to the vernacular in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance to see its very real dramatics. Dante himself championed this change in his Latin piece De vulgari eloquentia, which implored using the Italian language as a standard. In a similar spirit, Tia Baheri recently defended Internet linguistics in her essay that centers on the phrase (or rather, sentence) “I can’t even.” She defends the evolution of language and speaks to the need of users on the Internet to convey emotion through symbols alone. Rebecca Cohen also considers the need to convey emotion in rapid text-based communication, on Slate she discusses the withholding of the question mark within tweets, pointing out that it is often used deliberately to convey rhetorical questions.

This is not to say that educators need to accept language usage they are uncomfortable with, but rather to work toward an open-mindedness about students’ writing and the contexts in which they write. Modeling is still a great way to show students what they are expected to do, but it may be even better to encourage them to write in different registers, as that would further develop their writing abilities and push them to employ the analysis necessary to deliver certain kinds of writing in appropriate contexts.