Every Day a Little Death

Once upon a time (when I originally wrote this 4 years ago) I took aim at blogs and the many perceived faults I found with the format. I even opened my early draft by boldly stating “I no longer think there is such a thing as, ‘The Great American Novel’—who has time to read 200-plus pages anyway? No, we are now reduced to, ‘The Mediocre American Blog,’ and make sure to keep that thing short because even the copious amounts of caffeine coursing through my veins won’t help me focus for long periods of time.”

Now here I'm creating one. Awkward.

That’s because, after careful reflection (which is hard when you’re this jittery from espresso), I recognized my annoyance was misplaced, and for that I apologize: A big mea culpa to the blogosphere. In fact I have come across numerous blogs that not only exhort original ideas, but also give credit where credit is due (and properly)! In all reality my beef today, as it was then, is really with social communication and the butchering of basic writing skills as a result of the tweets, texts, and token lols.

But before I continue, full discloser is necessary. I love words, I love to write, and I love expounding on ideas into the wee hours of the morning. Because my professional writings must be short and to the point, however, I need an outlet to appease my deep-seeded desire to be verbose. You have been warned, dear reader, that there is no TLDR synopsis here, or will there ever be. Bail out now if you need to, but for those willing to continue on I will return to the subject at hand; my modified rant.

I truly feel as if I’m watching the slow torture of innocents during the Inquisition, and the tormentors have no intention of putting their captives out of their misery. Elegant Prose, Refined Letters, and Provoking Novels (to name a few of the unfortunates) are being burned as heretics by the 140-character trains of thought that dominate the digi-scape.

Fortunately, unlike the quiet serial killers living next door, these executioners are easy to spot. & OMG, if u can’t then idk what 2 say. I mean, wtf!

In an effort to condense information, news stories, quotes, quips, and anything else that pops out of our brains into something easily digested, we create these pockmarked messes that are physically painful to read (my head aches just thinking about it). Then those “gems” are added to an already sprawling mass of sticky, substandard content strands that seem to form the bulk of the World Wide Web. All that is done in the hope of catching a fly (reader) who will retweet or, at the very least, "like" the post.

“OMG! Drank 3 coffees. GTG bad! SMH Lol lol lol.” Only 152 likes? Weak.

Responses to post or tweets are even shorter, often barely amounting to a full sentence. But heaven forbid if anyone writes something of substance and length outside the realms of their own personal musings (again, my bad bloggers). Egad, look out! A crime against humanity has occurred! A fiendish monster wrote more than two sentences! How dare they try to be intelligent: we don’t have time for intelligence! We only have time for an alphabet soup of characters that everyone is supposed to understand, some misspelled words, and name-calling.

But even I have to hold myself accountable. Between the smartphone, smart TV, and even smarter, self-running laser toy for the cat, I feel my own brain succumbing to a sort of tech-sensory overload. The nonsensical jumbles that fill my various screens are starting to make sense. And now I’ve found myself omitting letters and even words here and there. Or is it their? Or they’re? Wait, it doesn’t matter. No one cares any more! All that stuff from school really was pointless! I can do what I want! Hooray for freedom from grammatical tyranny!

No, wait, what am I saying? I want grammatical tyranny. Help! Wow, it must be the coffee talking because I’m veering off the track. Then again, maybe I just have ADHD. I mean everyone else seems to. I just graduated too soon for a teacher to label, err I mean diagnose me. But that’s a rant for a different day.

Well, I have officially surpassed a composition length that any reasonable reader would sit through for an unknown writer. I do, however, have a final thought that I wish to share. If we were to pull together all the posts, the subsequent responses to those posts, the threads that are then created, and the responses to those threads, we could slap a cover on that bad (and I mean bad) boy and we’d have that novel after all! In no way would it be great, but it would certainly (sadly) be American.

P.S. Bonus points if you name the show the blog title is from.

#basicwritingskills #english #gripe #grammarrage