One of the favorite jibes that the intellectual right has hurled
at The Da Vinci Code is that it not only is bad religion
and bad history, but it’s badly written as well. If so, the problem is far
from unique to author Dan Brown: College professors report
— increasingly so, it seems — a huge frustration with the quality
of writing they encounter.
I’ve been particularly worried about the epidemic of bad writing
among the young ever since, several years ago, I was asked to judge
the opinion category of a journalism contest at one of the top
universities in the nation. Remarkably, I found not a single entry
was deserving of a first prize, so I awarded first place to just
about the only entry at all — and a left-wing one at that — which
even tried in a recognizable fashion to marshal facts and
reason to support the writer’s case, to persuade a reader rather
than merely proclaim an opinion or string of opinions as if the
very act of proclaiming provided its own validity. And I refused to
award a second-place prize at all.
Yes, the entries were just that bad.
In the past few weeks, though, I’ve begun to develop a theory
about the identity of one of the biggest culprits in the
bad-writing contagion. I offer no evidence to back up my theory,
other than this paper I found on the Internet in a
quick-but-desperate search to give the theory legitimacy. But the
perp, dear reader, is nevertheless plain to see: the computer, and
more particularly the Internet, and more particularly still the
blogs on the Internet. The blogs lend themselves to precisely the
flaws that ruined the entries in that top-college journalism
contest a few years back: opinions expressed but not supported by
reasoned argument; an utter lack of discernible transition from one
topic or sub-argument to the next; and, more fundamentally, a
shocking weakness in the basics such as punctuation, grammar, and
sentence structure.
The blogs particularly lend themselves to a bizarre combination
of attention deficit and what I’ll call the
“Shouting-From-The-Rooftops Syndrome,” a malady in which every
utterance is deemed worthy of broadcast because, well, it’s
mine, dammit, and I now have a forum on which to broadcast
it.
On blogs, anything and everything goes, including on the blog
names themselves: What the heck, for instance, is “Echidne of the
Snakes” or “Nyarlathotep’s Miscellany”? Then there is Fafblog,
which quotes an apparent admirer to this effect: “This is a good
blog. This is the best blog. It is about god and the universe and
those horrible screaming monkeys and that time I made a pizza out
of an old tire and a can of whip cream. It is the Fafblog.”
No, what it is, is Narcissism gone wild. (Not necessarily those
sites, but the whole, too-cute-by-half and often
too-scummy-by-more-than-a-half world of blog rantings.) Not, as
Seinfeld would say, that there’s necessarily anything wrong with
that. Better a Narcissist in cyberspace than a narc in a prison
cell, or something like that….
Oh, where was I again? Oh, yes, the bad writing. I’ll get back
to that in a second. This is all stream-of-consciousness anyway,
which is, like, so cool, so cool, there are no rules….
YOU SEE THE PROBLEM, don’t you? Blogs can be fun, entertaining, and
informative, but they don’t lend themselves to disciplined thought,
much less disciplined writing. There’s nothing wrong with the blogs
in and of themselves, but when they are a young person’s only or
next-to-only exposure to the written word, they certainly don’t
boost reasoning or writing skills.
Meanwhile, the very structure of the blogosphere, with its
immediate permalinks from site to site to site, encourages a
tendency to bounce wildly from one topic, indeed one entire realm
of discourse, to another and another and to countless others still,
all with the quick click of an electronic-mouse button. (Hence,
perhaps, the inability of blog-happy young people to sustain a
written argument or carefully build logical transitions.)
If the old rule of thumb was that everybody on earth is
connected within “six degrees of separation,” the new rule is that
any subject and anybody in the universe is reachable perhaps
through just three quick clicks of connection. (And, it seems, all
clicks lead quickly to sex and nudity. Here’s a test: Visit any
blog site that has a list of permalinks to other blogs, and pick
the most seemingly off-topic link you can find. Within three blog
links, you’re likely to find somebody advertising “Nude Live
Babes!” or “Celebrities In The Raw!” or somesuch.)
Go to a leading, highly respected legal blog and, within three
links, you’ll find yourself in the rarified world of professional
middle-eastern belly dancers or in a competitive sports fantasy
league not for baseball or football players but for professional
women surfers. Yes, seriously.
Go to an oft-quoted conservative political site and find
yourself, three clicks later, at a B-movie center, a “videogame
adventure comedy,” or an Internet journal of emergency medical
technology.
From the leading left-wing political site you can quickly reach
a highly traditionalist and Biblically literalist site for “Amazing
Bible Stories.” A golf blog leads quickly to a blog on “how to
cheat at online poker,” and another golf blog leads, lickety-split,
to a site allowing orders for various forms of Turkish Delight as
made popular by the Narnia books and movie and to another site on
the worst U.S. volcano eruptions.
Sometimes the seeming randomness of personal-site links can be
encouraging, even moving. For instance, by Googling “I’m Feeling
Lucky” after typing in “macrame,” you can end up three links later
at a wonderful site dedicated to creating “hometown memorials to
our men and women who have lost their lives defending the United
States of America in our war against terrorism.”
AGAIN, THERE IS A LOT TO LIKE about the blog world. It can ennoble
and inform and provide great tools for discourse and for meeting
like-minded people. But what it doesn’t encourage is reflection,
patience or, to stress again, discipline. And its wild informality,
including the use and misuse of the written world, does not lend
itself to careful persuasiveness.
So, a memo to parents: Don’t let your children sit at their
computers all day long. Even if they must be inside (outside
exercise is often better), encourage them to read books and
newspapers, to play board games, even to write notes to each other
with pen and paper. That way they’ll learn to communicate rather
than just to emote.
Meanwhile, if they or you must enter the Internet world, you
can’t go wrong with The American Spectator’s website
(which itself has a blog). It’s the best website, with lots of
stuff about horrible screaming monkeys,
God and the universe,
and even pizza,
albeit without old tires or whipped cream. Fafblog, eat your heart
out.
Quin Hillyer is executive editor of The American
Spectator. He can be reached at hillyerq@spectator.org.
