Posted on 2009-01-29, backdated to year 2000 to facilitate sorting.
An article contributed by jlvk.Caveat emptor: I am not a linguist.
Let's face the fact that in the olden days of typewriters it was burdensome indeed to produce a 500-word article, due to the infuriating typing and crumbling exercise that we vividly recall: type, blanko, blow dry, type over, carriage return, retype, and bah, crumble and toss into the bin! And we load another blank sheet just to stare at it for a few painful, underproductive hours. This impact on mental wellbeing had been chiefly responsible for denting our innate creativity and detered the majority of us (I can safely say this majority constituted 95% among you!)* from ever writing any article with the intention to publish.
What do we read from the web nowadays? Aren't we reading news, reports, product information, how-to guides, mythbusters, opinions, etc? From the aspect of information flow the readers are consumers and the writers are producers. Having benefited from the information consumer status-quo, shouldn't we reciprocate the goodness received? Yes we should. Put embellishments and rhetorics aside, we begin with good content with minimal care of style.
To let good content take over is to firstly put aside the irrational fear of writing. Cast away the exam hall phobia that you may have acquired through the schooling years from the subjects that required the writing of essays. You are in your leisurely mood sitting in front of the screen immersing yourself in the uncharted waters of freedom. Others' writings make you think and the thinking process generates opinions; which you open up your favorite word processor and type out the first word or phrase that strikes your mind--this becomes the theme of the article you are going to produce.
Seed the theme--around the key word or phrase add elaborations. Think about other related words that you can list after the phrase by way of commas. Take as example, the portion of the first paragraph of this article marked in green, where I began the seeding, in the following fashion:
i) good facts [the spark of idea]
ii) [ditto], good analyses, ... [expanding the comma list]
iii) [ditto], good criticisms, good grammar, good minimalism, ... [running out of commas]
iv) [ditto], and good humor [so I decided that six points of highlight should produce a full-bodied article]
v) that the web may be flooded with + [ditto] + giving rise to pleasurable reading experience [sandwiching the theme]
vi) [ditto] + for the esteemed readers [touching up the sentence with reader-orientedness]
And notice that in the second paragraph I haven't yet dived into any of the six points of highlight, as I'm planning the paragraphs for them to fall somewhere in the middle of this article. So I offered an explanation why typewriter publishing became obsolete, and exposed the emotional dent many of us suffered from the encumbrances of the mechanical instrument. Should I dive into good content at this juncture? Yes that's what I want to do, but allow the third paragraph to serve as the pivot note for the change of chord: therein I steal some space to ask a question on economics and utility to arouse the readers' conscience and to establish the need for readers to write as part of civility. And I take the self-answering approach in presenting the unambiguous resolve--into putting good content first.
As I write paragraphs 4-7 above I analyzed my own thinking process (albeit in a didactic fashion). Nonetheless, in customary day-to-day writings other than news one should always present clearheaded analyses and dissections of the facts presented, and no number of paragraphs should limit the depth and breadth of an exposition. What constitutes a healthy and readable paragraph, however, is the balance of its length versus its coverage: that a good paragraph should contain just enough peripheral sentences to form an adequate elaboration for one point and one point only. What is this paragraph's point? It is ANALYSIS, and the word "analyzed" appears in the first sentence of this paragraph. At this juncture the need for a new paragraph arises naturally if you adhered to the one point and one point only rule of thumb.
In e-writing it is simple, and perhaps, way too simple to criticize, and this convenience is often abused to unimaginable extents to which an otherwise valid counterpoint is reduced to an attempt to smear. The first step to arrest irresponsible critisizing is to refrain from posting comments anonymously and to always identify yourself to make your opinion count. To criticize effectively is to point out inherent imperfections of things and offer a balanced opinion of what might make things better, if one writes about things. Likewise, for people and events, we criticize just enough to be able gain healthy attention in the right perspective. Being a good critic gives freedom to build and innovate, as it is often impossible to idealize. So know thy fate as a critic.
Observation of good grammar is a scholarly trait most so-called "streetwise" people scorn. Remember, those who scorn good grammar are washing their gray matter down the gutters and an enlightened person should always bring the braindrain to public attention. Innocent typos are excusable if rectified in a timely fashion, for it is human to err. The habitual and indiscriminate use of SMS abbreviations, and the lack of scrutiny into proper construct of sentences can have far-reaching impact on any language and can potentially undo civilization. Imagine the "streetwise" brutes dominate the land with the noise particles "-lahs", "-lors", "-lehs", "-nina-ehs-": how would the discerning, learned, sensitive individual administer good governance? Do we let mob mentality rule? Certainly not! Do your part in establishing good culture founded on good grammar.
Minimalism is about favoring blunt-speaking to rhetorics. It is a great favor to the readers to speak bluntly and succintly, for most of us are put off by too much sales pitch and way too much fallacy. Remember, the more ego one attempts to project the more room there are for self-contradiction. And when ego rules one often gets into the vicious circle of defending one's stand, by trying to validate the contradictions instead of admitting folly. When garbage is repeated frequent enough and loud enough, it becomes substance! Do not make the nation a landfill nation. We live in the beauty of simplicity and one need not be in Utopia to enjoy a simple, uncluttered life. So how do we live in harmony with the powerful search engines such as Google and Yahoo!? The answer is not to publish garbage in the first place.
What do word processors offer in place of typewriters? How can word processors contribute to minimalism? Basically word processors solved the delete and insert problems and totally alleviated the pain of having to waste paper and mental health. Inserts provide the means to add content, and deletes balance the content by pruning the excess. The spacebar, the backspace key, and the arrow keys designed on your computer's keyboard offered hitherto unimagined degrees of freedom in navigating about your own written representation of ideas--that the process of writing has evolved form a linear one into a spatial one, and that the boundary between brain work and finger work is increasingly blurred (save probably for the hunt-and-peck typists). And the continuously evolving web technology assimilated word processors' ability to capture human thoughts in editable format, to give birth to online publishing--we call it Web 2.0 (actually a small part of it, more wonders of Web 2.0 is left to the readers' exploration). With Web 2.0 at our fingertips do we excuse garbage? And this is a paragraph about good humor in writing.
Do you know that the Creator gave us intelligent minds? Are you aware that we can sit down and chatter for hours screaming out to our hearts' content on various topics that interest us? Do you know that our brains do a great deal of thinking to have kept those meaningful conversations lengthy and engaging? Do you know that talks put to writing can be an enormously powerful instrument of change? Just write it! Pen it down! Take notes! Make recordings (discreetly and with consent) to replay it to write out the entire conversation. Let your kids read and laugh, let the young minds acquire the habit to read and write early.
When writing has become a habit, you will soon find yourself searching for the voice that speaks in your heart. You will begin to listen to the true calling within. The downside of people with a habit of writing is that they are usually sensitive people. I console myself with the fact that it is better to be sensitive and easily hurt, than to be insensitive and calloused and blind. Take the opportunity of the "Niu" Year to write with bullish prowess. In writing may you discover who you are, and live a life befitting who you truly are.
I take this opportunity to encourage you to derive unlimited pleasure from e-writing. Where to start? Feel free to comment on the existing articles! Better yet, email us your well-written thoughts, that the community may benefit therein. And in the spirit of furthering good information exchange, we welcome requests to link. Kindly drop us an email too!
*Take heart and make effort to disprove this assertion of mine. True pleasure awaits you, and renewed purpose is yours!
hits to-date.
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