As we think about the modern American society, we usually
imagine a fast-paced society with little time for entertainment. Where we once sat at the dinner table with a
newspaper and morning coffee, now we spend perhaps five to ten minutes glancing
at a computer or smartphone. Obviously,
these small windows of time no longer allow us to explore page-long articles;
we need short blurbs that provide interest and information in just a few short
paragraphs. Yet, this compression of
space and time comes at a cost. In the
article “Tsunami bike at Harley-Davidson Museum” by Rick Barrett, we can
evaluate the costs and benefits this new style brings to journalism.
First, we
immediately notice the article’s brevity.
On the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel website, Barrett’s entry takes up
roughly a fourth of the page’s length.
Mind you, this is also with extra spacing between the paragraphs to
increase readability, so the actual length is even smaller than what we see. It’s not hard to understand how a reader could
glance through this in five minutes and know what this article is saying. However, brevity comes with a price. By cutting down, Barrett ends up with one
sentence paragraphs: “The container had Japanese writing on it, and the bike's
license plate indicated it was from Japan.”
Where he could have gone into a great depth about the recovery and add
levels of emotion, he leaves the reader with the most basic understanding of
the experience. In fact, the article is
only eleven sentences long, with only two paragraphs being longer than one
sentence. Rather than build a personal
investment with the experience, Barrett chooses to lay it out as a matter of
fact.
Next, we
mark Barrett’s word choice. Rather than
bog the reader down with long, flowered sentences, the writer has chosen to
remain on the layman’s level, so to speak.
In fact, sometimes he intentionally makes redundant statements to
clarify his sentence’s intentions: “the container had Japanese writing on it, and
the bike's license plate indicated it was from Japan.” I use this example again because it
demonstrates the motives behind plain style writing! Barrett could have gone with either idea -the
container or the license plate- and most readers would reach the same
conclusion after some initial thinking.
Instead, he removes all the reader’s hassle with a touch of epistrophe.
Essentially,
the crux plain writing is to establish an idea in a way that is understood
without much (if any) second guessing.
While this desire leads to some habits that make scholars and
professional writers cringe, such as redundancy or simplicity, audiences as a
whole have embraced this style. This is
probably why we see it being used so prevalently in free-form communications like
blogs, newspapers and other multimedia outlets.
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