Creative Briefs #7: Email Police

There are worse things in the world than imperfect writing, though apparently, Haley wasn’t supposed to think so. After all, she was a copywriter – one of the appointed guardians of grammar, a warrior on the front lines of syntactic propriety. Of all people, she should be appalled by confounding punctuation and unwitting malaprops. Wasn’t it her job, literally, to prevent the English language from devolving into incoherent strings of acronyms and emojis?

But the truth was, Haley didn’t give a shit.

Such things mattered in her own work, but the presumption of pedantry was one of the enduring myths about copywriters that Haley loathed, as if learning the rules made one the de facto enforcer. Considering her own heavy workload, and how striking items from her office to-do list never seemed to make the list shorter, Haley understood why a colleague’s off-the-cuff email might not get a thorough proofing.

With due respect to the Bible and the Koran, few books inspire more devotional fervency than the AP Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style, and she knew plenty of professionals who couldn’t make it through a networking Happy Hour without rehashing the reasons for their dedication to one or the other. Alcohol and the serial comma can be a potent mix.

While she understood the tendency to call out errors, she found no pleasure in secretly roasting a coworker for typing “for all intensive purposes.” True, the miswritten phrase defied logic, but it was an easy phonic assumption if you’ve only heard “for all intents and purposes” spoken aloud. Someone’s use of “I’m at your beckon call” drew snickers in the confines of her department, but the mistake made as much sense to Haley as “beck and call,” and she would have replaced either with “I’m available.” A particular peeve was when anyone pounced on “irregardless.” Someone would inevitably add, “it’s not even a word,” a common complaint despite its appearance in the OED, which seemed a sufficient defense for any word, even one that contradicted itself. In each of these cases, wasn’t it clear what they were saying, even if they hadn’t said it correctly?

This forgiving flexibility extended beyond her inbox. Haley refused to pledge allegiance to a style guide, a fact that raised eyebrows in certain professional circles. With due respect to the Bible and the Koran, few books inspire more devotional fervency than the AP Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style, and she knew plenty of professionals who couldn’t make it through a networking Happy Hour without rehashing the reasons for their dedication to one or the other. Alcohol and the serial comma can be a potent mix.

Rigid grammar enforcement brought to Haley’s mind the early days of hip-hop, when self-appointed purists damned the genre as “not even music,’ as if ham-fisted lotharios like Bad Company had a deeper artistic integrity than Eric B. & Rakim. Haley had marveled at the time how the definition of proper music could contain everything from Mozart to a guy playing a washtub bass, yet complex Gatling-gun rhymes over a sampled groove were somehow outside the box.

She certainly preferred precise vocabulary and cogent use of semi-colons, but in the grand scheme of things, the goal was communication. Every language is continually evolving, and allowing a certain elasticity gives it room to grow. Seeing adverse where the sender meant averse didn’t render the message incoherent, and in the era of autocorrect, there was no way to know if an error is the result of napping in high school English classes or an overactive OS.

There was one aspect of the stern lexical taskmaster stereotype, however, that had some value at the office. If anyone at a meeting suggested a threadbare cliché or painfully punny headline, she would adopt a resting-bitch-face expression and let her silence telegraph her displeasure. On these occasions, it rarely took long for the offending suggestion to be retracted with a smirk or an admission that “I’m no copywriter.” Haley appreciated that she had this power, never letting on that she spent the awkward moment pondering something like what time the sushi place around the corner opened.

At its root, Haley believed that language is best used as a tool, not a weapon, and knowing the rules didn’t mean she had to be a snatch about them. Mocking someone for a minor offense not only seemed pedantic, it was a classic glass-house scenario – English is a complex language replete with rules and regulations, many of which we inadvertently break because our personal list of linguistic laws is incomplete. It seemed like poor form to get a feeling of superiority by calling out violations of the few rules we did know. People make mistakes, and that’s fine. We shouldn’t have to be perfect in order to make a point.

Besides, sometimes an emoji says all that needs to be said.

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