Bob Baker has the right idea. So did George Orwell in Politics and the English Language. They both recognize that some writers aren’t even thinking about the words they write anymore. So many phrases and words have lost all meaning because they have been used over and over again, in inappropriate contexts (Baker uses “passion” and “passionate” in his example). This makes language more abstract, less clear and less engaging.
This makes me wonder if internet culture will engender such lazy writing in blogs. Naturally, of course, the writing in this blog is upheld to the highest of standards, but the casualness of the internet may encourage writers to leave their rough draft as a final one--the most horrifying example being Rosie’s blog. Okay, so no one takes her seriously anyway, but many other bloggers don’t exactly take language or basic sentence structure seriously, either.
But if writing a blog is compared to writing an email to a friend, would that really be a reflection of a writer’s best work? True, writing should be natural and not too polished, but digging deeper than your first stab at an idea wouldn’t hurt, either.
Zack Barangan @ Wed, 04/05/2006 - 1:41pm
I think, as we've seen through guys like David Carr, that there's no specific writing style that is required of bloggers. I'm sure there're some beautifully written, flowery blogs out there, just like there's a whole bunch of crap out there.
It really depends on the author, and the standards they hold themselves at, I think. If you don't care that thousands of people could be potentially reading your poorly written words, of course you couldn't care less about silly things like sentence structure.