Something in that forum yesterday hit me as very odd, and I just filed it away, until this evening it clicked, so I thought I’d share.
The guy from the Trib said a couple of times yesterday morning that one of the difficult parts is getting reporters to write in a blog style, and that sort of point was repeated by the other panelists. He used the phrase “professionally trainer writers” and it baffled me a little. Because I do have training in writing — lo, the English degree, followed by writing groups — but I’ve always found the blog style easy to be in. To be honest, I hadn’t really thought about it as a _style_ as such.
Then tonight on my way home I was writing a letter, an honest-to-god handwritten letter that will be mailed with a stamp, during the writing of which I almost missed my stop. I was walking home from the stop, in the rain, with my notebook clutched to my chest, and it was like a flash of light.
That’s why the blog style is something I feel so naturally that it isn’t even a style. Not only have I been keeping a journal since I was 9, but in high school I was a(n erratic) penpal, and in college I had several friends that I wrote letters to regularly, including one friendship that was truely, and almost purely, an epistolary relationship. I’m accustomed to writing in this way, because that’s how the words flow out of me. It’s not that there’s not art or craft or whatever, but that it’s almost instinctual.