Corresponding Effects:
Artless Writing in the Age ofE-mail
Stanley J. Solomon
The notice which you have been pleased
to take of my Labours, had it been early,
had been kind; but it has been delayed till
I am indifferent,and cannot enjoy it; till I
am solitaiy, and cannot impart it; till I am
known, and do not want it.
-from Dr. Johnson’s Letter to Lord
Chesterfield (1 755)
SAMUEL
JOHNSON’S
famous putdown of the
opportunist Lord Chesterfield’s belated
attempt to shine publicly for aiding in
the production of the great English dictionary is unique and monumental-and
therefore noting that no one will ever
receive its like through e-mail will be the
least disturbing news of the day. But
what we will receive instead, and what
we will impart to others, may indeed be
disturbing. Graceful writing is hardly
the point, its preservation perhaps being an issue of art and literature rather
than communication. In the age of email, bland, minimalistic, occasionally
incoherent, and almost always
singleminded computer correspondence
begins to define large areas of our culture. It may not seem to matter much
that the Johnsonian syntax is no doubt
STANLEY
J. SOLOMON
teaches modem poetry,
film studies, and multimedia production at
Iona College.
unsuitable for cyberspace occasions;
yet it does matter that the further we
distance ourselves from a tradition of
fine writing, the more we place in jeop
ardy even commonplace business writing, losing not only the sense of nuance
but even lucidity itself.
Computer correspondence such as
electronic mail is characterized by its
strong encouragement to both quick
and frequent correspondence. Among
some writers, non-professional ones, it
stimulates a kind of addiction, inspiring
the transmission of enormous quantities of mail t o individuals on mailing
lists, whether for influencing opinions
or asserting truths or indulging compulsive behaviors. By extension, the problems relate as well to Internet correspondence or news groups. The most
abusive tendencies can be observed in
public chat forums in which a dozen or
more communicators participate in simultaneous rapid response writing,
which is almost always a few seconds
too late t o be immediately relevant to
the actual sentence that appeared to
have prompted the reply. This maddeningly comic activity appears continuously, twenty-four hours a day, in such
arenas as the forums of America Online.
Nevertheless, since the aim of such correspondence is t o imitate speech, and
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not really the written word, and eventually will be replaced by some new verbal
technology, it is perhaps best dismissed
as a temporary phenomenon of our era,
to be handled by sociologists and satirists of the future.
Only a recent challenger to the telephone as the main method of delivering
personal correspondence in our society, e-mail seems to have re-popularized
the notion of writing one-on-one, keeping in touch, even developing ongoing
exchanges of information. With its cachet of high technology, e-mail has at
least one advantage over the telephone:
it does not require the listener t o be
there; in fact, it mimics the phone-answering system in that a message can be
left with a brief description of the caller’s
purpose. But e-mail is much better at
messaging in that it never requires or
anticipates the recipient’s immediate
presence. Rather, it is premised on conveying the whole message to a recipient
who will in the near future attend to it.
Although slower than the speed of sound,
it travels comfortably at the speed of
business, and along with the omniscient
fax machine has rapidly replaced postal
services as the preferred method of commercial communication.
However, using the computer modem
to send messages knowing that the recipient is likely t o be there shortly, soon,
or eventually rather than immediately,
apparently slows the communication
process compared t o using the telephone. But since e-mail is usually “fast
enough,” speed is not the overriding
factor in choosing one medium or the
other where both are familiar tools. Indeed, e-mail has altered the nature of
rapid response communication, much
as the telegraph did in the nineteenth
century (with much less accessibility
then and length limitations). For most
purposes, e-mail is always less tentative
than telephone conversation. You can
develop your opinion on the telephone,
but e-mail announces your “developed”
opinion, however tentative it may in fact
be. On the other hand, e-mail is more
tentative than written letters, which remove most signs of hesitation and uncertainty because letters are primarily
a mode of communicating already reflected upon ideas. (Of course tentativeness can be finely or crudely expressed in letters, but then the tentativeness is in itself part of the communication, a reflective or well-thought-out
tentativeness: in other words, it becomes
doubt, which is an intellectualized state.)
The current economics of e-mail are
highly favorable t o the new medium of
communication since Americans generally regard it as free, especially as it
often is available to them as a bonus
paid for by some other service such as
America Online. Thus, at present it
seems that e-mail will win out over both
alternatives of telephone and postal mail
because so much of it is underwritten by
general Internet usage and boosted by
intra-institutional encouragement. Essentially, executives and administrators
want to use e-mail and its cousin voicemail to facilitate simultaneous multiple
correspondence and to cut down on
printed memoranda, which they feel are
often neglected and not read with much
enthusiasm.
Well, then, the letter as a vehicle for
business, discussion, and leisure is reborn. Isn’t this a blessing? Will not such
a flurry of activity eventually lead us
back to the traditional art of letter-writing, once a significant English literary
genre in itself ? Think of the letters of
Dryden, Johnson, Pope, and Swift all the
way through to Bernard Shaw and perhaps in the hands of some faithful practitioners today.
But, of course, no one looks forward
to the slightest hint of literary resurgence in e-mail correspondence. In fact,
many are battling merely for rudimentary levels of good manners (notice the
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proliferation of usage forms developed
by Internet services, bulletin boards,
and institutional “style sheets”). A few
users want to campaign for the retention of capital letters at the beginning of
sentences; others want to make the use
of a spell-checker mandatory-preferably with legal sanctions.
In the past, even writers of casual
letters by hand or by typewriter had to
take some care with what was said. After all, writing was preservable and frequently regarded as evidence of the
writer’s carelessness (a reflection of
one’s education) or inexactness (a possible reflection of one’s reliability or
integrity). Nowadays, e-mail is never
perceived as an exercise in style or dependent on careful proofing, let alone
rethinking and revision. At least in a
theoretical sense, any type of writing
done on computers (word processing,
specifically) benefits greatly from the
revision possibilities and innate inducements to revise. But e-mail has counter
inducements. By general agreement,
the primary format is informational,
never intentionally esthetic in design
and, as far as my experience goes, never
esthetic even by accident-as if a graceful, insightful, or intricate sentence were
blocked by a style checker programmed
to delete anything that is not ordinary,
redundant, excessive, or illiterate.
Aside from conveying information, email commonly serves as a way of keeping in touch with little effort. A letter, by
its inherent nature, indicates thoughtand thought is always improved by careful writing. E-mail is inherently anticontemplative. When not dominated by
random observations, the e-mail personal note features top-of-the-head communication. Written at odd times within
odd hours, it can be very short. Brevity
is its virtue, not for purposes of wit but
for the sake of specificity: “Here is the
information in one sentence,” or if part
of a debate: “Here is my opinion, and if
i
you disagree you’re a fool.” The emerging characteristics of e-mail, then, are
quickness of composition and frequency
of correspondence. Combined, these
characteristics promote the sloppiness
everyone notices in reading the errors of
others, as well as the quantity of unsolicited mail. The junk mail aspect of e-mail
and the millions of postings of notices on
the totally public news groups and bulletin boards and forums are commonplace
nuisances to many Internet users, but
they reflect a yearning toward self-expression on the parts of millions of otherwise anonymous voices.
Writing an angry letter to a newspaper requires some level of dedication,
but posting one’s opinions to a large
group of unknown people who are posting their views is an act of self-defense or
defiance or a compulsion to preach the
truth to the infidels. Communicating
through a computer modem-without
resorting to credentials of support, without documentation, without censorship,
without fear of grammatical abuse-apparently alleviates the daily frustrations
of life for thousands or millions of Americans who must otherwise repress their
ideas or be held accountable for the
quality of them. Add their numbers to
those who find equivalent freedom with
talk radio and we can speculate about at
least one social boon from modern technology: a democratic leveling to the voice
of the people and corresponding alleviation of the sense of oppression. Perhaps
this is one reason for the declining crime
rates in this country.
About the computer’s impact on the
general literacy level of the country, we
may feel less enthusiastic. In addition to
an apparent decline in the formalities of
standard prose-the willingness, for instance, to send unproofed letters across
cyberspace-we are also encountering
weaknesses in the content of communication. Even in its me‘tier, communicating information, computer correspon321
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I
dence persistently exemplifies another
deficiency: the lack of development of
information into a reasonable argument.
Reading what America is writing online,
we find the cultivation of skimpy details
without the need for much support of a
point of view; an open arena in which all
opinions are equal; impulsive judgments
made with instantaneous reply possibilities; and hostility toward objective
standards of analysis. As a result, information takes on a curious personal cast.
While it generally remains descriptive of
an objective world, often contemporary
information is conveyed as an opinion or
as a subjective view of that objective
reality. Communications within the thousands of news groups (as randomly
sampled by me in far fewer than thousands of such groups) frequently sounds
argumentative; postings read not as if
writers were merely correcting the errors of other writers, but rather as if they
were attacking the values and education
of strangers who are their antagonists.
In contrast, although receipt of a
mailed communication might also engender anger or need for a quick reply,
by the time one actually gets to a piece of
paper or a typewriter, some thinking
process typically occurs, one’s “cooler
head” prevails. However, with e-mail, if
you answer immediately, only your immediate feelings need be engaged-and
the inducement to reply instantly is the
fact that you can just click the response
button and get the answer out-no need
to address the correspondent, as you
might have to do if you put off replying.
Furthermore, you might lose the e-mail
piece if you do not exert some effort to
save it. I always try t o answer e-mail
right away, for who wants to hold on t o
a communication obviously dashed off
with little thought but requiring some
response?
With careful correspondence becoming outmoded, responsibility for errors
seems to be diminishing. Misspellings in
telegrams, surely, are still attributable
t o individual carelessness, not excused
by the general human propensity to carelessness created by God and abused by
Marconi. We might want to apportion
blame for anything originating in the
keyboard (as we always did in every
instance when the keyboard was part of
a typewriter), mainly pointing t o the
typist and his or her inability to proofread to perfection. But now that electronic communication is typically
handled quickly, we have blunted the
significance of errors, and the understood rule is not t o complain, for after
all, you are probably misspelling words
too.
Formal errors and faulty grammar
are common results of carelessness and
symptomatic of more serious problems
in our culture as we increasingly ignore
traditional standards for writing and
reasoning. As mechanical errors flourish, writers begin to regard the process
of electronic writing as a casual experience. If something can be done quickly,
why d o it deliberately, especially if your
intended readers expect a casual commitment on your part? Why take a day
to compose an e-mail letter when your
reader will assume it was written spontaneously, subject to the same shortcomings of other pieces of e-mail he
received the same day. In other words,
you may have caught all spelling and
grammatical infractions, but the reasoning of your point of view-unless
you write like Samuel Johnson with the
reasoning built into the sentence structure-will appear like everyone else’s
“e1ectronic”opinions: spur-of-the-moment ideas or embedded prejudices.
Opinions, in e-mail, are primarily perceived as information conveyed with
attitudes, attitudes that can be dropped
while the information is retained.
Well into the computer age, we discover that as a nation we are more
communicative than ever but less arSummer 1998
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ticulate. We have more to say and more
technology to send it along, but less
facility for saying it. To the extent that
this observation seems obviously true,
we may be confronting a language problem, and beyond that a cultural problem
rooted in democracy itself. Everyone
has a right t o his or her opinion-are we
not committed to defend that right unto
the death?-and such a right absolutely
requires access to the transmitting technology. And by the way, it was Dr.
Johnson who first made clear to the
English-speaking world the unpleasant
truth that our language was not under
his control (in his capacity as the “great
lexicographer”), nor the control of any
group of learned scholars. English is a
people’s language, he taught us, open to
anyone’s influence, undergoing daily
expansion by random processes not
voted upon.
No, we will not be receiving e-mail
from Sam Johnson, nor from anyone demanding an intelligent response, though
perhaps hopeful for an intelligible one.
Vain and arrogant as Lord Chesterfield
was known to be, as a fine prose stylist
himself, he had an enormous sensibility
regarding writing, its importance, and
its transcending value. Although
Johnson’s letter presented a brilliantly
satiric attack on his status as a patron of
the arts, Chesterfield left it lying about
(as if just tossed unconcernedly) on a
table so that visitors could sneak a look
at it when he was out of the room. Unsure whether Johnson had kept a copy of
the communication, Chesterfield knew
it would be copied by some guest and
thereby preserved for as long as the
language was cherished. What did you
do with this afternoon’s e-mail?
We regret to announce here the passing of
MILTONHINDUS
at the age of 81. He was a longtime and loyal contributor
to this journal. Both as a professorand as an eminent
literary critic, he was the author of many acclaimed
works of literary criticism as well as a teacher of repute
and influence.He was counted among the 13 original
faculty members at Brandeis University where he was
Edytha Macy Gross Professor of Humanities.
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