Learning to do more than just ram otherwise reluctant words together is a long and difficult procedure. That is why, generally, I am a fan of blog writing. So much of it is arduously un-self-reflexively narcissistic, but it does more than practice the fingers. For the writer of the blog, they are refining their craft, albeit in some cases unconsciously. For their audience, however, their chance search of a term brought them to a sudden realization, much as James Fenimore Cooper reputedly did many years ago, that if such unpalatable goulash may be placed before the hungry world, then they have as much right to the public practice of their skills as any other.
I am brought to this observation partially by marking several papers for my undergraduate class. So many sentences pleading for a bit more attention, or faltering by want of revision, lie tormented and twisted on the page. The student, like many writers online, is flushed with their audacity, the sheer virtuosity of their wit, as they press the oft-dreamed-of button, PUBLISH, or in the case of my students, pass in an essay a mere printer struggles to represent. Often when students bring papers to me to ask, some of them resentfully, what was wrong with it, I can point to a sentence and say “I don’t know what that means.” Usually that is taken as license to explain the sentence, in typically much greater clarity than has arrived on the page. “Say that,” I tell them. “Say that instead, and I would have understood.”
Online there is much of this hilarity at the expense of students, or anyone who makes a mistake. One of my former students wrote about the faulty grammar one finds online, only to litter their relatively uninspired piece with a vague awkwardness, although their self-praise was clear enough. It is easy enough to find the faults in others, even the bible is clear about what motes one can find in their eye.
Unfortunately, communication is an exercise we all struggle with. Writing is one of those enterprises of the mind, like talking or art, which is an attempt to transfer a kind of ineffable. We are reaching out through our words, just as we try to explain to the neighbour why the cats in our garden are annoying, in order to transfer one mind to another. A far simpler method has since been dreamt up. At the price of a few cables, and some equipment, you may transfer your thought. Even as you read this a telepathic connection is being made in labs all over the world. Before such technology becomes common, however, we are left with the literary equivalent of saying “See! See!” to the teeming multitudes whose only access to our minds is the signifier, slippery with its own linguistic juices, smeared across what otherwise would be a perfectly blank, and in Mcluhan’s terms, meaningful, screen.
