Life Cycle of Ideas

Ideas never die; they just float around waiting for someone else to snatch them, wrestle them through to reality, and put them to use. This is their life cycle.

Our Grandparents -- or parents depending upon your age -- had a much better grasp of the idea of writing as communication than we do (arguably, and based upon my small student sample). To a large degree, an ability to communicate ideas in well-written and grammatical writing equaled how smart they were perceived to be. So they tried to write well. They put in the time and energy and practice to attain a competency which should embarrass my Freshman by comparison. They understood that thoughts could only be really communicated though language expressed in sentences. And sentences, written down with care and transmitted to someone else, could communicate the idea of the originator to the reader.

We live in a different age. We live with the idea that communication can be effective when one dimensional and uni-alpabetical -- texting, for instance. AYTMTB, you ask. I'm telling you this because so much is lost in the margins, and not just the rest of the letters making up the implied words. The ability to use capitalization and punctuation are purely cosmetic, but worse yet, the nuances are lost, or worse, are left to the reader to imply, interpret, or somehow mind-read.

AYTMTB? Are you being snarky? Are you really expressing puzzlement? Are you somewhere in between snark and curiosity and needing information? How I read your text is mood dependent, frankly.

My grandmother just rolled over in her grave; did you feel it? She believed in the cycle of an idea; she would have it, express it in words held in complete and well chosen sentences via language: spoken or written, and the recipient of her missive would "get" what she had said because she took the time to form the letters into words into sentences into paragraphs which were not random, but chosen to communicate her idea.

And I am really not a Luddite. I am a thoroughly 21st century type gal. I can blog and tweet and microblog and facebook and run a website as well as the next gal, but I also teach communication, in the oldest and most detailed way -- I teach writing.

And much of what I teach stems from ideas expressed in texts which in our minds are ancient; you know, more than 30 seconds ago.

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