Those of us now thinking of Aretha Franklin still have a healthy
respect for writers as intelligent, well-educated individuals who
dedicate their lives to crafting words to entertain or make us think.
Those who haven’t got a clue who I’m talking about also don’t realise
that a basic command of spelling & grammar should be prerequisite
for ham-fistedly hitting the keyboard to churn out another short message
informing friends, acquaintances, & people you’re never likely to
meet, what you had for lunch & how well you can mangle such a simple
message into some form of incomprehensibility. At the least, we can be
thankful that the diminishing average attention span associated with the
decline of communication skills means that few of those afflicted made
it far enough through the previous sentence to be offended.
If there is less respect for the profession of writing, & a
growing misunderstanding that anyone can produce readable material
(& that people are actually interested in same), then we are doomed
to culturally decline to that level of literature where the intonation
of teenage grunting noises & the puzzle of SMS-speak become the
height of linguistic acrobatics demonstrated in a new form of poetry.
Don’t get me wrong - as someone who doesn’t think it’s clever to
quote the classics any more than it is to quote modern cultural
equivalents such as cinema, I’m all for the intelligence of the
individual to shine through their own articulations, as opposed
parodying others’.
However, I do feel that many people communicate their ideas much
better than I can; I appreciate their outpourings, & I have nothing
but respect for them.
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