
Exactly. I tell my kids and every writing student I’ve ever encountered: if you’re stuck, just write an email to me. And that works. Just write it to a particular person. And in fact I learned how to write on email. I’d never written before, with school, it was a struggle — but when I started to do email, you’re writing to a very specific person, you’re concrete, and you’re really trying hard to communicate. You’re not trying to impress anyone else. And teachers have discovered this. They actually did a study on it — having kids write in class and then email. And they evaluated the writing quality of the kids writing essays vs. email — and invariably, they were writing better in email.
…written on the wind. That which can’t go on, doesn’t. There’s no principled debate to be had, here. Fighting to preserve the privileges and profit of an unsustainable practice — predatory delay — doesn’t change that unsustainability, it just magnifies the consequences of inaction. It is intergenerational injustice (and often exploitative in the present, too).