This isn’t Evil.

And no honest craftsman should ever be shy about making sure they get paid.

Mr. Gilliard is asking for contributions.

And there are umpteen perfectly good reasons to do it that I won’t go into, but I would like to share on one, particular rationale for handing over to him -- and those like him – a little of that Liberal Gelt (pun intended) if you can…

…and at no additional charge to you the public, my argument for supporting your Local Lefty Bloggers has been artfully cloisonnéd into some shiny, new content by local artisans.

Who loves ya, Baby!

This via the Associated Press

Report: State employees' lack of writing skills cost nearly $250M

States spend nearly a quarter of a billion dollars a year on remedial writing instruction for their employees, according to a new report that says the indirect costs of sloppy writing probably hurt taxpayers even more.

The National Commission on Writing, in a report to be released Tuesday, says that good writing skills are at least as important in the public sector as in private industry. Poor writing not only befuddles citizens but also slows down the government as bureaucrats struggle with unclear instructions or have to redo poorly written work.

"It's impossible to calculate the ultimate cost of lost productivity because people have to read things two and three times," said Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, vice chairman of the National
...

While two-thirds of companies surveyed in the 2004 report said writing was an important responsibility for workers, 100% of the 49 states responding to the anonymous survey said it was. More than 75% said they take writing skills into account when hiring.
…
"You have to be able to write, convert an idea and turn it into words," said Bob Kerrey, the former U.S. senator and governor from Nebraska, who is chairman of the commission.

In public office, "I read things that were absolutely incomprehensible," Kerrey said. He shudders to think how Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, published 229 years ago Monday, would have read in standard, government-worker bureaucrat-speak.

"It would be 10 times as long, one-tenth as comprehensive, and would have lacked all inspiration," Kerrey said.
…

I don’t write for a living (exactly) partially because, as Harlan Ellison famously said, “The Muse is a Tough Buck,” but I do quite a bit of it for a variety of reasons and like anyone that can click two words together and make a little spark, a lot of the writing tasks on the job(s) wind their way downriver to my workbench.

(Driftglass Safety Tip: Beware the “And other duties as assigned” clause, kids. It can put your eye out.)

Like the ‘umble, elfin cobbler in some bad, German fairy tale, crappy writing shows up like battered shoes on my doorstep with little, Post-Its asking for resoling. The notes usually have the word “urgent” on them somewhere, often with festive underlines.

It’s fuzzy writing. Or run-on writing, which I myself certainly do a lot of, but I’m usually doing it for a purpose, (even if sometimes it’s just my own amusement.) Or “I have no idea what the fuck this is even about” writing. Or it’s festooned with sudden, exciting tense or POV changes.

Sometimes whole paragraphs or pages of slop have been wedged in to show off, or make some obscure point that might be of burning interest to the author, but no one else will ever give a shit about.

In other words, lots and lots of barely literate stuff by people who certainly seem normally intelligent over a cup of coffee.

I also see it from students who are well into their college years already. I don’t mind some bumps and transposed letters in casual writing (petit sins that I commit daily), but in presentations and public documents? Shit, precision and good edited in formal writing is like wearing a suit to court – something for purely pragmatic reasons you just do if you don’t want to be taken for a dumbass yob.

(Although based on my last visit to the HQ of the Justice League, that simple concept, too, has apparently fallen out of favor. I was, in fact, mistaken for a lawyer. And for one, brief, impish moment…)

So the headline “State employees' lack of writing skills…” didn’t exactly bowl me over, but IMHO, what they missed was the single most imperative point of all.

The point at which Mr. Gilliard and others like him enter the story.

Here’s a quote by Edwin Schlossberg that says it far better than I can: “The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.”

Bingo!

That’s the key. That’s the whole fucking ballgame. When Edward R. Murrow said that Winston Churchill was the man who, “… mobilized the English language and sent it into battle,” that wasn’t hyperbole.

Writing damned well matters because it gives people a framework in which to orient themselves. Without that framework, we spin vertiginously 'round and 'round with no local up-or-down references.

With years of work and untold millions spent, that it exactly what our opponents have jack-hammered into place: a box made of simple, easy slogans inside of which their minions move around. The slogans happen to be stupid and offensive and hateful…but they do the job. Take 30 years of falling test scores, add in rising illiteracy and a creepy, fanatical, anti-Science Fundamentalism...and no surprise that President Fredo is what you get.

Over time, any simple, well-build structure can do amazing things.

Something beautiful and true like “Love Thy Neighbor” not only has a helluva shelf-life, but after awhile, people begin “thinking around it”. Using it as something foundational. Something solid that they can stand on, push off of, and that’s what makes it powerful.

The inverse is lethally true as well.

In Orwell's “1984” the way to eliminate dangerous ideas was to render them literally “unthinkful” (OK, I don’t remember if that was an actual term coined in the book, but if it wasn’t, it shoulda been.) To so exile them from the tongues of men that even conceptualizing them becomes impossible, because there is no longer any language with which to formulate them.

Ours is a battle of ideation.

We want people to think ever more broadly and freely, and our opponents want thought ever more constricted, spun and controlled.

It is, IMHO, the deepest of ironies and tragedies that the dead zombie thing that has hijacked the The Party of Lincoln has as it’s ideal of the perfect State something very close to North Korea: a cult-of-personality built around a patently foolish and dim-witted Leader, complete with a fake history and imaginary enemies (that’d be us) who plot night and day to destroy the nation…all smothered 24/7 in shrieking State Controlled Media (Fox/CNN/Rush/Hannity/Coulter) lies and propaganda.

Our guys?

Our ideal by-and-large is…America.

We just want our damned country back, warts and all.

She still needs a lot of work, but nothing we can’t fix, and it is the quality and focus and purposefulness of writing like Mr. Gilliard’s that helps reshape the battlefield. Helps us keep our firm footing in the fight to take our nation back from the thugs and plutocrats and Christopaths that hold her hostage.

Or, as J. Michael Straczynski said, “The quality of our thoughts is bordered on all sides by our facility with language.”

To which I can only add, Fuckin’-A.