But having spend 2 decades reading Civil War primary sources like letters and speeches and such it does jar me a little how far we have fallen as a nation in terms of oratory skills.
It is interesting to read letters from common CW soldiers of 150 years ago. Their writing skill level was beyond the norm of today. Perhaps it’s a function of the technology. When one hand-writes a letter with a quill pen it takes time. You have time to organize your thoughts as you write. Today one blasts a Tweet out to the world in 140 characters in a matter of seconds. It is a totally different animal substituting brevity for speed.
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It is interesting to read letters from common CW soldiers of 150 years ago. Their writing skill level was beyond the norm of today. Perhaps it’s a function of the technology. When one hand-writes a letter with a quill pen it takes time. You have time to organize your thoughts as you write. Today one blasts a Tweet out to the world in 140 characters in a matter of seconds. It is a totally different animal substituting brevity for speed.
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Yes, even if the words were misspelled they looked like they strove to make their words elegant. I also have some text books from schools from the Civil War era and these people were reading Greek and Latin as well as Shakespeare so they were not country bumpkins in the south or north.
Also, I got into some heated forum conversations a while back (not here but on HBO's forum) about the TV show Deadwood. I stated we don't know if how people wrote letters was how they talked in every day language. Deadwood had the actors mouth the words they would have written and I was of the opinion in real life they would have used less purple prose to speak. Again off on a tangent.
I have repeatedly been disparaged on youtube or yahoo, for posts that should take a 5th grader about 20 seconds to read, as being to long.
I have repeatedly been told to make a point in just a few words.
We have a society that has the mental capacity of a tweet. Sound bites over 5 seconds are onerous.
You can't reason in 5 seconds, you can only feel.
Today's society equates feeling with thinking.
(This post would have been too long for some on youtube)