Today I need to admit something publicly, come out at last, declare that, it seems, it has finally happened: I am old.
Or old-fashioned at least.
Probably not in all aspects of my life, but there is one particular area that I just can't get used to: Writing.
To clarify this further, with writing I
don't mean writing myself, that's not the issue. But other people's
writing, and especially writing in newspapers.
It used to be such a
pleasure to read articles in newspapers. You would only become a
journalist in the first place if you could write convincingly,
powerfully, coherently at the least.
What do we have today? Snippets of
text strung together haphazardly, repeating the same thing over and over
in the same article, without a thread that holds it together. And don't
even get me started on the spelling! I just say quite quiet and they're
their, and you (hopefully) know what I mean and understand my plight.
And I am the non-native speaker!!! If I can learn it, a native can as
well, especially one who chooses writing as their profession. Shouldn't
there be a standard to uphold? Where is your professional honour,
darlings?
Anyway, I blame technology. All this twittering and
facebooking and texting has reduced us to blabbering idiots. No wonder
people these days can't string together anything more than two
sentences, we should be glad they even get one single sentence together
that makes vague grammatical sense. Hoping for a structured article in
an online newspaper, where the article is published as soon as someone
has wrung it out of their fingers, no edit, no spell-check, just publish
publish publish, and possibly amend later, well, hoping for structure
in that is probably a lost cause.
So here I am, realising
that it is probably futile to look for structure, or even coherence, in
my newspaper, where people a decade younger than myself present me with
information. The twitter generation feeding information to the essay
generation.
Maybe I should just resign myself to the fact that the essay
is dead, and all I was taught to do, such as
introduction/body/conclusion, or just simple grammar and spelling, was
all in vain. All those tests I had to pass in school, all those essays I
had to submit at university, all of it was useless, and my teachers
should've much rather pointed out that IGNORING all of this would be the
only way to achieve peace of mind while catching up with the news. As
they say, ignorance is bliss.
But here I am, waiting for them to invent the pill to unlearn things. Until then, you will find me on the sofa with a proper (hard copy!) book!
