One of the joys of being a columnist is that you get to have opinions you might not have known you had otherwise. Writing can be an excellent way of working out how you feel about something. “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking,” the late, great Joan Didion wrote in 1976. “What I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”
But there is another aspect to writing, particularly opinion-writing, that is less widely acknowledged: sometimes, you end up saying something that doesn’t manage to reflect quite what you think. Occasionally, the very process of having to string together one sentence after another into something coherent, and at least mildly enjoyable for the reader, ends up twisting what you wanted to say. Sometimes other considerations — brownie-point-seeking, a rapidly approaching deadline, or just plain old cowardliness — can mean the subtleties of your thinking are not captured.
A colleague once said that she knew she had written a good column when she read it back and thought: “Yeah, actually I really do think that.” It’s harder to do than it sounds: writing can help you work out what you think, but it can also push you into a corner that isn’t really your own, or can give the appearance of conviction when in fact you are still uncertain.
I have been mulling all of this over in recent months while reading about some worrying trends in literacy. High school graduates are turning up at Ivy League colleges having never read a book from cover to cover. A YouGov poll last week found two-fifths of Britons had not read a single book, even in the form of an audiobook, over the past year. Literacy is declining fast among both adults and teenagers across the globe, according to an OECD study last year.
Podcasts, meanwhile, are more popular than ever. Almost half of Americans above the age of 12 had listened to a podcast in the past month, according to a report by Edison last year. In the UK, those who listen to podcasts on a weekly basis — about 30 per cent of adults — do so for an average of five hours and 27 minutes.
All this is leading to the concern that we are becoming a “post-literate society”, in which the written word is no longer central to the way in which our thinking, politics and culture are shaped. The argument tends to be laid out as follows: we are becoming less intelligent; clichés and stereotypes are in the ascendant; communication is now more about one-upmanship and “being loud”; and “vibes” are replacing rigorous analysis and making us less able to deal with complexity.
I share many of these worries. I notice that the process of both writing and reading allows me a space for deep thought and reflection that consuming audio and visual media does not. Apps that promise to “summarise” books induce in me a mixture of despair and deep “ick”. As the literary scholar Maryanne Wolf writes in Proust and the Squid, “the secret at the heart of reading [is] the time it frees for the brain to have thoughts deeper than those that came before”. There is no short-cut for this.
Yet I also think that these discussions are missing some of the positives, such as the space for nuance, uncertainty and open-mindedness that the spoken word can allow for. My sister recently highly recommended a podcast from a newspaper that she finds unreadable because of the partisan lens so many of the articles seem to be written through. The hosts, she said, seem less prone to narrow-mindedness and virtue-signalling when they were talking about a subject than when they were writing about it.
In part, this can be explained by space constraints: it is harder to convey nuance in an 800-word column than in a 45-minute podcast. But it’s also true that a writer and a speaker are motivated by different things. A writer typically wants to sound serious, authoritative and self-assured; introducing uncertainty could weaken their argument or make it unclear.
A speaker has other things to consider: they might also want to come across as warm, charming or even attractive. And rather than imagining that their words are being consumed by some kind of abstract “general peer”, they are usually talking to a real person, and therefore have to be more flexible, curious and open to different perspectives.
Marcel Proust himself once wrote that one of the “great and wondrous characteristics of beautiful books” is that “for the author they may be called Conclusions, but for the reader, Provocations”. This offers us a way to think about the opportunity that the rapid growth of the recorded spoken word now provides — not only to give superficially simple answers, but to ask difficult questions of us too.
jemima.kelly@ft.com
