“Oh, you’re an English major? So are you going to teach?”
“Are you working yet?”
“What do you want to do?”
“Do you have a job lined up?”
Well, unless I want to be an editor for a medical journal, which the thought of makes me feel faint, or write for an African-American relationship blog, for which I, unfortunately, do not qualify, I am out of luck. As it turns out, finding a job as an English major is not as easy as everyone said it would be. Desperation sent me clicking on any site that might help me find a writing job. What I came across was somewhat comical.
A man put an advertisement out on the Internet looking for someone to write a poem, which he could then pass off as his own. The plan was to give it to his girlfriend for Valentine’s Day and he was willing to pay fifty dollars. At first, I laughed and then I wondered what kind of man would pay someone else to write his poem. Why not just write it himself? Why even bother? He could have taken that fifty dollars and gone to the nearest jewelry store to purchase this year’s featured deal.
It was then that I realized that this man knew the importance of language. He knew that a poem would mean more than even the most beautiful materialistic piece of jewelry. He also knew that he could not just slap any words down on a page and call it a poem. This man needed a writer. He may be the only non-writer I have come across that views writing as both an art and a career. This man is not the kind of person that looks at a piece of abstract art and says that he could do it himself; he is the kind of person that buys the art because he understands its beauty and the emotion that inspired it.
Yes, anyone can put words down on a page; one can study grammar and style techniques. However, there is a spark in true writers that cannot be taught. Writers view the world in a unique way. We feel things differently and have the ability to translate emotion into language. A random man on the internet understands that but all the people asking me questions and taking an interest in my career do not understand. They do not see the importance or the need for writers. I can hear it in the way they say, “Oh,” when I tell them, “No, I do not want to teach -- I want to write.”
I am not sure when the epidemic began but the number of people who have lost appreciation for writing is steadily rising. It has become so easy to publish anything on social media: sentence fragments, long rants with no punctuation, phrases where half the words have been replaced by emojis. Real writing does still exist and I am sure half the people on social media can write well, but they just do not do it there. However, social media is the place to do it. It is a place to publish anything you want; it is the place to resurrect the art of writing and cure the epidemic.
