The Copy Chief at Wired News Tony Long has written an acidic attack on the role of technology in the decline of writing standards.

It is technology — IM, text messaging and email — which he argues is (mostly) to blame:

“it doesn’t matter whether you are reading your local rag, surfing the net or trying to make heads or tails of someone’s inane blog — the quality bar is set lower than ever.”

Whether or not you find his argument persuasive, you will enjoy the verbal imagery.

It runs the whole gamut from poetic (“[Email's] speed and informality sing a siren song of incompetent communication, a virtual hooker beckoning to the drunken sailor as he staggers along the wharf.”) to the more direct (“… it’s not enough to simply vomit out of your fingers. It’s important to say what you mean clearly, correctly and well…. It’s important to think before you write.”)

I want to believe him. Goodness knows there’s some barely legible stuff out there. But are things really more badder?

I couldn’t shake a niggle from the back of my mind. Then I remembered what it was:

…Two evils, Ignorance and Want of Taste, have produced a Third; I mean the continual Corruption of our English tongue, which, without some timely Remedy, will suffer more by the false Refinements of Twenty Years past than it hath been improved in the foregoing Hundred.

— Jonathan Swift, “The Continual Corruption of our English Tongue”, The Tatler, 1710.text, email, IM, standards, punctuation, grammar, the good old days, language, technology, Jonathan Swift

First, there is no end to the debate on top-posting vs. bottom-posting in this life and, possibly, in the next. I understand that.

Secondly, I should disclose that I am a top-poster.

Thirdly, the obvious pathos of the message notwithstanding, I have never seen a more perfect, self-contained demonstration of the failings of bottom-posting than the following, which appeared on a mailing list ten days ago:

When it gets past the “Bottom-posting is better”, “No, it isn’t!”, “Yes, it is!”, “No it isn’t!!” stage, bottom posters produce three arguments to defend their practice, arguments that are outlined after the jump.

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