Musings on Conversational Writing

One of my treasured holiday gifts this year is actually a corporate gift, this one from Alan Siegel, Chairman and CEO of Siegel+Gale, the super smart strategic branding firm.  Alan sent the recently updated version of The Elements of Style, originally written in 1918 by Cornell University professor William Strunk, Jr., and updated in 1959 by E.B. White, a one-time student of Strunk and the author of classics like Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web and many more.  As Alan says "ten million copies later, [White's Elements of Style] remains the only book on commas that is, indisputably, a classic."

This most recent version adds pictures, by Illustrator Maira Kalman who, among other achievements, did the "Newyorkistan" cover for The New Yorker.

Elements of style was standard issue for English majors in college (I assume it still is) and considered the ultimate authority on issues of rules of English usage and composition. 

Here's a comment from the Foreword in this version, written by Roger Angell, himself a noted man of letters and, as it happens, the stepson of E.B. White.  He notes about this latest version that "what is not here is anything about E-mail--the results-free, lower case flow that cheerfully keeps us in touch these days.  E-mail is conversation, and it may be replacing the sweet and endless talking we once sustained (and tucked away) within the informal letter.  But we are all writers and readers as well as communicators, with the need at times to please and satisfy ourselves (as White put it) with the clear and almost perfect thought."

I'm struck by Angell's comment "E-mail is conversation."  Really?  I would argue it is more often simply chat, and rarely rises to the level of conversation, at least as defined by my hero Theodore Zeldin, who says that the great conversations are those that we "start with a willingness to emerge a slightly different person."  Conversations are true exchanges in which both parties are, in at least some small way, transformed.

I'd venture to say that rarely, if ever, do emails I receive--and send--meet that standard.

Comments

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