I am trying to figure out how people like that CEO do it.
"Wade" wrote:
"Brevity is the soul of wit," etc. In contrast to my screen name, I am a big believer in conciseness, which is one of the reasons why my average post is quite short. My continual quest as a writer is to say as much as possible in the fewest words possible. Creativity emerges not in the absence of boundaries, but in the presence of constraints. That is why poetic forms like the sonnet were so popular for so many years: they challenged writers to come up with non-trite turns of phrase in a strict format. "Free verse," as Robert Frost liked to say, "is like playing tennis with the net down." So if one desires to use a constrained medium like Twitter to hone one's craft, more power to them -- and for that it could have great value. But there is only value if the writer uses that opportunity to purge all the dross from his words. The problem with Tweeters is they not only fail to do that, they do just the opposite. Twitter thus becomes a platform for unrefined banality.
But, trust me, in the old days, the ratio of shit to value was just as high. It's just that the data set is so much bigger now that it seems worse.
"Wade" wrote:
I don't deny this. I'm one of those geeky college students who actually seeks out old sources for his papers: masters theses from the 1920s and the like. As I've read papers from various eras, I've noticed that editorial standards have increased significantly in the past hundred years or so -- and rightfully so. In the era of manual typewriters, a single mistake on a key could set you back a page -- or several, depending on the layout of the page. Today it's a matter of correcting a mistake on a screen. Even more the point,
all word processors and major internet browsers have built-in spell checkers. When people write things these days, their screens must be riddled with squiggly red lines that they simply ignore.
So yes, I feel justified in holding this generation to a higher standard.
I will say this: There are some people on this very forum who should probably feel at least a little humbled that a guy like Rockmolder, after a little more than a year, knows more about football and writes better English than they do after an entire lifetime. I know I often feel stupid next to him, anyway, and I'm not a (very) dumb guy.