I was recently part of a protracted and painful online discussion on a writers’ board on the topic of online writing. To be more specific, the writers were addressing the question as to whether or not online activity was good or bad for writing.
The subject of pay for online writing was discussed only briefly and comments were the usual. Online writing pays pretty poorly if you allow a webmaster to pay you for your services.
However, several writers shared their opinions that online writing used poor grammar. Some online texts even have typos.
The sweet irony of the discussion is that the biggest whiners about typos had typos–in their posts complaining about typos. Sometimes even in the same sentence!
If you are a real writer and by that I mean a person who writes consistently and for money (or trying for money), you know all about errors. You know it first hand because you make errors. I don’t know any person who belts out 5,000 or 10,000 words a day who doesn’t get a few letters here and there twisted up. Sometimes there is a punctuation error. And, yes, sometimes we make grammatical mistakes.
The point is this: is what you’re trying to do as a writer simply to avoid making grammatical mistakes and spelling errors? If it is, give up writing tomorrow. Never touch another pen or keyboard for the rest of your life and you will have attained that goal.
I’ve never seen any group of professionals as hung up on small mistakes as writers. For instance, do you think accountants sit around in forums on the internet and bemoan that “other accountants” might “sometimes make a mistake.” I bet there is not an accountant on earth who hasn’t transposed a digit or added a column of figures incorrectly at least once in his life. The point is, accountants recognize the difference between those sorts of errors and real errors (like running a Ponzi scheme).
Everyone makes mistakes and writers, being writers, make their mistakes in writing. But what other profession seems to shine a spotlight on these little “nothing” events? Imagine other newscasters ganging up on a colleague because he once mispronounced a word. Imagine them lynching the other newscaster because he once coughed on-air? The fact is, we know that those things happen. Maybe they shouldn’t, but they do. Drivers take wrong turns, cashiers count out change wrong, secretaries forget to sign for packages, and carpenters arrive on the job and forget one of their tools.
To come back to my point (I know it’s around here somewhere), a writer writes to communicate. It’s the sharing of ideas that is important, not the careful attention to a bunch of rules. A powerful writer is one who makes you think, who changes your mind, who impresses you with his or her thoughts …. not one who dazzes you with his or her correct use of the semicolon.
Language is organic. It changes constantly, even over the short course of a few years. What is linguistically acceptable today may not be tomorrow, and vice versa. Language evolves and it would be a sorry writer today who wrote like Shakespeare if you mean literally like Shakespeare. But a writer who can convey the ideas and insights of Shakespeare is a great treasure to all of us — even if those pages had some mistakes on them.
The main reason people hate to write is that they fall into the trap of thinking that all writing has to be technically perfect. Imagine an accountant starting out on his career and being warned by his very stern, no-nonsense boss (given to rants) that he could never, ever make a mistake or it would prove he was a “bad accountant.” Yet writers do that all the time to each other. Most of the writers writing about online opportunities only bashed those who were writing online for making grammatical and spelling mistakes.
That’s why most writers are poor!
Get past the mindset that tells you your main goal is criticizing the work of others. If other people are writing online and you think they stink, then get online and do it better … or find a new playground. If you think online writing is not for you, great, get out of the game and leave it to those who want to play. If you think that real writing is grammatically pristine, then, writer, edit thyself.
Here is what I learned:
- Writers who hang out in forums are a disgruntled lot.
- Writing is about communicating ideas, not the absence of grammatical mistakes.
- No writer should whine that others are making grammatical errors–we all make them, and writers make them more than others (because we write more than others).
- Language changes over time and writers who care about communicating (rather than obeying the grammar rules they learned 20 years ago) monitor those changes and use them judiciously.
The point is online writing is a huge opportunity for writers, but if your focus is on not making grammatical mistakes (ever, ever, ever) then you’re going to miss out.
