Then along came e-mail can all the formalities went away. E-mail has no etiquette. It does not require stationery, or neatness, or proper spelling, or preliminary chitchat. No amenities....Never have so many people written so profusely and with so few inhibitions. Which means that is was not a cognitive problem after all. It was a cultural problem, rooted in that old bugaboo of American education: fear.
Fear of writing gets planted in American schoolchild at an early age, especially children of scientific or technical or mechanical bent. They are led to believe that writing is a special language owned by the English teacher, available only to the humanistic few who have " a gift for words". But writing isn't skill that some people are born with and others aren't, like a gift for art or music. Writing is talking to someone else on paper. Anybody who can think clearly can write clearly, about any subject at all.
E-mail pushed that verbosity to a new extreme: chatter unlimited.It is a spontaneous medium, not conducive to slowing down or looking back.
Chapter One
I was asked if I would come and talk about writing as a vocation......He was going to talk about writing as an avocation.
He said it was tremendous fun. Coming home from an arduous day at the hospital, he would go straight to his yellow pad and write his tensions away. The words just flowed. (FLOW......WT..................) It was easy. I then said that writing was not easy and was not easy and was not fun. It was hard and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed. (.......................
"What do you do on days when it isn't going well?" He said he just stopped writing and put the work aside for a day when it would go better. I then said that the professional writer must establish a daily schedule and stick to it. I said that writing is a craft, not an art, and the men who runs away from his craft because he lacks inspiration is fooling himself. He is also going broke.
On "Is it useful to circulated in the literary world"... I said that professional writers are solitary drudges who seldom see other writers.
As for the students, anyone might think we left them bewildered. But in fact we gave them a broader glimpse of the writing process than if only one of us had talked. For there isn't any "right" way to do such personal work. There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps you to say what you want to convey is the right method for you. Some people need silence, others turn on the radio. Some write by hand, some by word processor, some by talking into a tape recorder. Some people write their first draft in one long burst and then revise; others can't write the second paragraph until they have fiddle endlessly with the first.
The self who emerges on paper is far stiffer than the person who sat down to write.
Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.
Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it is not a question of to personalize the author. It is a question of using
the English language in a way that will achieve the greatest clarity and strength.
Chapter Two
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaning less jargon.
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