Unbearable
Just as an addendum to my previous post, I feel that it's necessary to rail a little more on my current frustrations with writers and their products. Over the weekend I finished a book entitled Goat by Brad Land. The content of the memoir itself was pretty interesting, if not a totally self reassuring assessment of fraternity life and the degrading nature of hazing. However, my problem with the book was the style. The writing itself moved the plot along at a furious clip, but that was probably due to the fact that it consisted of nothing but sentence fragments, partial quotes, no quotation marks, and, what I can only describe as an utter lack of regard for the English language as a whole. In other words, it was a total affirmation to me that there's little or no regard for writing today.

What this type of writing leads me to believe is that it's now acceptable to write in a style befitting a journaled free-write, when it's much more suited for proper writing style. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the idea of journaling to get ideas for projects. In fact, when writing in this manner it's often encouraged to forget the grammar and punctuation and just focus on getting the ideas down on paper. This is all done under the assumption that the work will be all cleaned up when being presented formally. It's only natural to assume that this will be the case, right? What appears to be happening is that publishers aren't forcing their writers to clean up their work. Also, it appears that editors serve little or no purpose with regards to correcting these types of errors and stylistic nonsense. I understand and appreciate the flow of words on a page and how that style can contribute to the overall effect of the writing and content itself, but I fail to see how this writing should be encouraged.

What I find the most troubling is that this type of memoirish writing is similar in nature to the free-verse poetry that has flooded the market and coffeeshops in recent years. I'm reminded of the criticism that without any sort of understanding of the rules and constraints the writer has little or no business pursuing works that are without any sort of structure. In other words, prove that you can write in a style or within the boundaries of convention, and then you can pursue working without a net.