Tower Of Power

Almost a year ago, I started work on a large IT project based in Canary Wharf. It was a time of meeting many new people, tuning in to new accents and learning to find the toilets in yet another building. As is frequently the case these days, a large part of the communication within the project was carried by email, and despite acquiring a whole new email address, and an address list containing over fifteen thousand people, my email conversations with one person in particular stand out in my mind as worthy of note.

It all began, naturally enough, with messages about work. As I sent this person my queries and comments, I began to realise that I was waiting for the replies with a curious sort of eager anticipation. Sure, the person I was writing to was a girl. And not just any old girl, but a particularly attractive one, which made any kind of reply all the more sweet, and ever so slightly unexpected. But it wasn't just the novelty of being able to elicit a response from such a creature of beauty that gave rise to my pleasure. It was the startling realisation that I was enjoying the experience of reading the emails based on their own merit. The messages made real sense - they had a beginning, a middle and an end, and flowed from each to the next with easy, natural language; they were laced with subtle, intelligent humour, and wonderfully free of grammatical error or inappropriate constructions. It was most unusual. The emails were, in short, things of beauty in their own right, and they made me realise that with all of the marvellous communications facilities available to us today, most of the content seems to have been generated by that most despicable type of people - those who just cannot grasp the value of well-written English.

I'm not a great authority on the subject of correctness, whether applied to writing or anything else. I'm not even an authority of the smallest proportions. I am as likely to make mistakes as anyone; in fact, I make them all the time. But at least I make a reasonable effort, which is all one can ask really. It’s the people that don’t that really get my goat.

The real culprits I am talking about here, the Chavs of the literary world if you will, are the people who write absolute nonsense on a regular basis, all the while ignoring punctuation completely and substituting hopelessly incorrect words; for example using "there" instead of "their". Whilst this practice is not, in reality, likely to end in the annihilation of the entire human race, it's just incredibly slack, and shows a complete lack of consideration towards the reader. If, as you read this, you recognise yourself as being a literary Chav, you should congratulate yourself on reading this far into a piece of text, as one can only presume that you don't generally read that much.

And that, really is the crux of this issue, I suppose. I haven't studied the rules of English grammar since my school days (when the world was sepia-toned and innocent). But during the ordinary, life-long process of reading good-quality texts, one becomes unconsciously aware of spellings, use of punctuation and the make-up of a pleasing sentence. The reading of a beautifully-written piece evokes pleasure and brings understanding and appreciation. Conversely, a badly-written piece simply distracts, confounds and frustrates. I think that literary Chavs should stop reading the Daily Sport, and start reading something decent for a change.

My line of work requires me to review a lot of documents which are written by professionals – professionals in the heart of London’s financial district. They are often very technical documents, and it doesn’t help to have to fight my way through a hopelessly tangled, spaghetti version of English in order to understand the technical implications. Professionals should be able to write properly. Increasingly, it seems, they can’t.

Am I the only one who gets really annoyed at glaring errors made by people who should know better? Not far from where I live is a children’s party shop - called "Party's R Us". During the entire process of erecting the shop sign, it appears that no-one noticed the glaring errors in the attempt to pluralise “Party”. I will refrain from comment on the “R”. The shop owner missed the errors, as did the person at the sign-shop who took the order. The person who actually made the sign missed them, and apparently, so did the man who took the sign to the shop in a large van, drilled holes in the wall, fitted the sign and stood back to admire his handiwork. It obviously passed the shop owner's post-sign-fitting quality check too.

On the train recently, I sat next to a teacher who was marking coursework. On one unfortunate pupil's efforts, he wrote "You concentrated to much on section 4". My own daughter received a note from the school last week - it began "Note to parent's: ". If the teachers are making these kinds of mistakes, what hope is there for future generations?

I once received a letter from our local hospital, advising of an upcoming appointment. It was printed on a nice piece of paper bearing the heading and logos of our local health authority. The paper had obviously been inserted into the printer incorrectly, and so the content of the letter was upside-down. The letter was sent out anyway, along with an unwritten message of sloppiness, incompetence and complete lack of care. It’s not really what you want from a health service.

I could go on with these examples, but it's too depressing. I think that, a bit like the sex offenders register in the UK, there should be a "Chav Writers" register. Microsoft Outlook and other mail clients should include a "Report Chav Writer" button, which would automatically add the sender to a global directory, banning them from using email and registering them with their nearest further education facility. Only successful completion of a basic literacy course would remove their names from the "Chav Writers" list.

Public sector services currently tend towards a “diversity” policy, where they try to ensure that job opportunities are filled by people from all walks of life - particularly minorities. There is hope yet then, as Literary Chavs appear to be increasingly prolific, that people who can write readable sentences will one day be classed as one of those cherished minorities. And we can dare to hope that one day, I get a letter printed the right-way-up.