I've always been a writer. When I was much younger, before my family could afford a computer, I would use a typewriter to create fan fiction. During my final years of grade school, I was on the school paper's staff serving as a movie and game critic. In undergrad, I took an Intro To Writing Fiction class as a pass/fail instead of getting a traditional grade. The reasoning was that in theory I could focus on my other, "more important" classes without worrying too much about writing. In practice, I liked the class so much that I ended up spending most of my semester thinking and working on it. I've often said that in another life, I would have been a writer.
I'm always thinking how to phrase things more clearly or trying to figure out why an author elected to use a particular word choice over other possibilities. Structure is important: how well does the beginning, middle, and end hang together? With these tendencies, it was with great interest that I read this article on ZDNet. The premise is that as we live in an increasingly fast paced world where the tweet or short status update rules and younger people use these tools as a primary form of communication, then we should adjust our writing styles into bite-sized chunks. And to prove the point, the post is written entirely in 140-character or less chunks.
It was an interesting experiment by the ZDNet author, but the writing is very stilted. The comments do rightfully point out that shorter is better in certain environments, such as readouts to management. Short and concise allows something to be more easily digested by extremely busy people. This is a weakness in my own writing: often too many flourishes and small passing phrases (fun fact: I use parenthetical comments...a lot).
But I come from a background of writing narratives or trying to persuade people of something. In both cases, adding or subtracting words is a critical part of keeping the audience engaged. So naturally, after reading this, I wanted to post here and illustrate the value of things like pacing and the rhythm of a piece of writing. It turns out... that I kind of already did. (Talk about tl;dr: I now have two very similar posts. On a side note, less than 10 posts into this new blog, and I'm already in reruns.)
A bigger point is that I don't think we should enable a culture where the ability to focus is the exception rather than the rule. Malcolm Gladwell made famous the idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a master at something. How can we possibly reach that level if we're constantly switching tasks? As I write this, I've got the TV on and my iOS devices within arm's reach, pausing once in a while to watch political commentary, play a game or check Facebook. I'm also a 10+ year guitar player who's barely moved past the absolute beginner stage, in large part because I can't sit still long enough to sustain a solid practice session. This compulsion to take mini-breaks every few minutes from whatever I'm doing is one of my biggest limitations in realizing my potential. Shortening writing styles until only the main ideas remain is just another way of reinforcing that hurry up and move on to the next thing mentality.
I also fear that we're heading down a path where nuances that add depth and expressiveness are lost. Prose and argumentative writing is not poetry, but vivid language is part of the toolkit that helps convey the author's intent. Someone can write "The city had a single building taller than 50 meters." Someone else can write "The building stretched high into the sky, casting a shadow over everything else in the area." With the style advocated by ZDNet, everything would read like the first example. Which one is better at creating a world?
I'm not advocating that we turn the English language into a static construct. Language does evolve and change over time. High schoolers learn the works of Shakespeare through annotated editions that explain the slang and idioms of his day. I regularly twist and combine words into new variations. But simplifying our writing can lead to a slippery slope. We may end up with a variant on George Orwell's Newspeak - where we lose ideas because the words that express them are extinct. Freedom of expression is a powerful thing and we should hang on to everything to keep that alive.
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