The continuum between instruction manuals and flowery prose
An essay on disquiet is a great essay about… disquiet.
It’s not what some people would consider to be good writing these days, especially for writing available on the Web, published in a blog.
Here’s my precis of the essay:
Popular opinion is sometimes wrong. The Internet has made it easier for errors to be exposed, but popular opinion is still hard to change. Popular opinion suggests, as does this article, that 21st century life is chaotic, busy, and full of movement. Thus, it’s even hard for professional or motivated readers to find the time and necessary silence to read. However, the real issue is stillness of the mind, not the body or the senses. This is not a new problem – people have always had to deal with their mental noise. If reading is important to us, we need to make it a priority and do it. Don’t blame the Internet; it’s just another distraction.
Some of you may argue that Freed’s essay is flowery, long winded, and a waste of time. Other readers may wish that more people wrote like Freed.
Freed used nine more paragraphs and many more words than I did, but we’re delivering the same essential message. Heck, you could reduce my precis to one sentence and get the gist of it.
There’s still a need for longer form writing, something that blogging often fails to do. Blogging and other forms of electronic publishing often provide information dumps without context or supportive argument in order to keep the post short, sweet, and tight. That’s great for, say, an instruction manual, but poor if you’re trying to make more complicated arguments or, better yet, trying to help people to think and behave differently.
Freed’s essay takes communication to a different extreme where there’s a lot of thought and care put into selecting words and arranging them to meet style and taste. I think there’s a continuum of expression between instruction manuals (or recipes) and the wordiest, most rambling prose that can be used by writers. I still believe that the old rule of omitting needless words holds true. Sometimes it’s not about the individual words, though – it’s about how they work together in ways that build a larger picture, even if the details occasionally look a bit bloated. The medium should be irrelevant, though, whether it’s on paper, silkscreen, or a computer monitor.
Related: Copyblogger.com recently published a blog post about long blog posts, written in their trademark crisp and direct style, which provides another take on this topic.
gregfreed:
I like your take on the article, Mark, and your comments about different types of writing for different purposes. Most of my writing on my blog and in general evidences style experiments, and I'm glad to see you take this example and run with it.
Content maintains in the face of design or medium, and it's the only part of publishing in which I have an active and vested interest. I'm not saying that the other three parts don't have an important role (marketing, publicity, and design), but merely that I'm fascinated with content. I'm glad to see that you are, too.
Good lookin blog, btw. I'll be watching.
Greg
9 September 2009, 4:40 pmMark Dykeman:
Thanks for stopping by, Greg – I appreciate the feedback.
At heart, I see marketing, publicity, and design as necessary evils (and I'm not doing a great job with those at Broadcasting Brain these days, but doing good enough to get buy), but I've also come to believe that even the best content won't go very far without some effort to tell the world it's out there.
However, and maybe it's a reaction to a lot of the stuff I've been reading about how one should write blog posts or copy, I think we'd lose a lot if everything read like blog posts or sales copy. It would be an enormous loss, actually.
9 September 2009, 5:11 pmgregfreed:
I see the publishing world about the same way, and I've heard people (mostly academics, of course) say that they consider a book's failure to sell as a sign of its promise. I at least see the inverse, that phenomenal success usually indicates that whatever it is is total crap. Of course, those instincts proved erroneous with Harry Potter, which was worth the time to read in my opinion. I spent over two years swearing that I would never read the book before I picked it up one slow winter break and saw, for the first time in my life, something worth its hubbub. (I still haven't given Twilight a chance, however.)
If everything in the world read like marketing copy, we'd all be machines and the world would be a sci-fi utopia. I'll thank my stars every day that it's not the case. On the matter, I suggest Orwell's essay “Why I Write,” available online for free or through Penguin's Great Ideas series. The discussion of an author's interest in his own writing is at the core of NQOKD and why I consider it “not a not-news site.” (Fark.com also played a role in that motto….)
9 September 2009, 5:28 pmMark Dykeman:
I've not tried Twilight (probably won't) but loved Harry Potter. I'll check out Orwell's essay.
9 September 2009, 6:40 pm