The
Classical
Homeschooler
Jennifer Courtney
The Four Components
of Really Good Writing
. . . There are a few
simple skills that we can
recover from previous
generations to train our
children to communicate
complex ideas well to
those around them.
Is our entire civilization in dan- ger because of our impoverished language? Is textspeak a sign that we are losing the ability to construct and communicate complex ideas
through written language? In a philosophy class, I led a group of high school
students to come up with a thorough
definition of man (as in mankind). After
thinking, discussing, reading, wrestling
with ideas, and refining, we came up with
something like this: “Man is a rational
being made up of mind, body, and soul
which uses language to communicate.”
Communicating our ideas through written and spoken language is one of the important differences between man and the
animals. (For fun sometime, ask a committed Darwinist about the evolution of
language.)
If language is a distinctive characteristic of humans, then should we not
be concerned about preserving it? My
teenage son often mocks me because I
continue to use complete sentences, full
spelling, and accurate punctuation in
my overly long text messages. I continue
to claim that effective communication
is a hallmark of civilization and that the
reduction to three-letter mystical abbreviations is a sign of its demise.
Add to these changes the fact that
social media has sharply reduced the
length of our communications, which
makes it impossible to communicate
complex ideas through these media. I
constantly have to revise my Facebook
statuses because I have used too many
characters. This summer, my colleagues
and I were joking about our attempt to
Tweet quotes from David Hicks (author
of Norms & Nobility) and Tracy Lee Sim-
mons (author of Climbing Parnassus).
Like Saint Paul, it takes both of these
authors an entire page to communicate
a single complex thought. There is just
no way to break it up into a sound-byte
for Twitter.
