Another Opinion Among Many

As I’ve been reminded lately, online conversations aren’t quite the same as ones that you carry on in person. Like playing chess through the mail, you have a chance to contemplate a response, and read hidden (and unreal, usually) meanings into what has been written for the world to see. I find that quite often, people read, and thus assume, the opposite of what you want to convey.

Why is this? Bad writing, I think. There’s a reason that everyone is not a best selling writer. Its simply because we’re not all good enough. Like me. I write (quite a bit and quite often at times, as this blog can attest), but I’m not a good writer. If I was, there’d be no question as to what I mean when I scratch down my thoughts.

Like a wound that doesn’t get attention, the results of your words can be a growing infection, which if not stopped, can cause greater problems. This seems to be true of the online writing subculture now. With tools such as Blogger and Wordpress, which can help you post your literary genious to the world with a few words and the press of a button, it becomes easy (perhaps because it appeals to our laziness) to write things and publish them without nary a thought. You can write the most affecting and ingenious masterpiece, or you can write the most putrid and abominably substandard tripe (which I hope that this post doesn’t turn into - I’m posting it anyway).

One thing that online publishing has done for civilized society (at least the extremely small percentage that have access to computers) is to help introduce total strangers. Due to the feeling of relative anonymity that writing on the internet affords, people are more willing to comment on a stranger’s thoughts. As time goes on, the parties involved gain a small insight into what the other is thinking at times. The problem is that we don’t learn nearly as much as we assume (ass u me) and this can cause issues later, when we feel that we are in a comfortable place. We slip up and think that we’re carrying on a conversation as if in person. The dynamics are all different, though. In person, you can quicly elaborate on what you mean, when someone misunderstands you. Online, you can’t in real time, and, thus the wound festers. This is where the quality of your writing comes in. If you don’t write well, you’ll create conflicts where the opposite was intended. I admit that I am sometimes guilty of that, as are many people. Its natural. Writing online has become like writing in a diary. Who gets their diary proofread by an editor? When left to ourselves, we don’t proof our work as well as it could be and it comes out ending up substandard (look at the works of Karl Marx and Stephen King’s later works - too much literary freedom and not enough editing, producing verbose effluent, obscuring any genious that may lie underneath).

I’m going to try to break this habit of mental laziness, so that when you read my writings, you may understand the point I tried to make. I will try to do this for you. I hope that I succeed consistantly.