From the Desk of the Editor...

On Writing

So here I was, minding my own business a few days ago, when the tumblr radar showed some post from someone whose link I’ve since lost that was, itself, a link and excerpt from a blog post by Steven Fry back in November of ‘08 entitled “Don’t Mind Your Language” that I think you should read.  Then come back to this, because I’m not done.  Or read this and then that.  Or just skim past this altogether, you know, if that’s your thing.  I’ll have a painting of the ocean up soon, if you’re waiting for more pictures from me.  My scanner died and the last couple days have been a bit bothersome, but I’m off tomorrow and can probably wrap it up then and then take a picture of it or something.

But that post got me thinking about my writing style.  In school, I was told repeatedly that I had a very unique writing voice.  In PA, we had to do this thing where we would write an essay in fifth and tenth grades, and we would be assigned a number instead of putting our names on it.  And then it would get sent off to this big throwdown where a collection of English teachers from across the commonwealth were gathered into a place and spent like three days just grading them, each one would get graded by two different people.  And the goal wasn’t so much to write a good essay, as to determine the capacities of the commonwealth as a whole and school districts in particular.  But in order for that to work, you couldn’t let teachers who happened to get one of their students make themselves look good by giving them a high grade.  Hence the lack of names.  In tenth grade, my teacher was called off to do that, and when he got back he informed me that he had to hand back one of the papers that he got because after the very first sentence, he knew it was mine.

And this was always painted as a positive thing.  It wasn’t that I wrote so poorly you could sense it from across the room, it was that I wrote exactly as I thought and spoke.  My teachers would tell me that it was good to be able to do that, to just pour my words straight out and have them written in such a way that you could clearly hear me speaking them.  I would ignore proper literary rules when I felt the need, but it apparently wasn’t detrimental and they seemed to think that it was better than being rigidly formulaic all the time.

And then I started looking over my posts and writings since school, and I don’t see that anymore.  It’s started to creep back recently, mostly because I’ve been writing in a hurry and was thinking about this.  But overall, it just hasn’t been there.  And I can trace back to exactly when it happened.  It was 2002.  It was the first time I was really online regularly, my first real experience with blogging and my first dive into forums.  And the internet loves to eat you alive for that sort of thing.  See, there’s little people online can really hold over each other.  For example, I only know one of my followers in real life, despite living in the same town as at least two of them, and I haven’t actually spoken to him in months.  There are all these people that I intersect with on a daily basis on here, that I have no report with, no history, no inside jokes, no knowledge of their quirks and habits.  Not one of you, until I tell you just now, knows how I blow on every bite of food regardless of temperature and don’t even notice until someone jokes with me about it.  I don’t know why.  But that’s something that my friends and I are aware of, that they’ve noticed, that they can raise as something to give me crap about.  On here, though, all we have for each other is words.  Occasionally pictures.

And so, to substitute for all the little habits and behaviors we’re so used to finding and identifying each other with in the real world, people online become obsessed with highlighting the improper use of “your” and “you’re”, of attacking blogs that talk “too much” about the issues in their life, of finding any little thing that, quite frankly, most of us probably wouldn’t care about if we had something better to do but can point to as an identifying feature when all we have to go on for each other is our chosen words.  And in response to the limited window, people focus all the energy they would normally spend on some wide array of knowledge about each other on that one little thing.  And that can get pretty intense.  Intense enough, in fact, that in response to it (and the fact that I was spending most of my time in forums trying to have reasonable debates, which eventually led to me abandoning forums altogether), I cleaned up my writing and went very formulaic.  I abandoned the run-on sentences for the most part, that used to mirror the way that I can get really excited on a topic and talk really fast and hardly stop for any punctuation.  They’re ugly, by the rules, but perfect if I’m being honest with my voice.  I stopped spelling quotes and conversations in a way where you were forced to read them with the accent intact, because of course that generally involves spelling things wrong.

But it’s worse than that.  I stopped writing poetry and short stories.  I’ve literally written one poem since then, and it was lyrics to a song we were working on in a band I was in.  I wrote hundreds of poems over the span of three years, and then just one in the last eight.  I still have a website of them, but most of them aren’t any good and the link that goes to the actual poetry section has been long since deactivated.  But I can’t seem to write any more.  Perhaps it’s because of the restrictions I’ve placed on myself, that I have to write the proper way instead of the way that the words want to come out.

But this whole thing has reminded me that English is a living language.  It changes, evolves, adapts.  It pulls in pieces from every other language it encounters, sometimes warping them and sometimes keeping them perfectly intact.  Accents splinter into whole other lexicons that, thanks to global communication, can sometimes loop back and be absorbed by other branches that have no business even really knowing the word.  The obsession with playing by the rules is, quite frankly, antithetical to what English, and actually language as a whole, is.  Language is not a science.  You can dress it up in lab coats all day, but it’s art under there.  It doesn’t just share information in a rigid, set manner; but rather, it is a means by which we can communicate our very minds and souls to one another.

And as our minds age, and our environment changes, and we absorb bits and pieces from the people around us, our language must be flexible enough to keep up.  If you’re going to turn in a paper in school or work, yes, you must play by the rules - but if I’m sitting here, speaking to you about a concern I have in my life and really connecting with you on some level, does it matter more that I put the apostrophe in the right place, or that you can feel what I’m saying?  These words we write for leisure are not to be judged on grammar, but to fill the gaps between us that the cables and wires and signals can only scrape at.  Humans do not speak to be heard.  We speak to be known.

So I’m done.  I want my voice back.  If I cannot write it here, then what use is this site to me?  And you may challenge my grammar all you wish, and unfollow if it’s just too much to handle, or whatever you need to do.  But I’m not falling into that trap again.  It may take a little while to break that habit, but I’m sure it will come naturally soon enough.  The blog should not determine how we write, it should be a medium upon which we can send our writings and thoughts out to the world and see if anyone will connect to it.  And, through that, to us.