Ah, the art of brainstorming. I am an idea man by nature. When I sit down with a will to write I usually flesh out dozens of ideas before settling on just one. That said, I feel that I have a clear idea of where I want to take this research project. My writing in class was scattered and undefined so I will lay out my thoughts as best as I can.
Language fascinates me. I mentioned, albeit briefly, in my first blog post that I would like to write about the evolution of language in the modern era. There are numerous reasons why I am leaning towards this topic. First and foremost it is due to my own particular stance on language. Being an English Major and a person who loves to communicate, people often assume that I am concerned with things like grammar, spelling, etc. This could not be farther from the truth. While I understand and respect (most of) the rules of language, I do not strictly adhere to them in the same manner that many of my peers do. I will never correct people for accidents in grammar, word choice, etc. I dislike the amount of animosity that comes from people when they see a misused comma or an improper form of a word. To me, it becomes an issue of status and intelligence for those who love to wag fingers and make corrections. I know what I should and shouldn't do when it comes to writing, and I do not feel the need to condescend to others and make them feel bad about themselves for their mistakes.
You may be wondering where this is going, but I assure you there is a point.
My stance on language and structure often puts me at ends with friends and other students who LOVE to correct others. They find it to be their sworn duty, to patrol language and look down on those who do not know how to properly write. I love arguing, so I often play Devil's Advocate against those fighting for linguistic uniformity. All of these arguments have made me take true notice of the age we live in and how we communicate.
We live in a time period where people HAVE to write to survive. As little as ten years ago this was not the case. Writing has been taught in school for as far back as educational institutions have been around, but the vast majority of people who have gone to school in the past didn't have to concern themselves with writing daily. Writing was a luxury for those in the middle class, those who worked in factories or stores or restaurants. The most that people would do, even as recent as the 1990s, would be writing letters. With the age of the internet and communication methods like text messaging, we are seeing a huge rush of people having to write to get their point across. Few are the people who do not have a cell phone, and most of those with cell phones utilize texting over calls. Not only that, but social media makes it so that we are constantly writing about our own lives, commenting on the lives of others, and voicing opinions left and right about everything from politics to potato chips. With all of this writing, especially from the "common man," we are also seeing a lot of typos, grammatical errors and overall poor use of written language.
With all of this it is also interesting to note how our language is changing. Language is both a living and stagnant thing. It is stagnant in symbolism, what words represent, but it is living in its constant evolution. If language never changed it probably never would have come around in the first place (speculation, as the origins of spoken language will most likely never be realized) and we cannot try to stop the growth and change of our language. In this age, we see people writing the way they speak, something that is advised against in institutions of higher learning. My real question, though, is how can we call these changes "bad?" Sure, people are using double negatives, the wrong forms of "your" and "you're" and creating ridiculous ways of abbreviating words that, actually, take longer to use, but if that is how people communicate and other people understand them then language is serving its purpose. Just because people are communicating in a manner that goes against what our schools tell us does not necessarily mean that we are seeing a degradation of our higher faculties.
I could go on and on about this, which is why I definitely plan on using this topic for my research paper. I believe that I will be able to focus and explore one of the many facets of this area of research, and will probably have to scale back more than delve. Start big, then make it smaller; that's how I like to do things.
Obviously I am open to input, and the ambivalence of my opinion can make it difficult to try and "prove" something, but I'm okay with that. I don't usually write to prove a point, rather I enjoy starting a discourse (rhetorical writing, I guess) and opening minds to both sides of an argument. Picking a side may be the popular opinion, but it also closes off the mind to why the other side may be relevant or correct.
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