This is the kind of shit I never did before I started writing this blog. I’m eating breakfast and reading this essay in the New York Times and I come across this sentence:
“Society is not simply an aggregate of millions or billions of individual choices but a complex, recursive dynamic in which choices are made within institutions and ideologies that change over time as these choices feed back into the structures that frame what we consider possible.”
And I go back and read it again and think: “I like your logic – and sentence structure!” Even as I think this, I silently laugh – what a ridiculous response! But I’m not thinking it as if I’m grading a paper – I’m thinking it in admiration for it’s beautiful structure and the writers ability to convey a complex thought in a sentence that contains exactly what it needs and nothing more. The writer, Roy Scranton, is a professor of English, but that designation alone certainly doesn’t explain his gorgeous writing. I encourage you to read the whole piece, because there are several other masterful expressions of dark logic.
See, writing makes you a better reader, which in turn makes you a better writer. You start paying attention to the nuances of language and sentence structure in a way you never consciously did before.
If you love language and the process of expressing ideas verbally, it’s an endless well to explore.