Swimming, Mortality & Writing Well!?! (Huh?)

The recent post on my late night swimming episode generated a surprisingly large amount of discussion and comment. We were even contacted by a journalist who wanted to do an article on our unique life style here on the boat (we turned it down for reasons that I will expand on in another post.) What is surprising about the emails and comments is that there are at least as many about how I wrote as about what I wrote. (Hmmm – Mr. Hildebrand, my high school English teacher would be happy to know that I finally seem to be getting it. I’m not sure where IT came from – I certainly wasn’t getting IT in his class and have the marks to prove it. A current grade 10 teacher gave me an A+ for the post. Thanks Mrs. Muth – I don’t never have got a A in Engleesh before.)

See the quote in the post Crossing the Atlantic on an Alberg. The description of being out in the middle of the Atlantic surrounded by nothing along with the interaction of the waves, sky and light is awesome. That paragraph is so well crafted that it actually evokes feelings in your heart and pictures in your mind. Now, that’s what I’m talking about.

The topic of writing well was blogged about a couple of weeks ago by our Blog Consultant, Alister Cameron. (We hired a Blogologist to help us with A.’s website Scrapscene.com that we are trying to develop into an income source.) Quoting from his post, he says,

“Dear fellow blogger, I beg you not to underestimate the importance of good written expression. I personally do not think good blog writing is the same as good journalistic writing (although granted, it can vary from blog to blog). I rather see skilled blog writing as a kind of middle road between uncomplicated stream-of-consciousness, conversational-style writing on the one hand, and the more evolved, colourful and even poetic style of a magazine feature writer, on the other.”

Please take the time to read the complete article and visit his site. He is a great guy and has been a real asset to A. and I as we develop our on-line presence.

We all enjoy a good story, but a good story that is well written – that is a cake with icing. (Mmmmm, cake.) The web and blogging in particular have in many ways done a disservice to the art of writing well. The ease of being able to just fire out any sort of sniveling drivel and seeing it in black and white on the web has promoted a culture of lazy writers. Of course, kids today don’t learn how to write right, not like when we was in school. (Every generation seems to say this – logically speaking, eventually humanity will lose the ability to write completely.)

So what does this all mean? I guess I am saying I want my cake with icing, thank you very much. If you take the time to write something, you might as well write it well.

Ok – back to living on a boat…