Linguistic play as a writing exercise
Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet:
I’ve taken up this sense of linguistic play as a writing exercise, especially when I’ve just read a bunch of academic papers and I’m having trouble shaking my thoughts free of Nominalization Accumulation Enunciation Contamination. Instead, I draft in Peak Internet Style, with no capitalization or punctuation, using acronyms and creative respelling to write my way through the muddle, rather than stopping when I don’t know how to articulate something or trying to sort through form and content at the same time. It’s a lot harder to sound stuffy or pretentious when I’ve only got the tiny box of a chat window to type in and I can’t go back and edit—and it’s less painful to delete the necessary words when I haven’t fussed with them as much. Eventually, I do figure out what I’m trying to say, and at that point it’s straightforward to go back and add capitals and periods and delete things like “ugh idk what i’m doing hereeee.” But it’s easier to formalize the cosmetic elements while retaining an underlying clarity than it is to inject lucidity into a first draft that’s classically formatted but dense and impenetrable.