Gearing up for a day of writing. Planning ways out of a day of writing. There is a reading event in Red Hook where they are giving away free cookies. Never been to Red Hook, have a soft spot for cookies, free or otherwise, and a writing event is related to the act of writing itself. How's that for rationalization?
When a friend doesn't respond to an email after a few weeks, I wonder what I may have said in the last email to offend him/her.
Reading The Great Gatsby again, and drooling with envy. Fitzgerald was 44 when he died.
What has technology done to written communication? I depend on Instant Messaging and email to communicate. I left my letter writing days at college. How could I write without the backspace/delete key? The act of writing contains far too much editing, the speed of typing affects the words that come out, and I don't have time to linger or craft thoughts before they are on the page and then rewritten as fast as they came onto the page. Writing on a computer is a vastly different than being a slave to the speed and legibility of my scrawl, the inevitable writing cramps.
Email, instant messaging, blogging, web sites - free, fast means of written communication. Each of these technologies have greatly increased not only the amount we communicate but the amount we write to communicate. The writing style, the degree of formality and application of traditional rules of grammar varies with the medium and the receivers of the communication.
Writing an email to multiple coworkers requires the application of traditional rules of grammar and a generic, non-offensive tone in order to ensure that said coworkers will not misinterpret your message, reply in all caps (yelling) or forward to your boss as proof of your incompetence. Whereas writing an email to a friend of the sort who drinks and rides motorcycles at his time away from the tattoo shop will be replete with slang and fragments of sentences, and completely offend any notion of traditional writing.
Instant messaging forces economy of language, exposes the accuracy and speed of your wit, spelling and typing all at once. It also provides handy little emoticons (the shameless overuse of which I admit), to take the edge off of the cynical, wry, potentially offensive crack you just made at the person you are chatting with. AKA, your "buddy." Buddy sets the tone for the casual nature of this medium. It makes greetings like "hey" or "yo" perfectly acceptable, and encourages more clever, timely ones such as "yo dun" or "werd" or "ya there white boy?" and sign offs like "payce" or "one." Colloquial and silly? Absolutely. But on a deeper level, if I may go to a deeper level, what we are doing is writing one part of a dialogue. We are thinking about the way words sound, how speaking them distorts their sound and finding ways to write them that mimics speech. Peace becomes payce. Later becomes latah. Word becomes werd. Bitch becomes beeyotch. Okay, I'm laughing too hard at myself to continue.
And blogs, well, they are public, published even in a casual way. The writer with conscience will spend time re-reading, editing and editing some more, a desperate effort to avoid public embarrassment.
