essaysfromtheedge

The Depths of Ignorance

There are so many words available today. All you need is a computer and an Internet connection, and the world is at your fingertips.

It would take a lifetime to wade through all the material that has been produced in the last 24 hours alone. Blogs, articles, commentary, transcripts, instructions, deliberations… Private papers, public papers, minutes of meetings, minutes of congress, legal briefs… personal ruminations, private diaries, confessions, epiphanies…

The ramblings of an intellectually restless nation are daily on display. Most is the refuse of personal meanderings. There may be a nugget or two to cherish, but let’s face it: most people have nothing to say, really. And if they do, the writing skills they learned at the hands of our inept educational system has left them nothing short of illiterate; they can’t put a cogent sentence together to save their lives.

They have their word processors – their computer keyboards. Access to these tools might seem like the only prerequisites to written expression. At least, that’s the impression we’re given as we cruise the World Wide Web.

And that, in essence, is the problem.

Thirty years ago, before keyboards sprung up in every home, a typewriter was the tool of a wordsmith. Most young people have only seen typewriters in museums, or in their grandmother’s attic. Dusty relics, these tools were used primarily by secretaries, scholars, and those musty loners called “writers”. To these folks, words were the icons of a craft. They used them like fine wire: slowly twisting them about the stems of ideas until sentences emerged that conveyed those ideas in fresh, vibrant forms.

The time spent on this discipline called writing was immense: ideas were first scratched in notebooks (with pens and pencils… on paper!). These ideas were then organized into outlines. There was a flow and a cogency that was worked out. Did these ideas work together? Did they conflict? How best to weave disparate thoughts into a cohesive pattern?

Only when the outline was finished could the process of writing commence. First drafts were hammered out. Hammered out on paper; usually on stencils, carbons: a sticky, black paper between two sheets of white bond that would produce a smudgy copy underneath the incessant beating of the typewriter keys.

Pages would begin to collect in a box: numbered, usually double-spaced. Once the writer was satisfied with the first draft, he would sit down with his carbon copies and a pencil and begin to edit. Reading and re-reading his work he would pare down redundant sentences, cut thoughts that didn’t contribute to the overall harmony of the piece, add fresh ideas, and constantly refine.

A second draft ensued. This second draft meant that the author had to re-type the entire document, plus the changes made, onto fresh paper and carbons. A second box, next to the first, would begin to fill.

A fresh pot of coffee would be brewed, and the second draft would face the same fate as the first: the editing, the scratching-out, the re-writing.

The honing and refining of an idea into a perfect piece of language.

Then, again, the re-typing – the re-writing of the entire manuscript into the Final Draft.

This is the art that is now lost, an orphan in this age of immediate technological satisfaction. We don’t need to re-read our writing: spell checkers hum and grammar cops burble away under the white sheen of the computer screen. Our words don’t need to touch paper. We can cut and paste them into a browser, and they can be read by millions without ever the need of cracking a cover.

Yet, amidst this technological marvel stands a hollow man – a straw man. His chest filled with nothing but the electrical synapses of a worldwide ether. There lacks both the substance and the discipline to harness the power of the written word.

We no longer hone our craft; we no longer refine our work. We seldom read what we have written – that would be a waste of time.

And in our rush to post our words on a global medium we construct icons to our own ignorance. We make pronouncements we cannot possibly back up with fact; we impugn a person’s character without ever meeting him or her. We don’t engage in research – that would cloud the immediacy of the moment. The time spent would be time lost.

We bandy about ideas we cannot fathom with words we don’t understand. We call ourselves enlightened - our work important – we pat ourselves on the back and move forward into our own intellectual gloom.

Our language has the power to lift us from our basest instincts. Yet, on the white bond of today’s new media, we tend only to plumb the depth of our own ignorance.




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posted by Tomás @ 10/11/2005 04:45:00 PM