Ruminations On Making Ink

In the past, writers were hampered by the tools of their trade. When books first made their debut, authors had to grind and mix their own ink. Paper was rare and hard to come by. Old, used parchment was cleaned, and then written upon again. As time went on, books had to be hand written into blank journals, and then painstakingly typeset, to put them into print. After that came the typewriter. It was much faster, but corrections meant many, many re-typed pages. The only way to get a copy was to use carbon paper. Now we work on computers. We can type, edit, move blocks of text, and even speak to our computers in order to produce text. Easier means more people can, and do, write.  

It’s great that writing is now an accessible occupation for more people. But, even though we have better tools today, we can’t forget to do a good job. Writing a novel is not like writing a text message. We must spell properly, and format properly. We must still understand the rules of good writing. 

Because it has become easy to write, we all need to devote extra effort to make what we write extra special.

Laurie