The following is a collection of thoughts about what precedes my writing, the words that are chosen to express ideas, and what influence might result from the process. It’s been a busy year with significant news slants to explore, taking sometimes a series of articles to hit the angles that are missed elsewhere but this writing is a rare meta interval I find important. I’ve occasionally critiqued other writers and serial blogs and I’ll do so here as well but the primary focus is on my own process, my own word choices, what I expect out of them, and what I hope a reader will find from investing their precious minutes to reading something I wrote.
I start with the notion of IQ because it factors a lot to a writer choosing his/her audience and how that audience ultimately perceives the ideas presented. Up until recently, I, and I suspect, a lot of others, assumed the vast majority of John Q Public, potential readers, were relatively close in IQ and thus, I could appeal to a wide audience if I just hit a middle road in vocabulary and presentation. I’ve finally had to admit this is not the case based on observations of social media posts and comments. There’s a broad low end that lacks patience for any logic, progression, or persuasion, somewhat like eyeless invertebrates that only need be poked. There’s also a stratospheric class that hardly bothers with anything low end or middle, non-academic, non-technical. Even talking about IQ is too often considered elitist, or ‘ableist’. Donald Trump often resorts to basic insults about IQ and for the longest time I regarded it as a ham-fisted relic of his age and generation. I’ve gradually changed my opinion though as I’ve watched his masterclass of strategic and tactical operations in action with agenda and adversaries. But even more so, when you learn that below a certain threshold of intelligence, a person is organically incapable of connecting ideas and deeds today, to future consequences, suddenly, the state of the world makes a little more sense, even if it’s politically inconvenient.
I still write for average intelligence but just realize that’s a smaller cohort than I previously thought, however, I do throw a bone to both sides. To the more literate set, I try to play with words, vocabulary, and literary devices occasionally. It’s as much for my own amusement as for anyone else. I also try to be relatable to the infrequent reader. It’s important to understand that anyone can exercise intellectual mobility. I once set out on a quest to improve my own lot. I graduated in the direct center of my high school class. While it’s a superficial measure, half were smarter than me and half were something less. Even though I was exceptionally well read throughout my entire youth, I was put into a vocational track and that’s how I conducted my young adult years into my thirties. At a singular moment, I made a decision to expand my mind and self-educate. That served me well for many years until I embarked on a college education I had missed earlier, late in my career years.
Now that we’ve dived into an era saturated with AI, it’s critical to mention I’ve never used an AI product to write a single word of the articles you’re reading. I view it as a catastrophic farming out of one’s mind and that it will quickly make both writers and readers imbecilic within a generation. That’s just my opinion but with much ongoing validation hitting my newsfeed regularly. The result is that my writings are admittedly riddled with minor imperfections, inefficiencies, grammatical, and structural problems that surely must irk the professional writing class. I fix what I find but otherwise, proudly bear what I miss or have not time to fix as a badge of authenticity of being human, a major theme underlying my work.
Just as fewer and fewer people are willing or able to write without substantial AI assistance, far fewer people have to patience to read anything longer than a caption, ergo, the boom in video content, TicToc, etc. All the biggest names in conservative media are now almost solely video. Writing is thinking and we wonder why people are getting more stupid year after year. When there is no more writing, the development of native intellect will cease. First, they came for cursive and now it is virtually gone. Next was pen and paper. It’s been wiped out by the keyboard such that manual writing is painful and poor quality or in many cases, totally absent from personal routines. The desktop keyboard shrunk to a cell phone keyboard and now, even the keyboard is becoming passe. Video is the dominant language, acting out stands in for argument, mobs convey raw force, and everyone across the board is content to just hit the Play button.
My vocabulary is not constrained by a style guide. That might be primarily because NER is non-profit, frankly, even non-income as of the precent iteration. I answer to no one but myself and it’s a labor of pure ideas. I’ll tend to interject two or three non-standard uppity words in any given pieces. These fall well short of academic jargon which I frankly find boorish in the public square. Perhaps more controversial is my street jargon. This is where I can find a listening audience inaccessible to the crowd of ‘professional’ bloggers on the national scene. But the core reason I insert base language (sparingly) is because that’s I how I and almost everyone else actually talks. For me, it taps into what I feel strongly about. In the course of reviewing my own past years of writing, I began to see that when I felt strongly enough about a topic to cuss about it, I tended to express myself clearer and stronger on the core argument. So I lean in.
Leave it to other writers in the blogosphere to follow rules and color in the lines. I have my own priorities of which this article is an update and a part. While there are certainly a few champions such as Victor Davis Hanson., I endeavor to avoid a great deal of the sloppiness in conservative blogging. Never stating a thesis or a conclusion or never remotely matching a title to the text of a blog is a rampant flaw, far worse than missing a subject and verb agreement. Being so busy stating citations that no coherent argument can be made is problematic. Some writings are so short the message never gets off the ground and some so long they will never be read except by someone laid off or retired. We can all do better but please let us fix the most obvious problems quickly.
My hypothetical audience is engaged and informed or wants to be more so. Like me, they consume a lot of news and are familiar with a range of public figures and writers talking about that news. They are either conservative or are interested in mingling with or even challenging conservatives. Some are college educated, some, self-educated. You cannot and won’t appeal to everyone. You, I, will naturally appeal to any that share common beliefs. I’m not out to win converts. I would be more than content just to bring purpose to the indifferent.
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