I read much advice, guidance and coaching on the things that ostensibly can make those of us in the writing professions “better writers.”
Where as many of the hints offered for this new age may be true, there’s a pervasive subtext that concerns me. It concerns me not only for my (and my wordsmith colleagues’) future in the writing field, it concerns me for the future of humanity, as a whole.
“Use short sentences; use short paragraphs; white space is your friend.”
“Keep it really simple.”
“Use bulleted lists.”
“Write to a 7th grade level.”
Maybe it’s a sign that I am becoming a dinosaur in our modern age, but I seriously question our ability (and desire?) to advance the human cause if we’re eternally trying to reduce communication to 140-character tweets and bits of grunted txt spk.
The universe is an almost unfathomably complex organism and trying to explore and explain it in 7th grader terms strikes me as inexorable dumbing down towards a point where we will not advance to explore the stars, but regress to become non thinking morons living in (virtual, I grant you) “caves.”
Of course, there’s a moral and philosophical dilemma there.
On one hand, I can totally grok the simplification argument — making the “content” of life more understandable and accessible to everyone. In this world where “reach” has become of the essence for business survival, the message must be understood.
On the other hand, doesn’t this dumbing down just invite the inevitable creation of an ever shrinking class of “elite thinkers and communicators” and an ever growing class of “everyone else?” We talk about “The 99%” in terms of the financial classes, but it seems to me we are creating another “99%” of non-thinkers who won’t be able to grasp world — and LIFE — changing concepts because their reading, writing and communication skills have been reduced to… well, almost nothing.
I write these words neither as a wannabe elitist pseudo-intellectual, nor as someone separated from reality by the ivy covered walls of academia… I write them as someone who lives on the front lines, observing people as visitors to my “alternative” art gallery and gift shop, where I watch people in their later teens and 20’s not being able to count cash for their purchase, not being able to understand a simple recipe for the cookies I just shared and not being able to understand directions to a restaurant absent an app to do it for them.
This is not a criticism or judgment, merely an observation.
What will become of us, when we have “simplified” ourselves right out of being able to actually understand the world we inhabit?
Then again, maybe this is just the caffeine speaking…
