writing

Iinternet-age writing syllabus and course overview

As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no longer need to feel encumbered by the paper cuts, reading, and excessive use of words traditionally associated with the writing trade. Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era focuses on the creation of short-form prose that is not intended to be reproduced on pulp fibers.

I do half these things and don't consider myself a bad writer, just economical. I'll admit, I had trouble making it all the way to the end of the article. I kept thinking - do you really need all these words?!

"When did it become acceptable to write shit and get it published? "

This thought crossed my mind, as I was sitting in my ahem *study* reading a recent copy of The Atlantic, purchased on a whim to offer diversion from The Watchmen omnibus, and the foot-high pile of journal articles sitting by the bed.

Take this example, from a book review :

Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering From the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes

"Because It's STILL There" might well have been the working title of this comprehensive account, a vacuum-filling history (the first of its kind in five-plus decades) and an enormously engaging addition to the climbing-lit canon.

Seriously? "Because"?? It's a book review for the love of God, I learned not to start a sentence with 'because' while sitting on the rainbow rug in Ms Ginoux's second grade classroom.

What else is wrong here? Structurally, it's like the author took a perfectly good sentence, cut it up and played grammar boggle with it for a few minutes. Did you have to lead with the joke Mr. Author-pants? Could you not have written:

This enormously engaging addition to the climbing-lit canon, the first of its kind in five-plus decades might well have been titled "Because It's STILL There" so long has it taken for a comprehensive work on this subject to appear?

I mean, or is that like, not cool sounding? Trust me I am no stranger to writing sentences that go back to front in order to sound clever - ask my thesis adviser, who sends red arrows flying left to right over my insufferable and disorderly syntax.

Okay so I have run into this interesting dilemma. There is one concept that keeps popping up in my interviews, and I am totally puzzled as to how to define it. I will paste a few quotes anonymous and out of context to help illustrate what I am seeing (and yet cannot describe). Please help hivemind.

I am reading Light by M. John Harrison Lyrical SF it is, or maybe literature accidentally catagorized as SF. I am too much of a purist for that, if there are space-halos and brains who live in tanks and pilot ships it's SF.

Not the point, the point is how incredibly nice some of Harrison's prose is. These are my favorites so far: