Why we write

(Advance apologizes for cynical somewhat odd blog post)

To be quite honest I have no clue, whatsoever, as to how this question can be answered, and whether or not the question can be answered in a way that is clear and intelligent, and moderately well graded. In the simplest and most current sense everyone that takes part in English 470 writes because they are told to write much like a soldier is told to march, a miner is told to mine, and a trained monkey is told to dance. However, that response is cynical and comes after seeing how much writing I have in store this coming semester. The academic response to the question is that writing allows a person to communicate to his or her fullest capabilities and to share with a broad audience his or her ideas, ideas that would not be able to be shared so broadly in any other way. Of course, the anthropologist among us will talk about defining characteristics of civilization and the Philosophers among us will crone on about how writing proves the existence of the individual or some such nonsense.

Of course, writing is many things to many people, an outlet, therapy, a forum, or just another form of the proverbial soapbox. Personally though I tend to think of writing and why people right as an extension of something I like to call “Bard’s Revenge.” Of course I must first say that bard is capitalized for the sake of title, I in no way mean to imply “Shakespeare’s Revenge.” So, what is “Bard’s Revenge?” The way I see it, the whole idea of writing came about when the bards, minstrels, skalds, and the like decided that they were sick and tired of being forgotten while the people in the poems and songs that they performed were remembered and effectively immortal because of this. This idea cares on today, in almost every form of writing known to man (except for interoffice memos which should be banned), except that now everyone is striving to be remembered from fiction writers to PhD holders who really liked that epiphany he or she had during a lecture. In other words, we write in order to be remembered, from the smallest letter from a son to his mother while he serves his country on foreign soil, to the Men at Work song “Down Under.”

All joking aside, we as humans write not just because of “Bard’s Revenge” or a need to attain immortality, but also as a means to further express ourselves. The written form, in all it’s various states, offers humanity outlets that do not exist in any other forms of expression.