if i wrote a column this way you would assume id gone barmy. Maybe you wouldn’t. You might think I was going for shaggy experimental prose in the style of ee cummings (as that poet sometimes styled himself).

Either way, one doesn’t expect to encounter unpunctuated prose in any version of any newspaper. Dadaists have their place, and that place is not between the parliamentary sketch and the rugby stuff.

Until quite recently a writer was expected to make an effort to punctuate and capitalise when writing prose for another person to read. When scribbling reminders to oneself all kinds of linguistic anarchy are allowed.

But allowing untended sentences to be seen by others was akin to meeting friends without properly adjusting your clothing.

So what if wads of undergarment are hanging through my open fly? Who cares if I’m wearing odd shoes? Does it matter if last week’s soup is still splattered down the front of my shirt? This is still lovely old me. My pals can understand what I’m saying. Stop being such a square.

You can probably guess where this is going. In all kinds of electronic media, punctuation is now seen as an unnecessary affectation.

The point is not that writers are no longer taught punctuation (although that may be true).

The point is that educated people who know the difference between a comma and a semi-colon are now choosing to write texts, tweets and Facebook comments in a style that suggests madder sections of Finnegans Wake.

Like James Joyce, these people are perfectly capable of capitalising proper nouns and correctly positioning apostrophes.

It has been deemed unnecessary – and indeed a little gauche – to make that effort when writing in the new media. clever people whove published books and lectured at harvard argue on twitter like this. They would never dream of doing such a thing when writing an academic paper.

There are no obvious models for this breakdown. In the days when we used to write actual letters on actual bits of paper with devices that actually squirted actual ink, we were told to abide by the basic rules.

There was no need to write as carefully as we would if submitting a PhD thesis, but the assumption was that the recipient, even if a close friend, would expect a big “B” at the start of Belfast and a full stop at the end of each sentence.

Anything else would be disrespectful. Anything else would show you to be careless.

There are now so many ways in which the world is divided into two types of people. One concerns the care citizens take when composing a text. This group hammers out the message rapidly, pausing only to ensure that the meaning is unambiguous.

If we have made clear that pints will be had at eight o’clock in the Frog and Hatstand then all is well. It matters not if colons precede lists and qualifying clauses are nested within a pair of commas.

The other set stands in the rain desperately trying to work out which key combination is required to place a macron over the first “o” in Yasujiro Ozu’s name. (On the iPhone keep the “o” depressed, and the macron will appear on the second left.)

Nobody is going to take me for somebody who doesn’t actually have a word of Japanese.

I don’t care if we miss the first film in that director’s retrospective. I’d rather sleep in the increasingly damp gutter than get this wrong.

Text speak

Obviously, I’m the idiot here. Texting is designed for short, informative phrases, the distribution of shopping lists and pathetic, drunken entreaties to estranged girlfriends at closing time.

If you’re using the machinery for anything more sophisticated then you’re doing it wrong. A degree of informality is allowed in hurried situations.

The more deliberate disregard of these rules by people who elsewhere abide by them is less easy to explain. It is partly a generational distinction.

Those who grew up with texting learned to regard that medium as the least formal class of communication bar throwing faeces at one another.

At the age of 13 the imposition of punctuation would have seemed affected to the point of lunacy.

That convention looks to have lodged in brains and become the default setting for much online communication.

In a recent report Dr Celia Klin, who teaches at Binghampton University, in New York State, argues that even a full stop can send out the wrong signal in a text. It may seem "stuffy, too formal".

Such a dot could make the text seem “less sincere or in some ways stiffer, not genuine”.

That argument seems sound. Conventions shift. Meanings mutate. Walls crumble. Pestilence spreads about the land. No, that’s not fair. But things do change.