I think I'm drinking too much coffee. I had a cup of thick local kopi this morning about 9am, and now I have a frothy flat white on my table as I work on my Mac. I'm going to have coffee-stained teeth at this rate, along with the coffee-smelling pee that I already have. (Okay, sorry, too much info!)
I'm reading an article about writing today. There is a quote in it that I like very much.
Writing for me is almost never a straightforward, dispassionate matter of presenting information or defending conclusions. I assume — indeed, hope — that writing will entail and interplay of cognition and affect, of rationality and emotion, of conscious, disciplined effort and intuition and inspiration. ~ Lee Odell, Constants and Variations in my Writing ProcessTrue, isn't it? Although sometimes I desperately wish I could write and present information in a "straightforward, dispassionate" way, rather than this complicated emotive/intuitive/undisciplined thing that I tend to do.
5 comments:
Interesting. I used to think writing should be straight from the heart, now it's definitely more complicated. It's like life isn't enticing without meanderings. Pardon my rambling.
not sure but perhaps it is a left-brained, right-brained thing...
the good news is that it can be learnt...
having been in business journalism, about one of the first things that i was taught was to do just that - present straight information only, no colour, no value judgement, no emotion, just the facts...
but over the years, i've also learnt how to tinge those dispassionate words with various tints, how to camouflage value judgements in the choice of words (having a large vocabulary or a good thesaurus helps)... while using nuance to shape it one way or the other...
example of dispassionate:
the stock market fell 10 per cent yesterday, its largest decline in 19 years.
example of coloured:
the stock market tumbled 10 per cent yesterday, one of its worst single-day losses in almost twenty years amid widespread panic selling.
both contain the same facts, but the latter is definitely more emotive than the first... it does take discipline to strip it down to the bare bones and then reconstitute it, molding it to whatever you prefer...
Writing in an objective manner is almost a chore to me. As it should be. It's ugly and unfeeling and, for lack of a better word, boring. Newspapers are a definite no no for people like me. They are loaded with ugly prose and a total lack of style.
I like emotive/intuitive!
elle: i think THAT is the style.
traditionally, newspapers are supposed to provide just the facts and nothing else.
if a report is written to sway readers one way or another with emotive writing, it's called and opinion piece or a comment... not a news story... the reporter and his/her biases should never be part of the story...
these days, the lines have blurred. celebrity journalism has turned the paradigm on its head... the reporter becomes intrinsic to the story - making his/her opinion matter more than the facts...
which does one prefer?
the purist may want just the news quiet and distilled, while the MTV generation or the GENXers may want some effervescence, some colour in the reporting, prose that's laced with humanity... like Get REA!...
bottom line though, there is no such thing as a right way or wrong way, is there?
Post a Comment