… makes the same point I make at the beginning of my Teaching Company talk on how to write well. She headlines her post WE ARE ALL WRITERS NOW. Excerpts:
… [W]ith more than 200m people on Facebook and even more with home internet access, we are all writing more than we would have ten years ago. Those who would never write letters (too slow and anachronistic) or postcards (too twee) now send missives with abandon, from long thoughtful memos to brief and clever quips about evening plans. And if we subscribe to the theory that the most effective way to improve one’s writing is by practicing—by writing more, and ideally for an audience—then our writing skills must be getting better.
… My friends and I write more than we used to, often more than we talk. We correspond with each other and to colleagues, school teachers, utility companies. We send e-mails to our local newspaper reporters about their stories; we write to magazine editors to tell them what we think. And most of us do labour to write well: an e-mail to a potential romantic partner is laboriously revised and edited (no more waiting by the phone); a tweet to a prospective employer is painstakingly honed until its 140 characters convey an appropriate tone with the necessary information. A response to our supervisor’s clever status update on Facebook is written carefully, so to keep the repartee going. Concision and wit are privileged in these new forms. Who would not welcome shorter, funnier prose?
… [T]he quality of many blogs is high, indistinguishable in eloquence and intellect from many traditionally published works.
Our new forms of writing—blogs, Facebook, Twitter—all have precedents, analogue analogues: a notebook, a postcard, a jotting on the back of an envelope. They are exceedingly accessible. That it is easier to cultivate a wide audience for tossed off thoughts has meant a superfluity of mundane musings, to be sure. But it has also generated a democracy of ideas and quite a few rising stars, whose work we might never have been exposed to were we limited to conventional publishing channels…
July 6th, 2009 at 11:00AM
"And most of us do labour to write well: an e-mail to a potential romantic partner is laboriously revised and edited (no more waiting by the phone); a tweet to a prospective employer is painstakingly honed until its 140 characters convey an appropriate tone with the necessary information. A response to our supervisor’s clever status update on Facebook is written carefully, so to keep the repartee going. Concision and wit are privileged in these new forms."
She’s obviously never read the comments on YouTube, any news or opinion web-site, or most student e-mails. For that matter, she’s obviously not been paying attention to spot the massive errors appearing in news broadcasts, advertising, and littering the publishing industry’s products.
What she claims as an "is" is only a "should." Most people DO NOT revise, edit, or even think about what they are trying to say before they type and hit "send."
This is the problem that needs to be solved. Indeed, "we are all writers now," but too few care enough to craft their messages with care.
July 6th, 2009 at 7:07PM
So where is your Teaching Company talk? You aren’t in the alphabetical list of professors under Soltan.
July 6th, 2009 at 9:32PM
Hi Liz: It’s an audition — the Teaching Company is tweaking it at the moment, and then will be sending it out. I think it’d be easy to get one by contacting them.