This blog is meant to be an addendum to the Writing For The Internet article series, which directly addresses the issues of writing the the internet. Since 75%-90% of what an end user sees is written content and online work of any kind demands a great amount of writing, it follows that working successfully online requires above average writing skills.
Many people lack this skill and not from lack of trying-- at least, not on their own. Actually, if a little history lesson can be tolerated here, it is primarily due to a critical mis-judgement by educators in the mid-20th century who believed, at the time, what economists and other forecasters were telling them about the "Death of the Written Word."
With the advent of first radio, then motion pictures and especially television, many experts -- from science fiction writers, to business economists -- thoroughly believed that the written word and writing were dying out as a primary form of communication. Or, if not dead precisely, they were becoming "obsolete."
After all, who would stop to read when everything could be televised? They foresaw a world where children weren't even taught to read because they didn't need it, where virtually everything could be stored on some kind of video disk and all communication was via future versions of some kind of two-way television. And, while this may yet prove to be true, the fact is these experts are at least 100 years off their calculations of any of this actually being the norm.
Because of this thinking, cirriculums in most "forward thinking" schools anxiously adapted to this idea, de-emphasizing reading comprehension and writing skills and focused on mathematics and the sciences. Thus, in one of the 20th Century's grandest SNAFU's*, the focus on education changed.
However, we only realize this now. In the 1950's, meanwhile, educational experts of the time were urging primary and secondary schools to de-emphasize writing and reading comprehension, including spelling, grammar, punctuation and .
Also, as secondary educations became more and more expensive in America in the early to mid 1970's and the demand grew, colleges began to move away from the 4 year BA's and toward more specialized education. Believing math and science to be much more important than reading or writing, emphasis was placed on these. Thus, today, many doctors, scientists and engineers can barely write a basic sentence, even if they can design or heal or do all manner of great works.
In fact, one portion of these groups have dug us in a little deeper, applying their math and science to solve the problems arising from this rift in education by creating computer programs that are supposed to do the work for them. That is, spell checkers, grammar checkers, even article writers, if you can believe it.
And, of course, there is the natural course of language adaptation (as it always has) to the modern needs. Thus we have emails containing "msgs lik ths bcuz ppl r so used 2 abbvng n txtng" that they don't even realize they're doing so. Though this may well become a new version of writing, right now, in business, it is considered the work of an illiterate to use such things.
So, the time has come. But while the articles at Writing For The Internet will address major issues, this blog hopes to point out small, almost unconscious items that may otherwise be overlooked.
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