Logorrhemail

One weird thing I've noticed in my return to academia is that my writing style has changed substantially. I write an occasional thankyou note with a real pen and paper (and yes, Farmor, I'm going to sit down with Dutch tomorrow to write those late thankyous for her birthday extravaganza), but otherwise all my writing in the last 6 years has consisted of emailing (and now blogging, which for me is just email writ large). Now I write everything as if it's an email. My essays and "memos" for school are meandering and full of chatty contractions and cheap wit. I have to go over them repeatedly to formalize the language, impose structure and extract the jokes. Luckily, one of my professors is an email-friendly sort of person, and she likes my writing fine. The other professor is more formal and academic, and I have to work much harder to organize and tighten up my writing for him.

The same style drift affects the people around me. My new boss writes sloppily, and she also writes her emails all in lowercase. I do that when I email friends, but she does it even when she's emailing a stranger for professional reasons. One of the people who applied for her job actually sent me an email with about six smiley-face emoticons in it. Not just the regular punctuation emoticon :) but an actual smiley face. Ugh.