The Ashcan

WTF is up with that sentence?

Posted on 02. May, 2010 by Simon in Curiosities, Internet, Pop Culture

Much of my adult life has been spent learning how to write. Every day I hope to get a little better, weed out bad habits, pick up new tricks and make myself a better craftsman. When you think of good writing however there can be a lot of culturally entrenched presuppositions.

A survey of places one would expect to find good writing provides insight into our mental proclivities: The New Yorker perhaps, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Economist, Esquire, the Walrus.

By and large, good writing is understood to be formal writing. That’s just the reality of the situation. For as long as I can observe even humorists and writers that riff off cultural observation would never be considered high-brow unless their work was written with sufficient austerity. Consider authors who specialize in mixing levity with life commentary: Stephen Leacock or Chuck Klosterman, for example, are renowned for covering the world of colloquial language, but neither actually employ any of it heavily in their work.

Going through school, the belief that good writing was serious writing was always reinforced. Reasonably, I understood this lesson was just a means of distinguishing the fact that writing and speaking were different forms of communication.

After all, isn’t that the golden rule of good writing? Don’t write how you speak, unless you’re a tween complaining to your friend about prom on ICQ. This dissonance between what we say and what we write has always been axiomatic, and it made sense that there was no hope in conveying an authoritative tone if your writing was riddled with 87 instances of the word ‘like’.

I’ve never really had a problem with the paradigms of writing. This should be evident just by what I’ve typed so far — in an effort to ‘actually write something’ I am being particular about how I structure my sentences, dusting off the rarely used big-words in my vocabulary and trying to impart a tone that is simultaneously snooty yet adequately accessible. This is what goes through my head when trying to write well. I have never truly questioned it. The results, admittedly, are mixed.

Indeed, as amorphous an entity the English language remains, I have always thought of it as more like a car. What I mean is writing just meant putting pieces together the right way — those who did it wrong would end up with a non-functional car. Some people might put together a Neon and some people were capable of building Ferraris. Regardless, it was about how well one could follow a generally understood guideline and although creativity allowed for differences in design, all writing essentially had to follow basic, engineering tenants to end up with a working car. If you put the wheels inside the body for example, you didn’t really have a car — you had gibberish.

When you think about it though, this is kind of silly (and by ‘this’ I refer to the underlying thought process, not the car analogy, which I realize is both inane and wildly confusing). English is not about following rules. If anything, English is about breaking them. Arbitrarily, letters can be silent. Does that make any sense when you really think about it?

Moreover, English changes all the time. There’s even a name for one era; Old English, which is kind of odd because really, who decides what’s old and what isn’t? After all, would someone writing or speaking 5th century English today be considered any more antiquated and nutty than somebody speaking Victorian, Colonial or Prohibition era English?

Because English is the foundation much of my life is built on, I often (always) forget the language is actually evolving underneath my feet. This really hit me however while recently reading The Awl.

The internet has changed many things, but nowhere does it seem more clear how online writing has impacted writing-as-institution as in the casually toned pop-culture pieces the Awl publishes.

I submit for example the following excerpt from Sady Doyle’s recent essay on Weezer front man Rivers Cuomo:

The question of how you can find someone’s letter “great,” and also question their ability to use the language in which the letter is written, can maybe be put aside. (NO IT CAN’T! HE LIKES HER BECAUSE HE THINKS SHE CAN’T TALK BACK! AIIEEE!) The fact is, we are all reasonable adults here, and we are all comfortable and non-judgmental with regard to each others’ adult sexualities, and we are all able to separate the artist from his work. We are all able to separate the artist from his work, even when the artist is on record as not separating himself from this specific song or album at all, and basing it on his very own thoughts, feelings, and experiences more or less directly. And, as reasonable, sophisticated adults who are beyond parochial moral judgments, we all know that there is a perfectly reasonable, appropriate, adult response to a dude admitting in public that he is so sexually preoccupied with a strange lady that he licks things she’s touched and visualizes her masturbating, while also seriously entertaining the possibility that she is a tween. And that response is:

AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH.

GOD.

EEEEEEEEEEEEUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUWWWWW.

Make no mistake, this paragraph (and the essay it was plucked from) are as well articulated as anything you might find in Mother Jones. The difference however is pretty self-evident. The internet has degraded the walls between speaking and writing, creating a recognizable style of online voice that is perhaps an extreme interpretation of “snooty yet adequately accessible”. And yes, I just quoted myself.

Clearly Doyle is appropriating facets of online language in order to make her piece more relevant to both her demographic and, perhaps in some sense, to culture at large. She’s not the only one, of course. Mary Choi practically has made a career out of mixing frenetic stream of consciousness with ivy-school level discourse, while Halle Kiefer’s recent Glee recaps tread a similar path.

I find all this fascinating for many reasons.

For starters, this style of online writing is a tangible example that the golden rules we all adhere to are slowly becoming irrelevant. After all, you can’t write like you speak anymore even if you tried. Most of our communication is written anyways. Look at your cell phone and think about your phone call to text messaging to email ratio. Think of how much time you spend on Facebook or surfing the net or chatting to friends online and in video games.

It could certainly be argued that writing is now our primary form of communication. We can’t write like we talk because it would be a simulacrum; realistically we’re all starting to talk like we write.

The Awl (and its writers) are just a bit ahead of the curve in widely adopting the conventions of formal writing to a voice catered specifically to an online audience. Certainly, knowing when to write in all caps or insert an OMG takes just as much work as properly using a semi-colon (which I am still, frankly, uncertain of). I assume with great confidence that Doyle et al. take just as much pride in crafting this new hybrid style as Dexter Filkins does in his war correspondence, despite obviously tonal differences.

As the internet becomes an increasingly important part of our lives, I can only assume writing will continue to evolve and those evolutions will manifest themselves increasingly in our day-to-day understandings of language. Will formal writing as we know it become as irrelevant as academic writing is now? Will LOL’s or OMG’s ever be published in the New Yorker without irony? What is the thought process for writers who are writing in this style and don’t particularly find it natural? Is it even wise to employ this tone if it’s not natural? I don’t know, but it’s fun to ask.

What I do know is that writing is changing not just as an industry, but as a craft. People always wonder what differentiates a blogger from a journalist or whatever, but only now do we see the rise of a writing style and language that is identifiably unique to the blogging world.

The industry of English is transforming constantly due to media, financing and cultural consumption habits. What we can’t forget however is the actual words are changing too, and that’s something to literally keep an eye on as we forge naively into the future of the written word.

One thing I am sure of? I’ll probably be spending the rest of my adult life learning how to write.

Tags: Chuck Klosterman, Dexter Filkins, Halle Kiefer, internet writing style, Mary HK Choi, Mother Jones, new york times, New Yorker, Sady Doyle, Stephen Leacock, the awl