You can blame blogs (he says, throwing stones from his glass house), blame Twitter, or blame Facebook but, whoever you blame; we’ve got a problem on our hands. And it’s only getting worse.
The rise of social media means we’ve taken great steps in understanding human civilization. It’s just a shame civilisation can’t spell or make much sense.
I know language evolves. We don’t see many people use the word ‘perspicacious’* anymore, do we? Words go out of use, they change, we compress them, and we create new ones. But they still need to make sense in context. Bad writers never get the context and, every day, they are routinely raping the English language with painfully bad, overlong crap.
And it’s all social media’s fault. In the past, these people wouldn’t have had a platform to share their thoughts. Thanks to all the places I mentioned at the start, they do. What’s worse is these non-clever cookies think they’re good. You’ll often hear “I’m a writer” because they wrote a letter and a blog about their holiday in Majorca last summer. They got drunk too – you can see the photos on Facebook.
With the platform in place, they now say “I’m a writer. And I have a place to share.” Suddenly they have an opinion about what’s good writing, even as they commit apostrocities and write sentences so long that they turn into lines of code. Then, to make it even more painful, they say “Well, that’s just your opinion. Good writing’s subjective!”
MOTHER-FUCKER, I WILL DESTROY YOU IF YOU EVER SAY THAT TO ME AGAIN!
No, good writing is not subjective. Good writing is entirely objective (as in, not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice; based on facts; unbiased: an objective opinion). A 53 word sentence with no commas as part of a 400 word paragraph is the equivalent of a stiletto in the eye. Blades in eyes are not often seen as good writing. Who the hell could digest something like that without serious effort? And that’s the thing; writers make the effort so the audience shouldn’t have to.
What bothers me is that making an effort is the furthest thing from these writers’ minds. “It’s my style (despite the complete lack of one), so I’m not changing it,” is a familiar refrain for these guys.
Yeah, I know – I’m a snob. I’m proud of my job title having the word ‘writer’ in it (though would be less so if it was ‘under’ at the beginning). But that wasn’t some game over where I said “ok, good enough!” and stopped. I can get better, so I keep trying. And I think it’s important we make things simple even though it takes a lot more work than writing something in a complex way.
Language changes but the reason we write hasn’t. We write because we want to communicate. If we start to excuse writing that fails at that, then what’s the point?
Who knows? By making the effort, maybe the audience will make the effort with you.
*It means extremely perceptive
Coming next: 70’s horror ‘classics’ The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes. How have they aged? Title to come.
Coming a little later: Mann, Nolan, Demme, the Coens and Singer: guns, crime, masculinity and kicking ass. Not the catchiest… I’ll come up with something better.
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