A New Way of Talking with Our Words

Critics of the internet and social networking such as Twitter, Facebook and blogs/forums have been claiming that this is causing a decline in our reading and writing capabilities since we skim a lot of what we read and write in more fractured sentences online. But these new mediums are providing us with more information than we have available to us than ever before and I believe this is the key to developing our fitness literacy even further.

John McWhorter writes about this new form of writing we partake in in his New York Times article, "Talking With Your Fingers." In the article, McWhorter writes about keyboard technology in a very interesting way because, while, initially he writes about the common belief that texting and emails are the end of formal writing, he goes on to mention that there are only around 100 of 6000 languages that use large amounts of writing at all. He continues, mentioning that the way we speak through emails is less poetic than the letters soldiers would write to their loved ones during the Civil War. Admitting that texting and emails are simply handier, he believes that they are a new form of conversations, fingered speech, in a sense. In many fitness forums (as well as any forum) people writing will not write with correct grammar and punctuation, all the time. Experts (or those labeled as experts) usually post a lot and will get out the information as fast as possible. As long as it's legible, that's all that matters. Forums and blogs are much like conversations; I know that I don't speak with perfect grammar all the time and know that my posts on forums don't need to either. In regards to fitness, as long as the information is out there, it doesn't matter how grammatically correct it is.