A stylistic change
Reviewing my posts thus far I find I’m running afoul favorite pair of writing difficulties: It’s too long, son! What do you need all those words for anyway?
This weekend’s Buffy entry really drove the problem home. That is, the fifty times I’ve looked over my little 2 page essay and realized that it boils down to “I like Buffy because it’s about self-denial for the good of others and about fixing your mistakes.” Sure, that’s simplifying. I’m leaving out all the bits that point out that there’s more to the show than what I’m pointing out, but once I was finished hedging, did you really care what I was saying anymore?
I like to tell clients how important it is to tailor your tone to your audience, let’s do the same here. Time to go conversational.
You may also notice from today’s earlier post, I’ll be indulging in the occasional “lookie there” post, since there just isn’t time to write my own comments on all the cool things going on out there.
February 21st, 2006 at 10:42 pm
I think the real question is: are you using this blog as a medium for cathartic expression, as a temporary medium which you’ll publish later as a collection of commentaries, or as a medium to entertain and “converse”? Your resultant writing style ultimately depends on the context of your intent at the moment. (IMHO, I think style inconsistencies between posts are fine and to be expected – but that’s just me.)
February 22nd, 2006 at 11:16 pm
True this. The key issue is to match the tone to the audience, subject, and purpose. But I think one of the strengths of conversational language is the range of audiences it matches.
Another strength I see in it is breaking out of the inscrutable noun strings that tend to plague more formal business and organizational writing. My thinking is that to the degree that formal writing moves farther toward gobbledygook formulated to make people sound smart and farther from actual communication, conversational tone will seem a natural fit to more writers, and readers will tend to seek out conversational writing they can understand over obtuse give-me-a-few-minutes-to-decode-this writing.
It’s not that conversational tone is the only alternative, or necessarily the best in all contexts, but if people find themselves having to choose between formal writing that doesn’t communicate and conversational writing that does, they’ll opt for conversational. (Of course, if you reverse things, people will again go where they can understand the message. If Greg’s conversationally toned memos regularly fly off into digressions about his cat while the spare prose of Eva’s formal memoranda gets the point across, everyone will look to Eva to find out what’s going on.)