Telegram style

Not to be confused with Telegraphic speech.
This telegram was sent by Orville Wright in December 1903 from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, following the first successful aeroplane flight.

Telegram style, telegraph style, telegraphic style or telegraphese[1] is a clipped way of writing that attempts to abbreviate words and pack as much information into the smallest possible number of words or characters.

It originated in the telegraph age when telecommunication consisted only of short messages transmitted by hand over the telegraph wire. The telegraph companies charged for their service by the number of words in a message, with a maximum of 15 characters per word for a plain-language telegram, and 10 per word for one written in code. The style developed to minimize costs but still convey the message clearly and unambiguously.

Related but distinct, is the historical practice of using abbreviations and code words to compress the meaning of phrases into a small set of characters for ease of transmission over a telegraph, a device for transmitting electrical impulses used for communications, introduced from 1839 onwards. The related term cablese describes the style of press messages sent uncoded, but in a highly condensed, Hemingwayesque style, over submarine communications cables. In the U.S. Foreign Service, before the advent of broadband telecommunications, cablese referred to condensed telegraphic messaging that made heavy use of abbreviations and avoided use of definite or indefinite articles, punctuation, and other words unnecessary for comprehension of the message.

A characteristic is the use of the word STOP for a full stop character:

eg t-gram style stop

Example

Orville Wright's telegram of December 17, 1903 about the first powered flight.

Success four flights thursday morning all against twenty one mile wind started from Level with engine power alone average speed through air thirty one miles longest 57 seconds inform Press home Christmas . Orevelle Wright

Antecedents

Before the telegraph age military dispatches from overseas were made by letters transported by rapid sailing ships. Clarity and concision were often considered important in such correspondence.

An apocryphal story about the briefest correspondence in history has a writer (variously identified as Victor Hugo or Oscar Wilde) inquiring about the sales of his new book by sending the message "?" to his publisher, only to receive "!" in reply.[2]

Telegraphic coded expressions

Through the history of telegraphy, very many dictionaries of telegraphese, codes or ciphers were developed, each serving to minimise the number of characters or words which needed to be transmitted in order to impart a message; the drivers for this economy were, for telegraph operators, the resource cost and limited bandwidth of the system; and for the consumer, the cost of sending messages.

Examples of telegraphic coded expressions, taken from The Adams Cable Codex, Tenth Edition, 1896 are:

and from The A.B.C. Universal Commercial Electric Telegraphic Code

Other languages

In Japanese, telegrams are printed using the katakana script, one of the few instances in which this script is used for entire sentences.

In some ways, "telegram style" was the precursor to the modern language abbreviations employed in "texting" or the use of short message standard (SMS) services such as Twitter. For telegrams, space was at a premium—economically speaking—and abbreviations were used as a matter of necessity. This motivation was revived for compressing information into the 140 character limit of a costly SMS prior to the advent of multi-message capabilities. Length constraints drove readoption of telegraphic style despite requiring more effort to write and read than standard language using inbuilt predictive text's assistance.

Telegram length

The average length of a telegram in the 1900s in the US was 11.93 words; more than half of the messages were 10 words or fewer.[3]

According to another study, the mean length of the telegrams sent in the UK before 1950 was 14.6 words or 78.8 characters.[4]

For German telegrams, the mean length is 11.5 words or 72.4 characters.[4] At the end of the 19th century the average length of a German telegram was calculated as 14.2 words.[4]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Alred, Brusaw, and Oliu. Handbook of Technical Writing, Seventh Edition. New York, New York: St. Martins Press, 2003., p.522
  2. ↑ O’Toole, Garson (2014-06-14). "Briefest Correspondence: Question Mark? Exclamation Mark!". Quote Investigator. Retrieved 2014-06-15.
  3. ↑ Hochfelder, David (2012). The Telegraph in America, 1832–1920. The Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 79.
  4. 1 2 3 Frehner, Carmen (2008). Email, SMS, MMS: The Linguistic Creativity of Asynchronous Discourse in the New Media Age. Bern: Peter Lang AG. pp. 187, 191.

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