e. e. cummings: hero or villain?

when i was in high school i started reading poetry by e. e. cummings.  i thought e. e. cummings was so cool, all counter-culture, using inventive spelling, shirking proper writing conventions like capitalization and word order.  he was my hero.

in college, i adopted e.e. cummings as my personal source of writing conventions.  capitalizing nouns like the germans was another idea i toyed with, but i dropped that because it forced me to parse out sentences.  anyway, i completely stopped using capital letters, except for the word i (i was too lazy to dot the i).  on term papers and exams i felt compelled to use capitals, but i gritted my teeth the whole way.    lowercase letters became my personal writing trademark.

then came the internet.  i don't know how this happened, but people started writing everything in lower case letters, starting with emails.  why???  maybe because it requires fewer keystrokes--i don't know.  anyway, suddenly my unique style of writing had become common.  what a dilemma for me.

these days i'm a bit schizophrenic on the capitalization issue.  on emails i generally don't capitalize unless i'm writing to someone who is not a native english speaker, or if i'm trying to prove a point.  but i don't want to prove this point:  that i'm just like everyone else who doesn't capitalize.  i was doing this years before people started abbreviating the term electronic mail.  my ego is inextricably entangled with self-perceived uniqueness in writing style.  i really have to get over this.

once upon a time, e.e. cummings was my hero; now i just don't know.  as a teacher, i struggle to get my kids to ignore the writing conventions of the internet.  i cringe when they write ur instead of your or insert lol when it is or isn't appropriate.  teaching english learners, you have to be exact with writing conventions because they're not really getting support for it elsewhere. now, i don't think it's e.e. cummings' fault that internet writers use inventive punctuation.  but would i introduce e.e. cummings to my kids?  i doubt it.  maybe if they make perfect scores on their tests and can show me they can write correctly--only then would i treat them to this kind of literary counter-culture.  lol.

ttyl