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Imagine, for a moment, a culture in which everyone wrote well and easily, with the fun of spontaneity and the satisfaction of conscious control. What would that mean in our work, our institutions, and our society? We would write the letters that are so pressing and yet so difficult. We would send our proposals to organizations and administrators. We would make the connections that are so difficult now because we do not trust our capacity to express what we feel and think in a way that will be understood as we mean it. Moreover, by taking responsibility for our words, we would read with more energy. Instead of being a frustrating burden, communication would become an exciting exchange of ideas and feelings. Instead, our writing on the job, in school, and in our professions is characterized by the expectation of not being heard, of not being understood. As people who write, we learn early in school that our ideas, experiences, and feelings will be squeezed through a template of "mechanical errors." We take those red marks in the margins to heart and back down, protesting we have nothing to say or that someone else can say it better. Some people keep diaries, but their discoveries are private, and we all learn much too late in life that "other people felt the same way, too." Our fear of mechanical errors, reenforced by teachers in high school, college, and even graduate school, numbs the passion to write, and diminishes our capacity to understand others. That is a terrible personal loss, and a staggering deficiency for a society. Professions enforce these barriers, requiring that we write in a denatured, impersonal voice, as if our thoughts had been produced by a machine without passion or responsibility. In most organizations, even a "low-profile accountability" is risky from the standpoint of survival. But disguising the decision-making process or obscuring the responsibility for final decisions exerts tremendous pressure against the authenticity of language. The paradoxes revealed in our daily papers continually erode our faith in communication. We reinterpret what we hear instantaneously, translating "We have never . . ." into "We already have . . .", or "We care . . ." into "We haven't the slightest interest. . . ." This resignation to the corruption of language, together with our experience that what we have to say does not matter, isolates us. We can slide by, privately making our peace with day-to-day life. But this will mean that we are oblivious to any common ground. Our public communication, from whatever point of view, seems eerily consistent. Opponents in a public debate will share the same cynicism about the process of communication, and about the tolerance of their audience. Much public writing is barely readable in its dullness, not simply in style but in thought. As the audience, we have no way of demanding more, or of finding out what is true. What if this were not the case? What if people expected that by writing clearly and forcefully, their readers would be eager to learn, or debate with them? We would know more about each other, and face each other with less illusions. We would certainly find that we are more resilient than we have been led to believe. Time after time we find ourselves on the edge of this realization. A reporter asked a white teen-aged girl in Philadelphia why she participated in a riot to run a black couple out of her neighborhood. "I wouldn't want my kids to get to know the blacks," she said. "Why?" the reporter asked. "Because they might get to like them!" It isn't amazing that we accept our muteness and fragility. It's easy to see why we are willing to give up a voice of our own to save ourselves some of the pain of self-knowledge. But despite the conditioning of our schools, professions, and culture, there is a tug of war in each of us between ritualized thinking and genuine communication. We know that insisting on meaning would help us achieve power over our own lives; we know that that desire runs counter to what the culture expects from us. Sometimes this paradox comes crashing in on our numbness. But it is impossible to act on this knowledge in isolation. Why would a society want the act of writing to remain difficult and mysterious? If everyone had a voice, if everyone believed in the value of authentic communication in personal, professional, and political life, we would continually transform our relationships, our institutions, and our vision of society. The more we tried to say, the less we would need to hide, and the less manipulable we would be by those to whom we habitually yield the power of communication. Society tells its educators not to give everyone an equal share, but instead to "weed out the good from the bad." Experts in one field or another, whom we may mistrust but still obey, tell us: "This idea, this person is worthwhile, that one is not." Within such a culture, in which power is a reward for charm or obedience, communicating our own thoughts and feelings has a low priority. We dread the loss of freedom, but we have relinquished our right to communicate freely with each other. The struggle to write well nourishes us, and gives us more power over our lives and our interactions with others. Through it we gather our best energies and make connections with the best energies of others. It is a private accomplishment for independent writers, and contributes to the common effort for change.
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