New Rules: Writing Well In The 21st Century
January 23rd, 2012
The other day, I posted this question on twitter: “How is your writing different today than it was 10 years ago?”
Here are some @replies I received:
@Mathitak, writer and editor
I write and edit pretty much exclusively onscreen now.
@JBJ, professor
It’s more relaxed, and less worried. More aware of the way audiences differ, but also overlap. (Nonacademic isn’t dumber.) “Informal” is part of it. Also, maybe more welcoming? (For ex: Quotes & links for conversation, not for defense.)
@Wynkenhimself, professor
It’s looser, I think. More assertions, less endless contextualizing. Also, I’ll end a sentence w a preposition now.
@Wynkenhimself @Jbj
Is it also easier to try smth new because you can revise in the next post? Less permanence/one-shot to get it right?
@Mathitak
Emails were a little more writerly and conversational back then, and my replies were more point-by-point responses. Emails now are more, er, mission-oriented—just one or two points to discuss, very functional.
@Forestoftweets, student
I’ve learned so much respect for verbs.
Then I asked the same question on Facebook, and received longer responses:
Mary Beth Hertz, teacher
Ten years ago I was a senior in college. I would type out whole paragraphs as a stream in Word and then cut/paste to put things in the order I wanted them in. I often did outlines on paper, though, so that I knew what I wanted to write about. Sometimes I would work out the opening few sentences on paper and then move to the computer. The only thing that has changed is now I have Google Docs for that….. I tend to need to get things out of my head all in one stream and then I go back and edit. Often, I work out the logic of things in my head and then see how they sound when they end up on ‘paper.’
Maggie Galehouse, editor
Now, I write first drafts quickly, and spend 80 percent of my time editing, tinkering and fine tuning. Ten years ago, it was the reverse.
John Schwartz, businessman
Ten years ago I was much more fussy and technical about grammar and punctuation. Now I often write “incorrectly” on purpose — comma splices, sentence fragments. Because it gives me a sense of having inflection and tone of voice. I will never again use a semicolon. It’s probably less interesting, but I also think there are also many small changes in syntax that have been caused by the computerization of conversation. For example, in a sentence like this one: Your password is “foobar”. The period has to go outside the quotation marks.”
“Foobar?” That’s all I could think about after I read John Schwartz’ response. So I did what I imagine many of us do three or four times a day: I googled it. Turns out foobar is a term used by computer coders. So I responded to John:
“Ten years ago’foobar’ was not a word. And it would have taken me a lot longer to figure that out. ”
The last decade has seen a seismic shift in how people write. We have new words, like foobar. And we have new rules. These rules are not hard and fast “laws,” as in how to punctuate a sentence (although those are changing too, as John Schwartz notes) but more like manners, the assumed ways of doing things. We have new assumptions about what is and is not appropriate and effective prose. So to write well today means something different than it did them ten years ago, though many of the “laws” remain the same.
I chose ten years arbitrarily to refer to “the beginning of the 21st century”. By the end of the 20th century, many of us were using word processors to write, but we weren’t facebooking or tweeting, and few of us were blogging. We were probably not texting, and if we were, it was not on smart phones. We were emailing, but as @mathitak notes, the “rules” of email have changed since then.
There have been three major changes to 21st century writing: (1) writing is more informal, or “looser”, as @wynkenhimself puts it; (2) writing is more voice-driven, more personal (you can get a sense of what the people above are like by reading their tweets and Facebook posts, and (3) writing is more audience-specific. The tweets and Facebook replies above were composed as part of a conversation with a person or specific group of people (me, or me and all my and their twitter and Facebook followers). All were written to me particularly (and they knew when they wrote them that I am a professor of writing and a writer interested in new technologies. Their responses may have been different if the question was asked, say, by their children). And, as @jbj and @wynkenhimself show, sometimes one reply to me leads to a new conversation between two other people.
It can be hard to know how to engage in this type of writing. You might feel a bit lost and unsure of the tropes of twitter, say. But chances are, you are more comfortable with writing than you were 10 years ago. Why? Because you do it more. Think about it. Today, you may text, email and Facebook dozens of times a day. In the 20th century, you may have gone weeks or months without ever writing anything (though you probably talked on the phone more than you do now).
For more on new rules, see:
Why You Should Stop Worrying And Learn To Use Emoticons
Forget Sounding Smart
F**k The Rules
Know Your Audience