Email has brought the art of letter writing back to life, but some experts think the resulting spread of bad English does more harm than good.
Email is a form of communication that is changing, for the worse, the way we write and use language, say some communication researchers. It is also changing the way we interact and build relationship. These are a few of recently recognized features of email, say experts, that should cause individual and organizations to rethink the way they use email.
“Email has increased the spread of careless writing habits, ”says Naomi Baron, a professor of linguistics at American University. She says the poor spelling, grammar, punctuation and sentence structure of emails reflect a growing unconcern to the way we write.
Baron argues that we should not forgive and forget the poor writing often shown in emails. “ The more we use email and its tasteless writing, the more it becomes the normal way of writing,” the professor says.
Others say that despite its poor prose(文字), email has finished what several generations of English teachers couldn’t: it has made writing fashionable again.
“Email is a critical new communication technology,” says Ian Lancashire, a University of Toronto professor of English.“It fills the gap between spoken language and the formal methods of writing that existed before email. It is the purest form of written speech.”
Lancashire says email has the mysterious ability to get people who are scared by writing to get their thoughts flowing easily onto a blank screen. He says this is because of email’s close similarity to speech.“ It’s like a circle of four or five people around a campfire,” he says.
Still, he accepts that this newfound freedom to express themselves often gets people into trouble.“Almost everyday I get emails that apologies of previous emails,” he reports.
In the US, the number of emails sent in a day exceeds(超过) the number of letters mailed in a year. But more people are recognizing the content of a typical email message is not often exact.
5.The passages mainly shows us that .
A people should stop using email to communicate
B experts hold different opinions about email
C Americans only use email to communicate
D email makes people lose interest in English
6. In Lancashire’s opinion, email is a wonderful technology because_____.
A. it can be used all over the world
B. it is the fastest way to communicate
C. we can express ourselves in a free way
D. we can save a lot of paper
7. Which of the following is NOT true about email?
A. It is changing the way of communication.
B. It is used more than letters in the US.
C. It helps us write better.
D. It causes us to write more.