Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure was a clever bloke.  He distinguished between 2 languages: langue, the language, and parole, the spoken language.  We speak one, and we read and write the other.  They can be quite different.

So it seems a bit odd to me that we write to be read, rather than to be heard, especially in the stripped down, dumbed down, sound-bite-driven world that we inhabit these days.  The blog seems to me to be a classic example of this.   You can certainly get quicker through those posts that are written closer to the language of conversation.

Re-read the sentences from this post.  Could you see yourself saying them, exactly as written?  Some of them maybe, others not?  Odd, isn’t it?   Perish the thought you do a spell check and Word tells you your sentence is not a sentence, but a fragment.  Shocking.  🙂