I would like to preface this article with the following: I am a member of the Odyssey team at Bloomsburg University. I respect my fellow team members and the content they produce. This is by no means an attack on their work. However, I have had something on my mind for quite a while now, and I feel that I must say my piece…

My name is Grace Schueren, I am an Odyssey writer, and I swear on my own life that I will NEVER write an “open letter” for the internet to read and share. As a writer for Odyssey, which specializes in highly share-able social media content, this may sound like I am digging my own grave. After all, to renounce such a popular clickbait format is to renounce the possibility of gaining more readers. However, I have my reasons.

First and foremost, I find the format to be highly overused. Nowadays, it’s hard to scroll through one’s Facebook or Twitter feed without seeing multiple links with the title “An Open Letter to [insert person/population/place/thing]”. Websites including Her Campus, PuckerMob, and even Odyssey itself, have thousands upon thousands of articles that use the format. When I searched for the phrase “open letter” on Odyssey’s website, hundreds and hundreds of results popped up, including at least ten articles that were just published within the past 24 hours. When so many people are writing in letter format, it gets tiresome to read, especially when writers start to depend on the format every time they publish a piece. I find it far more interesting when these open letters are fewer and farther between, and the formats of writing pieces are varied. It’s always a welcome relief to see a switch-up in style when it comes to student publishing.

My second issue with open-letter-writing comes from a purely grammatical standpoint. I feel that the letter format enables growing writers to get away with writing in second person, which is generally considered to be “lazy writing”. For those who have joined an online publishing community as a stepping stone for a future career as a novelist or journalist (or other communications-based career), falling into a pattern of writing about “you and I” can be a detrimental habit. When authors write novels, they generally stick to first or third person, and when it comes to news-writing, third person is a must (aside from editorials). The use of second person is simply not good practice for those who will need to be able to produce content in another format in the future.

Finally, I do not like the open letter writing style because I believe it to be emotionally-charged clickbait. I believe that the open letter format allows writers to quickly produce more, share-able content, while paying less attention to the quality of their work. The simplicity of the open letter format seems to give writers a way to write a quick letter and slap a couple pictures in between paragraphs, and hope that everyone will agree with their personal thoughts about their mother or sister or college roommates, and then hit the share button. However, that may be part of a bigger problem - sometimes, I even get the feeling that the articles I’m writing for Odyssey are just fluff pieces looking to get clicks. I try to avoid it, but occasionally I do find myself writing a list instead of a longer narrative, simply because I feel that those share-able lists will be more relatable to my Facebook friends, and therefore shared more, earning myself Odyssey incentives. It’s a tough rabbit-hole to get out of, but I am definitely trying to take more time to write articles I care about, without worrying about how many times my pieces are shared. I hope that my fellow Odyssey writers will do the same.