Fourteen centuries of excruciating composition (and counting...)

I feel like I’ve been banging on a bit lately about my perception that the quality of writing amongst otherwise well-educated and articulate people has been going to hell in a hand basket. And it seems I’m not the only one to think this, as these representative samples from Clio Bluestocking Tales and Dame Eleanor Hull testify.

Regardless of whether I’m right or wrong, this particular gripe usually makes me feel just a wee bit curmudgeonly. I start to suspect the real problem may lay somewhere in the intersection between my advancing age and retreating patience, rather than in any objective decline in standards. This charming little post by Alice Rio (from Jonathan Jarrett’s back catalogue at A Corner of Tenth Century Europe) tends to confirm my suspicions. I hope he doesn’t mind me quoting the relevant chunk here, because it is just so apt. It’s from a seventh century manuscript that appears to have been written by a rather grumpy monk:

“Another text, addressed to young men who do not know how to write. I wonder that, after such a long time, my speech has in no way been followed on the page, and the borrowed writing tablets which you bring back soiled with your text, as if from dictation, are filled with the wrong words.”

I bet that after writing that, our monk got together with his mates over a pint of ale to moan about how “novices these days wouldn’t know what to do with a semicolon if it came up and bit them on the arse!”

Image: A novice monk being punished for misusing the possessive apostrophe.