Quick Thought: The Importance of the Dictionary
This past week has seen a lot of thought bandied about whether bloggers are writers. The debate has gone both ways, but I say everyone could’ve saved themselves a ton of time if they had just consulted a dictionary. For my purposes, I decided to rely on the trusty standard promulgated by the Oxford English Dictionary. Because if anything knows English, it’s, well, the English.
Our good friend Oxford tells us that writing is:
“1 the activity or skill of writing. 2 written work. 3 (writings) books or other written works. 4 a sequence of letters or symbols forming coherent words.”
Since blogging involves the lattermost definition, sorry anti-bloggers, bloggers are writers. There are some assertions made as to the motives of bloggers: appealing to the masses, poor writing, opportunistic, no original thought, et cetera and so forth. These statements reek of a kind of elitism that is simply unwarranted.
I believe that the purpose of writing is the same purpose of blogging: sharing ideas and communicating information. If anything, blogging represents the essence of what it means to write. Yes, there are plenty of awful bloggers. In step, there are also plenty of bad authors, journalists, and artists. When’s the last time a Harlequin Romance novel won an award?
I believe that advances in technology bring advances in other areas. Writing (and perhaps printed word in general) has been greatly affected. Blogging is just another one of those technological consequences as it were. We can now share faster, easier, and simpler. For these “serious” writers to deride blogging as they do is silly at best, hypocritical at worst.
Further reading:
Life Without Pants: http://www.lifewithoutpants.com/friday/friday-quick-hits-writers-bloggers-and-maury-povich-oh-my/
Modite: http://modite.com/blog/2010/01/19/bloggers-are-not-writers/
