DON MORRILL: Because the world is made of words. Writing is probably the most powerful technology our species has developed, produced. Everything that surrounds us here is made out of words. If it hadn't been for words and writing, we wouldn't have been able to store the accumulated knowledge, to then create new knowledge, and gain more power over nature. We can debate whether the real power of nature, but more power. We would not have the wisdom of the ages. An oral culture works by a kind of constant deletion and distillation.
So our language is our language, language of any kind, words of any kind is are central. The world is made of this. We are worded, shall we say. And it's very important that-- we've all have the experience of-- I think to write and to spend time writing is also to commit yourself to kind of a school for eloquence.
The Greeks, the Athenian Greeks, talked about character, and in a mark of a man's character, a citizen in the Agora, was how he spoke. And delivery was one of the canons of classical rhetoric. So your power was related to how you spoke. You could move people by how you spoke. And that came from practice.
The same is true with writing. Whether you're-- I think you become a better speaker, but you also become a better communicator if you're writing in you're in your work life, let's say. You're going to write that memo or that key report, or you're going to write that love letter or whatever it is, you've got a greater repertoire.
Language becomes a friend to you. Varieties of language and diction and flow, shall we say, become a friend to you. You're not an alien to your tongue, and you're more greatly empowered.
Those who use the language well are always the ones in the room to whom everyone turns when they start to speak or when they write. You do it, you do it, you write better. You say it, have him say it. What he said. That's the power, the super power of language. And refined use, it's more conscious usage of the language. It's extremely important.
And to practice that is a form of civilization. To practice writing is a form of being civilized. It will also make you a better reader. You'll slow down and see how much words do convey. And in the case of a poem, you don't really get an executive summary. The poem is the poem. It's not like here's the compression program or the executive summary or the takeaway of the poem.
So it's empowering. And that's something of a buzzword these days, but that's truly what it is. You're different when you pay attention to language that closely.
I spent a long time writing poems before I ever wrote prose. And I learned a great deal about writing prose from that. If you're writing a 20-line poem and you're got five sentences in it and you revise them many different ways, you suddenly have a very different view about the drama of each sentence, because each sentence is a drama. It has a beginning and it has episodes and has a climax and an end. And I'm not talking about what is said in the sentence. I'm talking about the fact that it unfurls in time.
One of the most important things about writing that it does that no other art form does is that it is words and strings, words and strings. And it unfurls in time. Its linearity is part of its great power. It accumulates in the reader's ear and in the imagination.
And so the unspooling or the unfurling of a sentence, the drama of that unfurling is critical and central to communication, whether it's a sentence that's just two words or one that's 30 words.