Email has brought the art of letter writing back to life, but some experts think the resul

ting spread of bad English does more harm than good.

Email is a form. of communication that is changing, for the worse, the way we write and use language, say some communication researchers. It is also dramatically changing the way we interact and build relationships. These are a few of the recently recognized features of email, say experts, that should cause individuals and organizations to rethink the way they use email.

"Email has increased the spread of careless writing habits," says Naomi Baron, a professor of linguistics at American University. She says the poor spelling, grammar, punctuation and sentence structure of emails reflect a growing unconcern to the way we write.

Baron argues that we should not forgive and forget the poor writing often shown in emails. "The more we use email and its tasteless writing, the more it becomes the normal way of writing," the professor says.

Others say that despite its poor prose, email has accomplished what several generations of English teachers couldn't: It has made writing fashionable again.

"Email is a critical new communication technology," says Ian Lancashire, a University of Toronto professor of English. "It fills the gap between spoken language and the formal methods of writing that existed before email. It is the purest form. of written speech."

Lancashire says email has the mysterious ability to get people who are usually scared by writing to get their thoughts flowing easily onto a blank screen. He says this is because of e-mail's dose similarity to speech. "It's like a circle of four or five people around a campfire," he says.

Still, he accepts that this new-found freedom to express themselves often gets people into trouble. "Almost every day I get emails that are apologies of previous emails," he reports.

in the US, the number of emails sent in a day exceeds the number of letters mailed in a year. But more people are recognizing the content of a typical email message is often imprecise.

This can cause mild confusion or, in the worse cases, disastrous misunderstandings. Using email effectively is a matter of recognizing its strengths and limitations as a communication tool, says Don Cohen, editor of Knowledge Directions, the journal of the Massachusetts-based Institute for Knowledge Management.

"Email is extremely useful for communicating straightforward stuff like the time of a meeting or correct spelling of a name," Cohen notes. "It is not an good for building trust among people and making decisions."

"Email alone can't communicate the subtlety and signals needed for maintaining a relationship," he says. Most relationships made through email don't survive. Yet, the moot serious consequence of the increasingly casual, speech-like style. of writing being promoted by email could be a gradual loss of critical awareness, Barot believes.

She has noticed a decline in the ability of today's students to think through an argument. She also says that many people are being fooled by emails into thinking that spelling and grammar ore not important in the electronic medium.

"There's a growing awareness that people who are interested in you either professionally or personally read your email carefully and form. impressions of your intelligence and capabilities by what they read," she repolls.

Baron disagrees with linguists who say that emailing will forever change the way we write and speak. "l wouldn't be surprised if 30 or 40 years from now we get disgusted with how unclear and careless our writing has become and change our teaching methods and standards."

Naomi Baron believes that email is responsible for ______.

A．neglect of good writing habits

B．normal way of writing

C．imprecise information

D．disastrous misunderstanding