The Fate of The Sentence: Is the Writing On the Wall?

Over a cup of coffee recently in his best-view-of-the-Capitol office on the top floor of the Madison Building high above Independence Avenue, he sounds the warning. In complete sentences.

"The words 'community' and 'communicate' come from the same root word," the silver-haired librarian explains. "It logically follows that greater communication would lead to greater community, would bring us all together."

Great leaps in communication create an illusion, he says, that everyone is going to come together. The irony is that every major information revolution in the modern world has failed to stem misunderstanding and societal mayhem -- or even slow it down.

In the mid-15th century, Gutenberg's printing press did not forestall bloody holy wars. The multimedia revolution of the mid-19th century, which included telegraphy, photography and the steam-driven printing press, led to increased nationalist passions and wars among nations.

The Internet revolution, Billington says, creates new possibilities for people to be in touch with others, but it could also lead to a gobbledygook language without sentences and punctuation and paragraphs -- and with less understanding of the world and its meaning.

"We are moving toward the language used by computer programmers and air traffic controllers," he says. "Language as a method of instruction, not a portal into critical thinking."

A day or two after this conversation, Billington took his concerns to a group of educators at the library. The occasion was the April release of the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, otherwise known as "the nation's report card."

According to the report, only one-third of eighth-graders in this country can write with proficiency. The New York Times reported that the crowd laughed when Billington, at the presentation of the report, sounded the alarm about "the slow destruction of the basic unit of human thought -- the sentence.''

Undaunted, he continued. Online communication is sloppily written, he said, and "the sentence is the biggest casualty.''

Was the librarian just kicking it old school? Not necessarily.

Efstathia Siegel, who has been teaching freshman composition at Montgomery College for 10 years, agrees with Billington. "I'm optimistic about students' enthusiasm for learning," Siegel says. "But when it comes to how their sentences are put together, that consciousness is not there."

Love of stories hasn't vanished, Siegel says, and students who want to be writers and storytellers still care about the way sentences are created. "But what about those who don't write the stories?" she says. "That's who I am concerned about. Those who don't have a love of the language."