On Writing

Last time I asked who read paper books anymore. I will follow up with a different question. Do you write now more than you have in the past? Maybe you do without realizing you do. Think of perhaps thousands of text messages you send on your cell phone. Not to mention emails back and forth to colleagues at work or in business relationships. Yet, even beyond these mundane uses, there is a great potential to pen yourself with all the help you get from Large Language Model driven applications like Gemini AI, ChatGPT and a host of spinoffs virtually writing your sentences for you. It is no wonder that the common man and woman is much more lettered these days. As an illustration of this very trend as I write these words, my Word application is using a trained CNN to predict the most common phrases I will write. It is not always right, but it is close. So, a profound irony is growing, we don’t read paper books much (or I should write many don’t read paper books) anymore, but we create virtual materials at a growing pace. The irony comes in what was supposed to cause the decline of reading is not, it’s increasing it, just not in the same substrate, i.e. paper. Moreover, all of us are in some limited fashion, becoming authors to be read. I am thinking mainly of text messaging. You see, in fact, you know that people exchange all manners of personal views via their phones. This makes it a form of authorship.

Way back in 1993, I got my first 386 processor computer. It was state-of-the art in 1993. 250K of RAM and approximately 2 to 3 Mb hard drive. I wrote a lengthy work on Existentialism and printed it. I had no idea how to be published at that time. The World Wide Web was a year away from its inception. What little research I could do at a local library informed me of sending solicitations letters to publishers with a copy of my manuscript. I found a list of potential publishers from a reference guide and sent a copy of the work. Two weeks later I received the original document, and a terse letter with a memo on printed letterhead. It read: Mr. Wais, thank you for your submission for publication of A Short Review of Existentialism. Unfortunately,(censored) Books is a publisher of children’s books for pre-teens ages 5 to 7. I don’t think many 7-year-olds have read about Existentialism (smiles).

This was the kind of error a novice could make trying to enter the publishing industry in the late 20th century. Things have changed for the better now. Not for publishers either. I no longer seek publication of some paperback book or submit an article to a magazine for inclusion in its next edition. I have a website like this one where the world can read what I write.

Next time we look at how virtual writing is changing the language we speak and write indelibly. Too many adverbs?

Robleh Wais — 08/28/2026