Writers, do your words matter?
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Writers, do your words matter?
How many of you writers get so fed up of people not actually reading your words? I’m not talking about your articles getting readers and making money. I’m talking actually reading your words and attaching the meaning to them that you intended.
I don’t know if it is laziness, stupidity, a dumbing down of society in general or what. But lately, actually for a while now, I have noticed that my words are often misinterpreted. When I write a post on social media, for example, I will get loads of comments that have completely missed the point I was making.
I really do not understand this. I am a writer. I write words in a certain order that depict an explicit meaning, that’s what I do. I do this for a living. I write for my job. I know how to construct sentences. I know how to tell a story. I know how to explain things using my words. Far better in writing than orally I might add. So why do people not understand the words I have written?
Have we really become such a lazy society that we no longer take the time to read, properly read, digest, think and analyse? I worry about a society that cannot comprehend a simple 4-line facebook post. Seriously how can you not understand 4 lines?
Then I look at the comments people make, claiming that words only have meaning because of the constraints of society and the meanings that we attach to them. Ummm, well duh, but isn’t that why we have words? We have words, we created language, so that we could communicate with one another because grunting and pointing wasn’t particularly satisfying.
Yet I’m being told that the only reason I interpret something the way I do is because of the thoughts inside my own head. The way I view things means I project my intention, my meaning, my voice onto the words I read. No, no no no no no no no no no no. Words have meanings, that’s why we have them. I am not projecting a meaning onto those words, I am understanding the meaning that those words contain.
We all agree that the thing we sit our butts on to eat our dinner is called a chair, the thing we have our plate on is called a table, because we named those things when they were created. Love is a feeling, because that is what the word means. The sky is the thing above our…
