THE HUFFINGTON POST, NEW ENGLISH AND BROKEN GRAMMAR

Writing has finally become a cinch, duck soup, a breeze, child’s play, a snap… and more, much more.

Do you have the itch to write? Go ahead, plunge right into your computer keyboard and start pounding away without any ado about grammar, lexical proprieties, misspellings, non sequiturs and stuff like that. If you start considering primness in word order and redundancies you will not get anywhere, and besides all that belongs to the straight-laced past. In this day and age –cliché, but who cares- The Chicago Manual of Style, the MLA Style Sheet, Strunk and White are all old hat and in this new order of things everything goes. Let me explain.

Many successful writers have adopted what I have come to call NewWriting, after the Newspeak invented by George Orwell. It is true that many make shy escapades into NewWriting, sprinkling their prose with drops of idiosyncratic rule-breaking pearls, but the other day –I am a lucky dog- I stumbled upon a writer who is spearheading this novel trend in writing. I was enthused and enthralled, thrilled even. Read on.

Let me tell you what NewWriting is all about according to an iconoclastic grammarian and syntactical innovator: Nathan Schneider, who has become my literary hero. He writes for the Huffington Post and by a fluke I ran into his article “Macs No More: After Edward Snowden, Time to Come to the Penguin.” (June 11, 2013) The title itself is a natural. It is revealing, intellectually whetting and has this musicality to it that rapture my neurons no end. No wonder 735 people, so far, have liked the piece which is pure gravitas for the new literati.     

The first gem comes with his disregard for simple grammar, whose aim is to attract the attention of the reader. Probably Mr. Schneider had to battle with the Editors at The Huffington Post in order to keep this rare grammatical find: “The idea is to turn the computer from a general-purpose anything-machine into a ad-distributing appliance.” This “a ad” is such a wonderful discovery, such a rule-breaking find that I must tip my hat to him, in awe. It is eye-catching if nothing else.

He loves slangy and colloquial crutches and has introduced them in his article: “The time for liberation has kind of come.” He writes “kind of” in order to suggest that we are actually hearing him speak to us, whispering to us in our right ear. We feel close to him. What an innovation! 

The nuances he introduces in his syntax are jaw-dropping: “The devil some of us have most sold our souls to isn't Apple or Google or Amazon but Adobe.” It makes us stop to think and reread the sentence in order to get the full aroma, as if it were good California wine. Rarely will we find such challenging syntax in our daily readings.    

Hyperbole is an essential part of NewWriting, as Mr. Schneider shows us: “…over which can more quickly totalitarianize the computer universe in which way too many of us live for too much of our lives.”  “More quickly” is quicker than just “quickly”. “way too many of us” is always better than a simple “many,” which is a lot.  “Too much of our lives” must be 23 hours a day, every day, I guess. Another example: “When the thing crashes, as it might somewhat frequently, it's less aggravating.” I wonder what that “somewhat frequently” means. Perhaps every thirty minutes. The “aggravating” bit is a condescending wink to us, the ignorant hoi polloi, the ragtag and bobtail.

Ambiguity is another basic element of NewWriting. For example: “The reason Apple stuff is so stylish is so we don't have to be.” To be what? Stylish? What stuff is he referring to? This introduces an element of mystery.

Mr. Schneider is a clever cookie and writes “… are getting a lot more steady and accessible” because if he uses “steadier” rather than “more steady” the “a lot more” would sound clumsy. He thinks of everything. He is shrewd as the devil.

Neologisms are not shunned, of course. Take the adjective totalitarian which NewWriting has no qualms about turning into a verb: to totalitarianize as in “…over which can more quickly totalitarianize the computer universe.”   

I am sold on this NewWriting fad because it avoids proofreading, dictionary checking, adequate sentence structure, and it is a time-saving stylistic ploy that will fast set a writing example for future generations. It will go viral.

And Mr. Schneider wisely tells us in his witty article: “When there's an error, the community (eventually) corrects it.” So, why bother doing the correcting ourselves? Let the community correct our mistakes.

I propose a toast to the Editorship of The Huffington Post for venting and backing Mr. Schneider’s groundbreaking ideas on NewWriting. Here is to them!