I wrote recently about how I’d prefer to express my views about a given subject by writing about them. It’s easier for me to write about something in a blog post and then point people to that blog post than to discuss the subject in conversation. If the subject is something in which I’m interested, I can be effusive, talking too much and not being appropriately succinct. If it’s something that aggravates me, I can get too angry.
Becca Rothfeld goes a bit farther with this mentality.
Who in their right mind would want to talk, much less listen, to a person who has contrived to spend as much of her life as possible crouched over her computer in isolation, deleting unsatisfactory variants of a single sentence for upwards of an hour? Nothing in my daily practice has prepared me for the gauntlet of a tête-à-tête. Writing is an antidote to the immediacy and inexactitude of speech, and I resent any attempt to drag me back into the sludge of dialogue.
I’m not totally averse to wading into “the sludge of dialog,” but many times I’d rather go through the calculations necessary to write out my thoughts.
