First Things: Prosing About the Web
By Joseph Bottum
Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Writing on the Web good not is. Too fast, it move. Too quick, it change. And telegraphed its punches are.

Of course, that’s the nature of the beast. Be angry at the sun for setting if these things anger you. Every morning, I read the newspaper editorials linked on Real Clear Politics, the magazine pieces linked on Arts & Letters Daily, and then I start on the blogs—and the blogs and the blogs and the blogs. Some are thoughtful, some are clever, some are informative, and some are wide-ranging. Mostly they serve as filters—as if to say: We too have been browsing around the Web, and we’re better at it than you are, and here are the interesting things we’ve found, with a pithy comment to mark each one.

Fair enough. To ask for extended passages of fine prose in such things is like asking for a complete explanation of Georgetown’s use of the Princeton Offense in the thirty seconds of college-basketball highlights on the evening news. Or an accurate description of the pope’s new apostolic exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis in a daily newspaper.

But sometimes the eye wants a little more—a sweep of prose, a few fun paragraphs in a row, a more-than-pithy passage. Why is it any surprise that the Web doesn’t provide many examples? You’d need to find writers who could do it at thousands of words every week. The shock is that there are any at all. the rest

Interesting blog: Manolo, the great shoe blogger