50. Mind Your Language

Teacher’s lecture (Social Media Usage, Paper III – Basic Writing Skills)

“Both content and language matter in a post. You have all heard about content being the king. But the king needs to sit on a throne.

"Language is that throne. If the throne is not imposing, the king has no respect.

"Similarly, if your language does not comply with some acceptable criteria, your content will be literally lost in translation.

"In India there is another layer of complication in the form of the script used for writing. Are you writing Indian languages with Roman letters or in Indian script?

"The following is a list of different writing possibilities in India in decreasing order of social acceptance.

(Applicable to Facebook status, comments, tweets, Instagram comments, Whatsapp group messages etc.)

    1.       (Most acceptable) English comments written with English/Roman script.

    

    2.       Indian language comments written with English script.

    

    3.       Indian language comments written with Indian script.

    

    4.       Indian language comments with grammatical mistakes.

    

    5.       English comments with grammatical mistakes.

    

    6.       English comments written using short/SMS forms (eg. U hd a wndrfl hairct)

    

    7.       (Least acceptable) Indian comments written using short/SMS forms. Nobody understands them.

"Use the most acceptable forms to write your own comments and use the least acceptable ones to make somebody’s profile look bad.”