I was so proud of myself when I wrote my first blog post last week. I mean, I’d written entries on Livejournal (a site now looked upon as a social networking dinosaur), but I’ve never had to write something in which brevity truly is the soul of wit.
Instead, I’m writing a dissertation required to be hundreds of pages long, and I’m an editor at a publishing company who begins to twitch when she runs into too many grammatical faux pas. I also tend to write like I speak, in meandering run-on sentences whose point is often obscure until the very end.
Source: http://surrealmuse.com
On the other hand, I have co-workers who are not editors. They speak in short, clipped sentences where the point rings loud and clear, and their writing is the same way. However, I often find their economy of language extreme. One-word sentences, simple and informal language, and…gasp…jargon! Oh, how it makes my head spin and my eyes hurt!
I have been hired to shoot down mistakes and even slight grammatical imperfections as if I were shooting targets at a carnival game for prizes. I’m supposed to help spin choppy wording into long, elegant sentences that caress the margins of the page and leave the reader flowing on a river of prose. Much like that very sentence itself, I guess.
Except the problem is, many of you may have gagged reading that sentence (okay, even I did a little bit). Especially when online, many of us are not looking to be wowed by literary brilliance (or attempts at it), but we are looking for the point, the lesson, the bottom line.
That’s why, as an editor I know I will struggle with writing blog posts, and they’ll certainly be a lot more prosaic than some of the other posts you’ll read on the JPS site. I will never really approve of the linguistic short-cuts some of my colleagues use; I’m programmed not to. But I’ll let my fellow posters have them nonetheless.
As for me, I’ve always liked to stretch out a story to create more suspense, saving the point until the end. And I’ve always chosen my words very carefully, so that I speak clearly and write correctly. It takes longer for me and it takes longer for the listener, or in this case, for the blog reader…but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
-Julia
