Jesse Sheidlower on PBS Newshour

[Matthew Gordon]

I was impressed with Jesse's part, but it's not fair to call Patricia O'Conner
a "linguist". She's an editor turned language maven. From what I can tell, her
book is a prescriptivist attempt to return email to those golden days of letter
writing.

>From the jacket of _You Send Me_:
"Will the computer be the death of good writing? Not necessarily... The good
news is we're writing again, but we'll have to upgrade our lousy language and
social skills or suffer the cyber-consequences."

Dave Wilton wrote:

> In all the excitement over the media coverage of WOTY, no one has seen fit
> to mention that Jesse Sheidlower was on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer last
> night (6 January). They did a feature on how email and electronic
> communications is changing the language. Jesse was one of two linguists
> interviewed. The other was Patricia O'Conner, who has written an email style
> guide.
>
> It was an excellent piece, one of the best examples of media coverage of a
> linguistic issue that I've seen. A RealAudio version of the story is
> available at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/newshour_index.html.