Inspired by “Eats, Shoots & Leaves”, by Lynn Truss, Jennifer Garret has posted “Eats, Blogs & Leaves“. I have to agree.
Bad punctuation is only the half of it. Spelling, grammar and syntax are all victims of the rapid publishing habit that is blogging. I’m constantly embarassed to discover howlers in my own blog, often many months or years after the event, often as a result of a search hit containing the same innocent typo.
I guess the point of the original article is that this is not just a matter of tolerance of ongoing language evolution in a new genre (like txting, no doubt more extreme), but more a plea for taking communication seriously. When people are memetically programmed to read what they want to hear, and we all are, then meaning transposed by mis-punctuation or other typos, may be far more than subtle nuances.