We're messaging our nearest and dearest all day long, tweeting about our lunch, receiving and sending all sorts of emails every work day, or leaving long screeds on social media about both political and personal bullshit.
It's all good and useful and exciting and everything, and it also devalues the fuck out of the skill of actual writing, because everyone thinks they can do it now.
We all think we can string a few words together, and we forget it is a real skill that can be taught, and a skill that can actually be out of reach for many people.
It's not just the basics - not just the fact that writing clear, concise copy is absolutely essential in the modern media world - it's structuring a story, catching the attention of a reader or listener or viewer with something that is properly paced and put together.
And some people never learn. Some journos who have been in the industry for decades still have issues with little things like punctuation, grammar and putting events in the proper sequence, and produce some of the worst copy in the business, saved and cleaned up by dozens of editors over the years, because the most basic writing skills were always missing.
But there is also a feeling that telling stories through the media is not real work, a feeling that is only amplified by the general refusal to pay for news. If nobody is willing to pay for news, how can it be worth anything? The skill means nothing, especially when we can all string those few words together.
There are some media organisations which actually take advantage of this, and offer opportunities for regular folk to get their work in print by only offering little or no money, and promising that the writer will get 'exposure', because why would they have to pay somebody who actually has some writing skills, when everybody has those skills.
Still, you only have to read a few of the emails that come into newsrooms, moaning about the standard of writing and lamenting that they could do a lot better - to see the bullshit exposed for the stinky mess it is, because those emails are almost always terribly written, with gratuitous spelling mistakes and lots of fucked-up punctuation in a message that is just a few lines long (which doesn't leave much hope for anything longer than a spiteful message).
It's not just the news stories that suffer from this – all the creative disciplines suffer from it. Everybody thinks they are a better scriptwriter than the people who do the movies and TV they watch, and artists can spend their entire lives trying to convince the rest of the world, envious that they're not doing 'proper work', that their efforts have worth and value.
Putting words together ain't no thing, but putting them together in a way that makes a point, or makes a reader think about their place in the world - and doing it in a way that is even readable - is a lot fucking harder than it looks.
Everyone thinks they can do it. They can't.
- Ron Troupe
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