“If words are all we have as world and god, we must treat them with care and rigor: we must worship” — David Foster Wallace in a letter to Jonathan Franzen
I was going to dig out my copy of Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’ to start off this little piece, but since this is a blog, that seemed a level of diligence too high. Instead I set out an epigraph from myself and DFW quoted in D.T. Max’s new biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, which I –conveniently– happen to be reading right now.
I must say, my leeriness about blogging is a specific case of my general skepticism about internet/technology/new-fangled stuff. I laughed at Twitter when it launched and I still find it pointless.
Some years ago, I had an internship at a high-fallutin magazine back east in New York. This magazine probably has the highest-reading level of any mass-market magazine. Most of the position consisted of fact checking, but I had the opportunity to sit in on the editing of an essay as well. The three of us sat down and tore apart every paragraph and every sentence for clarity, tone, analyzed every factual assertion, &c. So there was the writer, and three rather smart people all contributing to making this the cleanest piece of writing it could be.
Call me old fashioned but rigorous writing followed by rigorous re-writing followed by rigorous, and occasionally adversaria,l fact-checking and editing, seems like an excellent method of achieving clarity of expression. It also has the salutary side-effect of slowing down the production of writing, which is a nice way to avoid getting caught up in the incorrect or misleading narrative frames that characterize what passes for public discussion these days.
If words are all we have as world and god, here’s my blasphemy.
About Me My name is Ben Gore. I grew up in the DC suburbs. I currently live in the mountains of western Colorado. I’ve lived a good number of other places as well, most notably Vermont and the Pacific Northwest. I studied writing and environmental studies at Middlebury College. I... Read more →
On Blogs, and Blogging
“I’m not terribly keen on the idea of blogs” –me
“If words are all we have as world and god, we must treat them with care and rigor: we must worship” — David Foster Wallace in a letter to Jonathan Franzen
I was going to dig out my copy of Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’ to start off this little piece, but since this is a blog, that seemed a level of diligence too high. Instead I set out an epigraph from myself and DFW quoted in D.T. Max’s new biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, which I –conveniently– happen to be reading right now.
I must say, my leeriness about blogging is a specific case of my general skepticism about internet/technology/new-fangled stuff. I laughed at Twitter when it launched and I still find it pointless.
Some years ago, I had an internship at a high-fallutin magazine back east in New York. This magazine probably has the highest-reading level of any mass-market magazine. Most of the position consisted of fact checking, but I had the opportunity to sit in on the editing of an essay as well. The three of us sat down and tore apart every paragraph and every sentence for clarity, tone, analyzed every factual assertion, &c. So there was the writer, and three rather smart people all contributing to making this the cleanest piece of writing it could be.
Call me old fashioned but rigorous writing followed by rigorous re-writing followed by rigorous, and occasionally adversaria,l fact-checking and editing, seems like an excellent method of achieving clarity of expression. It also has the salutary side-effect of slowing down the production of writing, which is a nice way to avoid getting caught up in the incorrect or misleading narrative frames that characterize what passes for public discussion these days.
If words are all we have as world and god, here’s my blasphemy.