In fact, it was the subject at a recent meeting of the Modern Language Association. I've embraced e-mail, because it is getting people more involved in written language and it's fast and convenient. Clearly, however, e-mail tends not to be long epistolary affairs a la Hemingway to his editor Max Perkins. Instead, e-mail often is a quick note with informal language and a rushed sense. Grammar, capital letters, and spelling fall by the wayside for many people.
Web sites can appear just as hurried.
While I think that the more people write, the better they will get, Sven Birkerts, an English professor at Bennington College, was less than optimistic in a recent article by Amy Harmon in the New York Times . Birkerts, who mourned the fate of electronic reading in the electronic age in his 1994 book , The Gutenberg Elegies , writes about the coming apart of language in a new collection of essays to be published by Greywolf Press. People don't tend to read the kind of writing that has semicolons. I mention this because this column's goal is not to help you write overwhelming flat prose or how to be informal and mediocre. Hence, if it means being a little more precise in your writing, so be it.