Pam, before the modern media emerged in the last fifty years or so, the written word was informer, inspirer, and entertainer. Before great orators spoke, they wrote. Before actors spoke their lines, they learned what the author had written. Before neighbors discussed the events of the day, they read newspapers and magazines. To rise above the mundane, the great writers honed their craft, learning to draw their audience into the worlds they created with their pens, and later, typewriters.

I have written with a pen, then a typewriter, and now a computer. Each medium is faster than the last. One must think faster, or write with less flourish, or feel left behind. The best writers today have mastered this requirement for speed, and have found new phrases and shorter brush strokes, to mix metaphors. Some of them have chosen instead to ignore new methods, and still use yellow legal pads and pens, in order to maintain their own pace. I certainly don't consider myself a great writer by any measure, but I wrote college papers by hand, having composed them in my mind beforehand. At that speed, I could edit my thoughts and make changes I would have ignored if typing them.

People in the past prided themselves in the skill and art they could bring to their discourse with their peers. To that end, they studied grammar and phraseology, and read great writing, in order to improve their expression. They wrote letters to one another, with the idea they might have some permanency. Today people hardly talk at all, in any formal sense. They almost certainly do not write letters on paper. They text, in a form of shorthand. They e-mail, hardly thinking that what they write will float on the waves of the Internet for ages. They chatter on cell phones, never looking anyone in the eye. Advertising copywriters jam hyperbole into ten, twenty, thirty, or sixty second TV and radio commercials, sometimes creating new ways of spelling which ignore established rules.

Writing just ain't what it used to be, ya know. (I Hate that phrase!) Stan