Why do language rules exist? They exist, not because a tyrannical academy has made them up on a whim or likes to show off its language mastery, but because they are necessary to ensure efficient communication.
As I´ve heard a few times, someone might say that they are not making a critical error if they drop an ‘h’ in Spanish or write an ‘s’ instead of a ‘c’ or a ‘b’ instead of a ‘v’. But I know what you´re thinking: no one will die because of that nor trigger a world war (I hope). But reading such misspellings will surely slow you down and you will need to go over the lines again in order to get the message straight.
Again, someone might remind me of those experiments in which you have to read jumbled letters and you nail it, as in “Do you fnid tihs smiple to raed?”. Yes, our mind is a code-cracking machine, and we can do this because our brains process all the letters of a word simultaneously and use the letters as context for each other. That´s why we can also read words that have “NUMB3RS” instead of “L3773RS”. But picture yourself reading a whole jumbled paragraph: you will need a bit longer to figure it out and you´ll be exhausted eventually if you have to do this on a regular basis. So if we are not going to write properly, then let´s play tennis by our own rules, and I´m pretty sure that we´ll be playing alone soon.
Now let´s take grammar, for instance: “Juan vio a Pedro entrando en la habitación”. Yes, ambiguity is a bitch. There´s no way of knowing for sure whether the person entering the room is Juan or Pedro. You´ll need to use another structure to leave (the) room for no doubts. Would anyone think of setting their watch to their own time? Oh, yes, let´s do this, and you´ll soon be late for meetings and work or even missing your child´s school theater show.
And then there´s punctuation. A friend of mine once texted someone: “I thought you couldn´t do it”, to what the other person replied: “No puedo” instead of “No, puedo”. Worst case scenario, my friend could have lost his mind over this, cause you never know the context nor the person´s state of mind. But he was smart enough to write back and ask if he had understood the answer correctly.
So I think it´s a pretty bad idea (and sometimes a dangerous one) to dodge the rules, cause rules were made for a reason. As I mentioned before, we see words as a whole and recognize them immediately if they are spelled correctly. Besides, we should be focused on understanding the content of what we are reading rather than deciphering the words, cause this will only result in a loss of our precious time and a lack of undestanding. So let´s do ourselves a favor and write the way we should. Otherwise, we´ll end up by being diagnosed with dyslexia or something. By the way, language is one of my passions.
Lilián Elizabeth Borgeaud