Do you know anything about email?
Email is a kind of communication that is changing, for the worse, the way we write and use language, say some communication experts." Email has helped the spread of careless writing habits," says Baron, a professor at an American university. She says the poor spelling, grammar, punctuation and sentence structure in emails show the growing unconcern about the way we write. Baron argues that we shouldn't forgive and forget the poor writing in emails. "The more we use the email, the more it becomes the normal way of writing," the professor says.
Others say that though it has poor writing, email has done what several generations (代)of English teachers couldn't do. It has made writing fashionable again.
"Email is a new communication technology," says Ian Lancashire, a professor of English at Toronto University. "It fills the gap (缺口)between spoken language and the formal (正式的)methods of writing. It is the purest form of written speech."
Lancashire says email can help people who are usually afraid of writing to get their thoughts flowing easily onto a blank screen. He says this is because email is close to speech. "It's like a circle of four or five people around a campfire," he says.
Still, he accepts that this freedom to express themselves often gets people into trouble. The number of emails sent in a day almost is the number of letters mailed in a year. But more people are recognizing the content (内容）of a typical email message is not often exact.
