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

A recent survey by the College Board and Pew Internet and American Life Project found that most students say it's important to know how to write well, but a majority also said that Internet-style language -- including abbreviations and emoticons -- is making its way into their classwork.

Some linguists are not alarmed. "Language, all language, undergoes constant change," Amelia C. Murdoch writes in an e-mail. "And technological developments that impinge on language inevitably cause changes in language, all kinds of changes." Murdoch is president of the just-opened National Museum of Language in College Park.

"I personally do not anticipate the early demise of constructions such as 'Pass the salt' or 'Thou shalt not kill,' " she says. "I believe that people want, require, applaud and revere writing that is clear, logical, forceful and beautiful for their information, their laws, their literature and philosophy."

Martha Kolln, a retired Penn State English professor and author of "Understanding English Grammar," says, "Every new thing that comes along has its naysayers. Kids who are text-messaging . . . certainly sentences are underneath those few words. We do in speech and in writing tend to use elliptical phrases that stand for the whole."

"I'm an optimist myself," she says. "We're still using sentences. Maybe they are fragments of sentences, but good writers use fragments. I would have to see more proof that the sentence is dying."

Wilson Follett, writing in Atlantic magazine, offered proof. In an essay titled "Death of the Sentence," fiction writer and literary critic Follett wrote, "To deal with the organization of thought in words is of necessity to deal with the sentence."

In all languages, he added, "it has been the great continuum."

The sentence, he declared, "is a structure inherently faithful to the pattern of consciousness." It is "an instrument inevitable and perfect for the expression of thought."

But, wrote Follett, the sentence is under attack. "To what stage of vagueness, confusion, or sheer lunacy must the English sentence be pushed to evoke any noticeable volume of outcry?"

Follett's essay appeared in Atlantic's October issue. Of 1937.

At the time, he was not concerned about millions of text-messagers and e-mailers killing the sentence. He was worried about highbrow writers -- such as John Dos Passos and Harvard University's Bernard DeVoto -- using long, looping sentences that did not adhere to the strict grammatical and punctuation rules of the day.

Back then there was concern that sentences were too complex; today, that sentences are not complex enough. And that's the way it.