After 35 years working with engineers, scientists, and technology followers, I’m about ready to throw in the towel. A society like ours, one that has fallen in love with technology, has turned a deaf ear to the relevance of language. To those who bow to the numbers, language is an abstract waste of time, a no-no that should be banished, not practiced. After all, wouldn’t it be much easier to communicate by numbers? I’m guessing that in the future, people will communicate like this: “678598 2345867 9021345, and, by the way, 67124.” Language? Who needs it.

Lee,

Numbers may be fine for computers and techies, but they will never hold the beauty of the written word.

For example:

“The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal.

“‘Now look here, Bailey,’ she said, ’see here, read this,’ and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. ‘Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did.’

“Bailey didn’t look up from his reading so she wheeled around then and faced the children’s mother, a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit’s ears. She was sitting on the sofa, feeding the baby his apricots out of a jar.

“‘The children have been to Florida before,’ the old lady said. ‘You all ought to take them somewhere else for a change so they would see different parts of the world and be broad. They never have been to east Tennessee.’

“The children’s mother didn’t seem to hear her but the eight-year-old boy, John Wesley, a stocky child with glasses, said, ‘If you don’t want to go to Florida, why dontcha stay at home?’

“He and the little girl, June Star, were reading the funny papers on the floor.”

(Excerpt from A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor)

Numbers will never have the beauty of language. Language and the power of communicating with language will never go away because of that beauty–because people like you and me appreciate it. We appreciate the beauty of the written word.

Someone said that “A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

And yet we write because we have to. It’s in our soul. We are writers. It’s what we ARE. It’s like saying we are people. We can quit writing, but we are still writers. You know exactly what I’m talking about, because you, my beloved friend, are a writer, an excellent writer.

I wish you were with us in Denver. I miss you.

Robin

Well, Robin, I hope your students and others creating Web sites read your response. I was being a bit sarcastic in my effort to point out that too many site owners spend all their time on tech topics when they should be striving for quality content. By the way, I don’t know why we call words “content.” Everything on the site is part of the content. Why not call it the “writing,” or the “text”? I trust you have your footy jammies out there in frozen tundra land. It’s 80 here today (grin).

Lee,

The beauty of the Web is that quality writing on the Web will always float (or flow) to the top of the top of the search engines. Junk won’t. That’s why the article sites where people churn out “articles” that members can use will never be as effective. I question the “quality” of those articles.

If the members re-write the articles like they’re supposed to, maybe so. But I wonder how many are going to do that.

I’m going to cut/paste content from a student’s site to show you that well-written content is still alive and ticking. This site is getting tons of leads from this small site. Why? Because of the beauty of the writing.

“European communities have long used pavers. They match the character of those dignified towns and villages. When pavers were first brought to America, those kinds of public presentations gave home owners and contractors the idea of using the same distinct material in private homes and drives.

“Since then, managing public space has come a long way. More and more emphasis is being placed on creating unique venues that let people interact with their environment. Everything is being designed to maximize our comfort level–from flowerbeds to markets to the streets themselves. We don’t know what will happen tomorrow, but pavers are making our communities more livable today.”

From USA Paver Company, Brick Paver Installation throughout Florida

Wow. Isn’t that beautiful writing? We know why this site is getting so many leads, don’t we?

Lee, I wish I were half the writer you are.

Robin