Why I hate the index finger (1980)

Worth the read.

I am so worried that we as a society have lost the ability to write well, and risk losing the ability to recognize and appreciate good writing. Rote professional written communication skills are changing and diminishing. The written word is generally seen to be a burden. Anyways, bittersweet thoughts from a really funny article.

This place really is good practice for all sorts of skills: expressive, physical, mental, emotional, and even spiritual. And beyond learning about various zones of my beloved nerdtech, there are very subtle levels of sociology, anthropology, and psychology on display here, too.

But yeah, the decline is real, my friend. I declined to use IRC for all these years, and I'm afraid its descendant, texting, has not improved our society's level of anything beyond the most mundane trivial pursuits.

I think this is a poor example of "society writing well". It reads like a medical journal. I personally hate it and couldn't get through it.

Well this is from the 80s when writing was still quite respected and practiced

Thanks to LLMs, the death of stylish writing in non-literary fields is assured. I agree, many people seem to view writing as a burden.

I have only met a handful of people that can lay out a complex argument from scratch in speech alone. For most of us, writing is thinking. If you avoid writing, your ideas will remain murky forever.

Up until recently, there always seemed to be a marked difference between the way people spoke vs how they conveyed thoughts in writing. These days, it often feels like most writing is just conversational and stream of consciousness and differs little from how many people speak.

It always makes me curious how we generally view the people of antiquity as speaking very eloquently and properly, but that's probably because we only have writings from their time, not recordings of how they actually spoke.

I'm surprised you mention us not having recordings of the older times being why we thought people spoke eloquently. Even in old recorded audio and video, like old TV, it feels to me like people speak much more eloquently.

Part of the reason this is written like it is is that it is the work of a true master. (Like his opinions or not, he's come by them the hard way and really does know what he's talking about.) Mastery is just not as common as it used to be, probably in no small part because there is so much more to cover these days.

But when you find someone else who really knows their topic, inside and out -- they will probably write about it a lot like this.

Go listen to some Teddy Roosevelt speeches, blown away by the clarity and fluency. Or the Cross of Gold audio snippets.

tbf with the advent of text messaging and the internet a much greater proportion of text is conversation

Prepared speeches don't really count; they're basically reading written prose. I'd be interested to hear actual conversations from Victorian times. I wonder if they are anything like how we write them in TV shows and movies.

Well, we do have recordings from that period, but it would be as out there as having a finetuned AI of your own writings these days so I don't know how natural it would have been.

Also, apparently TR used the manuscript much less than most speakers, delivering much of the actual wording impromptu and the general structure from the script, so he was actually pretty fluent off the cuff.