Writing - Articles Blog Posts...
Owen Jones
I hope that you will find the information helpful, useful and profitable.
More people are writing now than at any time in the history of civilisation. This is mainly down to education and more free time. The generation of the parents of the Baby Boomers was the first generation of mass readers – certainly in the West, and probably globally. Their parents could read, usually, but had no tradition of reading books. Instead, they read mostly newspapers. Their children had a better education, and picked up the reading habit from their parents. They were also encouraged to read books at school. The first generation where this happened.
Their children, the post World War II Baby Boomers, continued the progression and became avid readers. In those days, not so long ago, say, between seventy and thirty years ago, people wrote letters by hand. It was a long, but very pleasant, personal experience. Then the home computer, email, and the Internet began to spread among the masses, and pen and ink gradually became replaced with message boards, posting to forums and email.
Before this point, writing had been a special event for most people... thank you letters, postcards, birthday cards, and the odd personal letter home or to a friend. The home computer made it easy to dash off a quick note to someone. It took far less time to write and deliver, or have delivered by the post office. Suddenly, everyone began writing and posting to family, friends, strangers and even enemies. A barrier had been lifted – barriers of time and formality, perhaps.
A high percentage of those Boomers, compared with other generations, have gone on to write some kind of book, or ebook. So, the Boomers are the first generation of working-class writers, and their parents were the first working-class generation of readers.
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