“When the topic is most serious, understate; when least serious, exaggerate.”

This statement above is Roy Peter Clark’s Tool #21. In his book, Writing Tools, he gives this example from John Hersey’s Hiroshima:

At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl in the next desk.

The last part of this sentence is mundane, downplayed and ordinary, yet the subject is obscenely serious.

Contrast that description with this description of former New York City mayor Ed Koch for the Associated Press:

“He is the freshest thing to blossom in New York since chopped liver, a mixed metaphor of a politician, the antithesis of the packaged leader, irrepressible, candid, impolitic, spontaneous, funny, feisty, independent, uncowed by voter blocs, unsexy, … a man oddly at peace with himself in an unpeaceful place, a mayor who presides over the country’s largest Babel with unseemly joy.”

The nonserious tone brings some freshness to an otherwise stale and dreary topic.

When I taught school — all 7th, 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th grades — teaching my students how to write was always a battle. I’d push, they’d pull. Every once in a while, you’d find a teenage girl or boy who embraced the rules of writing and who wanted to take the time to get it right, rather than just rush through it. What helped me then was an article I’d read about the beginning of the texting era, and how some teachers were disturbed when kids didn’t understand the value in a five-paragraph essay. One teacher, though, adapted to the technology. Don’t be alarmed, teachers! She commented how she taught the traditional way, but because we speak in micro-bytes and social media tools like Twitter were becoming en vogue, she adapted her lessons to include writing in 140 characters or less.

This article about how social media affects the way we write is a good reminder that technology works its way into every aspect of our lives. The impact is great, and much of the time, what separates the successful from the unsuccessful writer is how willing he or she is willing to change and adapt without violating the writing fundamentals. After all, even good Tweets use a verb after a subject.