Infamous. Infamous?

COME TO SANTO POCO PUT ON SHOW STOP THE INFAMOUS EL GUAPO

Clearly, knowing where the period is in this sentence – and getting past the clunky language of telegrams – is crucial to understanding this sentence, and The Three Amigos fail miserably at it.

Nevermind that without the misunderstanding we have no story. Because the senders of this telegram had to settle for the ten-peso version, tragedy (“I’ve been shot already!”) and comedy (“Lip balm?”) ensue.

So I agree with Joe Moran, professor of English at Liverpool John Moores University when he says “If you want to write well, learn to love the full stop. See it as the goal towards which the words in your sentence adamantly move.”

But some of the rest of what Moran writes would fit in well with a comedy of words.

Moran decries the advent of texting and chatting online, where “[w]e live in a digital age that likes to pretend that writing is speech. We tap out emails, texts and update our social media profiles in the places – busy commuter trains, cafes and streets – where we also talk. We write as if we were talking. This kind of digital writing is often done quickly in the hope of an instant response. It is a slightly interrupted way of having a conversation.”*

Considering that most early records of written communication are little more than accountancy made permanent, I have to wonder how much tweed is stuffed up Mr. Moran’s bum.

Writing and speech have often had a hostile relationship. The Linguistic Society of America has a few choice words on the topic:

Written language is associated with political and economic power, admired literature, and educational institutions, all of which lend it high prestige. In literate societies, people often come to think of their written language as basic; they may regard speech as inferior. Nevertheless, writing can be perceived as colder or more impersonal than speech.

The best books I’ve read are mixtures of both writing and speech. Writing as we speak – and this applies to nonfiction as well as fiction – allows us to remove some of the tweed from our bums; to remove the colder, impersonal air that writing can entail. Some writers are better at this than others. And there are times when we want the cold informality of the written word, rather than the casualness of speech. But both styles have their places, can often be intermixed successfully. Neither should be regarded as better than the other, but rather should be seen as equal partners to be called upon when the need arises.

Our ears – used to speech – can tell when something sounds written, particularly when it’s delivered in an active medium like a radio play, a movie, or such. The nuance of circumstance, context, and place help us – complex linguistic creatures that we are – to tell when a character is cleverly written to appear stiff and wooden, and when a character’s lines are poorly written.

Our brains – used to writing – can tell when something sounds casually out of place, irreverent, or informal when the opposite is called for. Yet we can begin to hear characters speak in our minds – we often give them distinct voices, too – when the casualness of transcribed speech allows us to hear the characters speaking. And this goes for those characters who are cleverly-written to sound as if there’s tweed in their bums.

Learn to write both ways, young man, and the west will be yours, even if El Guapo turns out to be a big, dangerous man who wants to kill you. He certainly didn’t sound that way in the telegram.

*We can also see Moran is no fan of the Oxford comma, but that’s fodder for another post.