So I'm doing this, and I'm thinking
about written versus verbal communication. I've had some issues with
people in the recent past where written communication became more of
a barrier than a useful means of conversing. In one case, we worked
it out, in the other, we did not.
But what does that have to do with
anything? Well, this is a world increasingly reliant on texts,
tweets, emails, messages on social media sites, blogs and a thousand
other forms of sending words to people without actually saying them.
Is that a bad thing? In and of itself, no. But there is a problem
that develops, and it is getting worse.
Specifically, nobody is teaching people
how to write well and clearly. People think that because they can
converse easily and effectively with others in person, that they can
say the same things in a written format and it works just as well.
No, it does not.
Much of face-to-face conversation
happens non-verbally. Specifically, tone of voice, body language and
facial expression. Take those away and words that clearly mean one
thing become ambiguous, reliant on the mood and reading style of the
recipient to understand correctly. Which is why those annoying
goddamn emoticons started appearing, so that there was some vague
indication that “hey, this is a joke, not me saying something
horrible”.
I went to a small private high school
in Portland, Oregon, called Catlin Gabel. From 7th grade
until I graduated, I got writing pounded into my skull. In 10th
grade, I remember spending an entire semester writing three and four
sentence paragraphs and then analyzing what I had written. How long
was each sentence? What were the first five words in each sentence?
What words did I repeat? Over and over and over again we did this.
And I got better. When I went to
college at the University of Puget Sound, I was in the Honors
program, which basically meant I got good grades in high school and
didn't know enough to spot the program as an unnecessary adjunct to
an otherwise good educational experience. In our first class, we
found out the format. Each four-month semester, we would read six
books. And then we would write a 5 to 8 page paper on each one.
Sounded reasonable to me, only a little rougher than high school.
I was in the decided minority.
I also lived in the Honors house, and
so I got to see many of my fellow Honors students undertake this
ritual the day before each paper was due. We had class at noon
Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Papers were always due on Wednesdays.
So at noon on Tuesday, the whole house would start writing. Notes
came out, final readings were done, and 24 hours of agony began.
Most of them were rushing to print out what was essentially a first
draft of their paper the next day at 11:49, just in time to run to
class.
Because I had spent so much time just
writing and writing and writing in high school, I would sit down
around 5, read the question, write my paper, find my quotes and be
done by 10 or 11 (if I wanted to polish something). I didn't get
solid As, but B’s and better all the way through, doing at least as
well as any of my classmates (with one or two exceptions).
And that's because I didn't have to
think about how to construct a sentence so that it was clear. I
didn't have to think about which words worked and which didn't. I
could focus on the idea I wanted to get across and then let the
largely automatic process of constructing sentences, paragraphs and
essays take its course.
I'm somewhat rusty now, and less strict
about it, since my audience isn't a bunch of professors with specific
ideas about how these things should be done, but the basic skills are
still there. I'm at 661 words right now, and it's taken me about
fifteen minutes to put this together.
Not bad for being out of practice.
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