YO LUCY R U KIDN ME?

Last weekend, Lucy Kellaway, the management columnist for the Financial Times, welcomed the end to an era of “sloppy informality”. Citing an “elaborately punctuated” text message from a tardy, young colleague of hers, as well as a survey of recent e-mails from readers, Kellaway determined that:

Just as recession encourages people to put on ties (as I wrote last week), it also makes them look more kindly on the capital letter and the semicolon. When people are losing their jobs, correct dress and correct usage of words seem like a good insurance policy.

She went on to gleefully note that this crisis-induced punctiliousness is affecting entire industries. Unlike French teenagers and the British government, “the private sector is falling over itself to talk posh and the more endangered the industry, the posher its executives are talking.”

While Kellaway welcomes this return to pomposity, I find her argument misguided. To begin with, her entire schadenfreude-twinged analysis is built on a skewed anecdotal sample. The prim and proper columnist has been bemoaning the rise of casual correspondence and informal work attire since well before the Internet bubble burst. The 100 e-mails from her readers that Kellaway used to pronounce a return to formality surely reflected a kinship among her presentation-sensitive fans. Furthermore, Kellaway works in an industry and at a newspaper that demands proper punctuation. She should not be at all surprised that her colleagues, truant 20-somethings or not, write in well-edited sentences.

Not long ago I paid my bills by working in the decidedly less articulate field of advertising. In one day, I would easily receive double or triple the quantity of e-mails Kellaway used in her flawed survey, many of them very poorly punctuated. Apparently the e-grammar revolution has not been advertised.

Edited e-mails, like pretty penmenship, have their place; however in the era of reorganisations, integrations and redundancies, I have always applied the same logic of ruthless efficiency to my e-mail: proper, punctilious e-mails to clients (or editors) and stream of conscious, lower-case lettered e-mails filled with abbrevs to everyone else. This isn’t because I’m am inconsiderate of the beauty of the English language and all of its formal flourishes, but because I would rather devote more of my time keeping in contact with my far-flung colleagues and friends than pondering the poshest phraseology. Sincerity and regularity in correspondence are more important than the use of semicolons.

I cannot fault “Dear Mrs. Kellaway” (as she prefers to be addressed) for finding a silver lining in these dreary economic times. But her delight at reading well-edited e-mails composed in a state of fear is a bit myopic, and even pernicious, like noting the fine music from the house band on the sinking Titanic from the safety of a lifeboat. I would rather that beleaguered businessmen concentrate on their deteriorating balance sheets than dither over letters to the editor.