To Write or to Rant?

I recently got "promoted" to Editor-in-Chief of my church's Uni/College Fellowship magazine. A magazine that I've yet to see published in the six months I've been in attendance. So this ought to be interesting. What have I done so far? Nothing. What am I do to? Possibly everything. Thankfully not, since we're a team, and most of the other people are survivors from the past publication (which should be coming out soon). And they'll take care of me... ...riiiight?

At work, due to my grammatical prowess, editing anything my company publishes has become yet another duty [not in my original job description] of mine. As a result, I've also been dubbed the Comma Splice King.

In school, I'm now editing and revising old drafts of papers that I desperately need to finish and submit in order to proceed to thesis phase of my degree. I'm also taking a course on English Grammar right now, which is extremely interesting and enlightening. Especially when I disagree with the TA's and have better reason to think what I do than the reasons they provide to think contrariwise.

So with all this theme and thought in English and editing, it should be no surprise that I would mentally edit anything that I read. Even my friends' blogs.

There is one particular friend who's known to write a lot. And since most people shy away from large bodies of text (an unfortunate side-effect of formal education) they tend to miss the fact that most of the text is superfluous and needlessly wordy.

Writing well involves many things. It includes a strong sense of grammar, a conscious awareness of lexical nuances, a general theme, coherent and cohesive thought and structure from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, audience awareness, etc.

My aforementioned friend possesses none of them. So late in his life has he taken an interest in reading and writing that he has unfortunately equated the colloquial with the natural. And I don't even mean 'tricky' things like knowing that "between him and me" is more correct than "between he and I". He doesn't recognise the error in replacing a past participle with a past tense as being incorrect in a perfective contruct. (e.g. "you have came" instead of "you have come", or "he had drank" instead of "he had drunk".) His sense of pronouns and prepositions are equally weak, which I suppose is to be expected when one's communication skills are entirely dependent on the extreme colloquialisms of what high-society would deign to call "low-society". One cannot produce a Shakespeare from a street urchin; a grammarian from a guttersnipe.

But my point here is not to harp about all my friend's linguistic failings. Rather, he serves as a convenient example of all that fails in our contemporary society. His failings in language are so numerous, he is practically an archtype for all that is wrong. And one of the most grevious ones is that of concision.

It is easy for most of us to spew pages and pages on a subject we feel passionately about. If we were to write about a person very dear to us, we could easily write twenty pages inside an hour. But most of it would probably be meaningless drivel. Because unless most of us are in that 0.00001% of the population who naturally and quickly organise their thoughts as to be able to write a coherent and cohesive twenty-page article on a dear friend, most of us would instead, be ranting.

My English professor related to us a story of Winston Churchill, who had written a ten-page letter to a friend. Upon receipt, the friend wrote back, saying, "your letter was extremely informative, but I don't know what to make of it," to which Churchill replied, "I'm sorry, but I didn't have the time to write a shorter letter".

The truth and the fact of the matter is, most of us cannot write. That most of us also hide behind the fact that our writings are in blogs and therefore shouldn't be subjected to the same scrutiny as published novels, only provokes me to say two things:

1. It is Published. If you've written it online, listed, and linked for anyone to find, it is published. That means the general public has access to them. It is only because of the foolish freedom afforded by the internet that the standard of language has been lowered to unintelligible proportions. We've managed to undo all the beauty and linguistic complexity that our ancestors have striven to refine and perfect. In short, we've managed to do in a century what China managed to do in a decade.

2. Excellence is acquired, not affected. Those who consistently write properly find it easier to write properly and only progress to become even more precise and articulate authors. Those who write whichever way they will, and only bother to write formally when the occassion rises, will find that their formal writing will be as impressive as a pianist who hadn't practised for his recital.

So you can hide behind your blogs and fears, begetting yet another generation of illiterate ignoramuses, or you could try to learn all that you can, and become a generation of adventurous authors. If you were given the choice, which would you choose: to rant or to write well?


Latin phrase of the day: pari passu
Means "at the same pace (or rate)". E.g.: "Despite the fact that he was my junior by many years, we progressed pari passu in our instruction of the violin".