I love this article by Dave Gelerntner in the 29 Sept 03 issue of The Weekly Standard, although I’m not sure I agree. “Is (email) good or bad for the art of writing? Both. It devalues the written word; email is so fast and easy to send, correspondents exchange semi-articulate gibberings without a second thought. There used to be good letter writers, but there don’t seem to be any good email writers (or barely any).” Not so. My 83-year-old father-in-law writes marvelously long and literate emails.
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I believe that the vast majority of e-mail writers are people who are trying to get a point across to someone else as quickly as possible. Just as with any other form of communication, some people are fluent with their native language and some aren’t. Add to that a time factor. E-mail is generally written in a pinch.
The bottom line is quality. Dave says “There used to be good letter writers…”
Keywords: USED TO BE
People just need to learn how to write — again.
Couple of points:
1) Big problem: what do you do with readers of your blog who don’t want to use the ‘comments’ link in your blog? That could be for personal reason (e.g. ‘I’m too shy to go public, I want to run it past you first to see if it’s interesting enough, I don’t want to be seen to bad-mouth you, or I’m simply cussed and don’t like the way the popup window looks”) This often occurs to me (as here) and I think blogs can benefit from an ‘edited’ point of view if they are to have a truly personal voice.
2) Email is writing. Full stop. It’s just another way of getting the text (or sms txt) in front of your eyeball.. All the smileys and all the hackneyed FWIWs or AFAIKs in the world won’t get around that. But that might not matter, because…
3) I have friends who write email extremely hastily and scuffily, and many of them consider the badly-spelled and mistyped email as a subtle indicator of how busy and how efficient and how effective they are.
Ho w wil this eaffect wrttne English it thefuture ? Will I seem a better buissness man abecause of it? I suspect the are right.
In medieval Europe being a scribe was one skill, and being a preacher who could read (usually from the Bible, or perhaps from the ‘rent owing’ list) was another profession, and even the King or a Lord wasn’t expected to know how to read or write. I wonder if we could be headed that way again?
Best wishes,
Andrew Denny
Norfolk, England
I’m not sure if email is either good or bad for writing. I think it’s not so clear-cut to compare email to old-fashioned letter writing. It seems more appropriate to me to compare it to talking on the phone, or, perhaps more accurately, leaving a voice mail message.
I would never argue against clean, well-constructed communications, but it is certainly true that we use verbal shortcuts and weak grammar when we talk to each other, and we usually understand what’s being said. To say email is bad for writing is akin to saying that talking is bad for lecturing. Plenty of good, careful public speakers are less careful in their informal conversations.
Most of the email I see is fine. It can range from the quick one-off: “Thx, Bill” to the detailed memo. My family tends to write emails more like letters. My clients and other business correspondents tend to be chattier. Furthermore, I know lots of writers — people who make their living crafting words. I don’t see any correlation between the quality of their professional writing and the quality of their email writing.
Finally, my daughter is a fanatical text/instant messager, like so many her age. Even her handwritten commmunications are now peppered with those ubiquitous instant messaging shortcuts. Still, I understand her messages quite well, and she’s a very good writer. More than a few of her instructors in college have commented on the quality of her writing.
Just me, I think we’re safe.
I read somewhere that email was responsible for a renascence of letter writing.
I write long emails. The usual response I get is that the other party can’t keep up. They want to move the conversation to IM. IM doesn’t work for me. Then, we move the conversation to the phone. Once on the phone, the long emails are history, but sometimes they are missed.
As far as getting people to post comments, there are a few things you can do:
1. Sell commenting. Highlight the comments feature on your blog. Thing about the WIFFY, what’s in it for them, the key to persuading them to comment.
2. Be responsive to comments. Debbie always gets back to me about comments. But, the responses need to be in the comments or in the blog, so that blog readers can see them. Email will reinforce the behavior, but blog readers are oblivious to that. Always talk back.
3. Some people are lurkers. They never comment. The same thing happens in forums. You can lower the bar, by including a social section if your comment feature uses a forum type of organization. In several other blogs, the comment categories range from comfort food to the moon, but other categories stick to the topic closely. Being human is the best way to get humans to speak up. Have commenters introduce themselves and such. But, the comment feature has to support the behavior. We couldn’t do this here.
4. Encourage commentors. Get them to comment again. It’s not just a one time deal. Think about comments as your feedback mechanism in a curriculum marketing campaign. Think about comments as enactment. Your encouragement is the next link in the enactment chain.
5. Have a contest. Some comment tools let people vote on which threads or categories are interesting.
6. Do whatever it takes to ensure a civil, friendly tone amoung your commentors. Commenting has to be perceived as safe before readers will comment. One flip response can end the conversation.
7. Look at the culture your comments and blog content create. Constraints and practices get selected and reinforced in a very short time, particularly if there are a lot of responses. Being tolerant of commentors who haven’t read the whole thing, or don’t know how to observe the culture is an important requirement.
More ideas came to me:
Ask for comments in you blog text like “What do you think?” Weave the request into the blog entry. And, use the information to evolve your methodology, not just the relationship. Make comments, survey responses.
Carry on a conversation with commentors. Bring it back from the comments to the blog content. Tie these content streams together intimately.
And, if you think of comments as spam, and some blogger do, actively discourage comments.
Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.
Seekers of truth invariably turn to lies.