I believe that the act of writing is changing. We have a radically new tool, no make that plural, we have radically new tools, and we think through them differently. Does anyone think we would write the same way with a quill pen as with a ballpoint pen? Does writing with a pencil change the way we write from how we would write with a fountain pen? And the big question, does writing with a word processer in an online environment change how we write?
The second question is, do we humans write the same way at different points in history? Do I write like Aphra Behn? or George Elliott? or Emily Bronte? or Virginia Woolf? or Margaret Lawrence? or Margaret Atwood? Or even in a similar style? Of course not. And are patterns in writing changing? I've read that articles in scholarly journals written in the 1930s were much denser and more formal than modern articles. And magazines are very different too. Do we even think about writing the same way as writers did then?
Now that we can write and "publish" for the world to read with no publishing "gatekeepers, now that we can write knowing our spelling mistakes will be automatically pointed out to us, and a correct possible replacement offered to us, now that we can write, and change what we've written immediately with no traces of the previous wording left, now that we live in a world with informal writing, email and messaging, for example, as well as formal business reports, do we all need to know formal stylized rhetoric of the 1960s?
