Aphorisms stir up emotions. Some people see them as seemingly profound nonsense, while others gain strength from them. Whatever you think about aphorisms, two things are certain: on Facebook you can’t avoid them, and they represent an entire spectrum of language errors.
On that spectrum you can find:
- comma errors
- unnecessary capitalization
- missing sentence parts, like verbs or subjects
- smilies instead of periods
- erroneous punctuation marks, usually in the wrong places
- confusing phrase structures
- over-long sentences.
Aphorisms are an art of everyday life, so we must allow them some liberty. But the artistic impression of an aphorism doesn’t suffer from having a comma in the right place. According to an aphorism, Martin Luther King said, “To serve, you don’t have to make your subject and verb agree. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.” When it comes to writing an understandable text, though, a loving soul is not enough and a gracious heart doesn’t help. A soul that can edit, on the other hand, is helpful if an aphorist wants his phrasing to produce feelings other than confusion.
This week’s guest writer, Terhi Savonen, is a Finnish language student who participated in the Language Consulting Course at the University of Tampere.