While at times I wanted to shake my fist at Gretchen McCulloch’s Because Internet, I lapped it up and took scads of notes on it. There will be others like it, maybe there already are, but to me it seems utterly original. To survey how the internet and social media affect the way we communicate is not only useful but necessary.

McCulloch approaches her vast subject with a linguist’s eye, and notices things I’ve noticed but didn’t know others paid attention to (I’m leaving that preposition hanging out there because I know McCulloch would approve). Things like how spellcheck and autocomplete cause writer’s block because they draw our attention to small details when we’re just trying to get the danged words out any way we can. And her observations on typographical tone of voice, which I’ll cover in a separate post.

Where I take exception is McCulloch’s quickness to condemn “book English” (my quotations, not hers) and the stodgy, class-laden thinking she believes goes with it. This makes me defensive, of course, not only because it threatens my profession (do we really need professional writers and editors if “idk, maybeeee we should taaaalk about it … lol” is perfectly acceptable?) but also because she seems to assume that writing well, with grace, is somehow false.

Writing well is not just a matter of following rules but also of breaking them — and breaking them to more brilliant effect when they’re not broken as often. Writing well is putting words together in a way that is fresh, original and utterly you (whoever you are). If striving for subject-verb agreement makes one stodgy … then I’m guilty as charged. In the meantime, though, I’ll be thinking about McCulloch’s points, and maybe loosening up just a tad because of them.