Writing Right

For a variety of reasons, I have been reading more on the Internet than usual, including blogs, forums, and news articles from various sites and of various types. It strikes me that the vast majority of people cannot write well.

I make my living writing, so I am both personally and professionally biased, I realize. However, by writing professionally, I also know that nothing I write is ever "perfect." The first rule of my profession is to never edit your own work. When reviewing and rereading your own work, your brain fills in the gaps, ignores misspellings, and generally lets you down in subtle ways that cause errors to creep into your writing. However, that is not to say that I do not do this step; I reread, edit, and re-edit my own work and posts a few times, using different techniques designed to minimize the number of errors that can creep in. Yet, still, when I go back to a previous post, I usually find at least a couple of errors.

While I do not expect anyone to be absolutely perfect online, the average person's blog, Facebook status, or Twitter feed is littered with issues, which shows the decline in communication skills in general. However, I am especially appalled by the number of news magazine and other professional sites that have frequent issues with grammar, spelling, punctuation, and contextual writing. While I deplore what I see as a general lack of even basic skills in these areas, it is one thing to have a non-professional making mistakes and another to have professional sites, which should have copy editors, making egregious, frequent, and consistent mistakes in these areas.

With my current bent on reading more online articles and posts, I see that majority of sites have the following errors:

1. Bad grammar. People are constantly using the wrong word(s) in the wrong syntax. Homophone usage is particularly poor, where someone will use "their" when they want "they're."
2. Bad Punctuation. People misuse punctuation, especially putting punctuation marks outside of quotation marks and sprinkling either commas or semi-colons throughout sentences that do not need them.
3. Bad typos. Many writers also do not take the time to reread their work and look for simple typos (I see a lot of "doe snot" rather than "does not" cropping up lately). Too many writers appear to be relying on spell-checker to get everything right, even though spell-checker cannot tell the difference between a congested fawn (doe snot) and something that works differently than you think it does (does not). Spell-checker is a useful tool, but not a panacea.
4. Bad topic/idea creation or support. Many people do not know about what they wish to speak. They start with one idea but, by the time your each the end of the post, it has morphed into something else entirely or the person cannot support his original thesis in any relevant, coherent way.

When I was in grade school, we were taught that every idea has a thesis statement. This is the "statement of purpose" about which you were talking or writing. It is the theme of your idea, and everything else you write should be supporting that theme in some way. Generally, you want to break your thought or theme into one sentence.

Each sentence, paragraph, or, in the case of something really lengthy, topic or heading, should then establish your position, support your thesis, or explain your reasoning. There are many ways to do these steps, and I will not go into them here. It is safe to say that many people that saying, "Because I said so," is in some way an erudite and insightful way of stating their opinion. Yet, we do not know why they think as they do, how they came to their conclusion, or what could be done differently to appease their worries.

For example, if you were to speak with a friend about a new movie and the friend said, "It sucked," you would not be satisfied with that answer. You would likely follow up that statement with questions to delve into the reasons why he/she thought it sucked, what about it sucked, if there were any redeeming qualities to the movie, and then make up your own mind on whether to see it. These questions you would ask your friend about the qualities that made the movie suck are the same types of questions a writer should be asking him/herself about the thesis of their statement and then providing useful, relevant, and specific examples to showcase their knowledge of the subject. For example, the friend could say, "The movie used shaky-cam, which I find very distracting." Further, "The actors didn't seem to have any chemistry at all, but the movie was supposed to be a love story." And, "I had a very hard time following the convoluted story. There are so many twists in it, that I stopped caring what happened and simply focused on trying to figure out what was going on." These responses all provide you with much-needed information that could sway you one way or the other on whether to see the film yourself.

While it is true that literacy rates have fallen to new lows over the last decade, some argue that the Internet is actually helping to get young people to read and write more and that literacy rates are slowly trending upward. While I do agree that I young people are texting more often, texting does not equate with reading or writing skills. In fact, I argue the opposite; the use of so many short-cuts and acronyms in place of real grammar is hurting people's writing skills more than helping it. Because they are starting texting at young ages, the bad habits of texting often supersede the information they should be learning in grade school about sentence creation, thought formation, and general writing skills. This keeps compounding until they graduate high school with little ability to read or write anything above a fourth-grade level.

What many people forget is just how much writing we need to do in today's society. Unless you have a fairly basic blue-collar job, chances are that you will need to email your bosses. Most white-collar professions require constant reading and writing as you take in data and then must disseminate it to others through emails, fliers, memos, speeches, specifications, and other forms of, generally, written communication. Those who can write well often get promotions and raises that others may want or even deserve simply on the foundation that they can communicate better than those who cannot write well.

When I see that educators and education budgets are under constant attack by politicians, I shake my head in wonder. By firing teachers and gouging the budgets, the ability to teach the next generation proper grammar, spelling, and writing techniques will get even worse. Soon, we'll have a monosyllabic culture that cannot express itself in the written form. This does not bode well for our country's ability to compete in a global economy, where clear communication is becoming more important, not less.

My online reading has made me aware of a lack of communication and writing skills in the general population. While a small number of errors can be attributed to the usual mistakes that creep into one's work when one is editing his/her own writing, the vast number, consistency of, and quality of the errors and writing lead me to believe that America's communication skills have atrophied. Short status sites like Facebook and Twitter, and quick contact applications like instant messaging, seem to be further eroding our ability to write coherent communications. I wonder what affect this will have on America in the next 10-20 years, as global communication via the Internet continues to climb and the world continues to shrink?