Writing in English??

Para los que les interesa saber cómo carámbanos comunicarse en inglés les recomiendo esta Newsletter de una chica llamada Jennifer Stewart, en yahoo groups. Es divertida y tiene cosas interesantes. Abajo va un ejemplo de su última newsletter, acerca del uso de Hopefully.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WritingTips

Hopefully, you won't need it.

"Hopefully" is often used to mean, 'it is hoped,' as in my example above, and while many authorities frown on that usage as being colloquial, others see it as acceptable. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary states:

In the early 1960s the second sense of hopefully, which had been in sporadic use since around 1932, underwent a surge of popular use. A surge of popular criticism followed in reaction, but the criticism took no account of the grammar of adverbs. Hopefully in its second sense is a member of a class of adverbs known as disjuncts. Disjuncts serve as a means by which the author or speaker can comment directly to the reader or hearer usually on the content of the sentence to which they are attached. Many other adverbs (as interestingly, frankly, clearly, luckily, unfortunately) are similarly used; most are so ordinary as to excite no comment or interest whatsoever. The second sense of hopefully is entirely standard.

And dictionary.com shares this view:

Usage Note: Writers who use hopefully as a sentence adverb, as in Hopefully the measures will be adopted, should be aware that the usage is unacceptable to many critics, including a large majority of the Usage Panel. It is not easy to explain why critics dislike this use of hopefully. The use is justified by analogy to similar uses of many other adverbs, as in Mercifully, the play was brief or Frankly, I have no use for your friend. And though this use of hopefully may have been a vogue word when it first gained currency back in the early 1960s, it has long since lost any hint of jargon or pretentiousness for the general reader. The wide acceptance of the usage reflects popular recognition of its usefulness; there is no precise substitute ... It might have been expected, then, that the initial flurry of objections to hopefully would have subsided once the usage became well established. Instead, critics appear to have become more adamant in their opposition.

"I hope we'll be there in time for lunch, but I suspect we won't make it."

"Hopefully, we'll be there in time for lunch, but I suspect we won't make it."

Most people find that the first of these is fine, while the second is strange and even bizarre. The reason appears to be that `hopefully' means something like `I hope and expect that', and hence the speaker of the second is doing something weird: she's simultaneously asserting that she expects to be in time and that she expects to be too late. Most interesting.

The Cambridge dictionary states: Hopefully (=I hope that) we'll be in Norwich by early evening.

"Do you have a cigarette?" he asked hopefully (=wishing the answer to be 'yes').

My Webster's says it means 'in a hopeful manner; with hope or confidence' and that's good enough for me!

The best way is to avoid using "hopefully" to mean "it is hoped that" in formal writing - save it for colloquial use only - a bit like your favourite baggy pants that you only wear around the house.