To the journalist, writing is a profession. To the student, it's a chore. To the poet, it's an art. To me, it's the equivalent of a bodily function.

For the true lover of writing, the craft is as inevitable as it is precarious. To try to corral with words the flurry of activity that swirls within the skull is to tame a grudge-nursing bull with yarn. To make it meaningful is all the more an accomplishment. Yet for the rare occasion when the writer views his or her work with the satisfaction that it is crisp and yet rich, informative and yet a cakewalk for the eye, the quest continues.

I write because I cannot help it; my brain would swell, bulbous, misshapen, if I tried to muzzle my thoughts within my head. The same is true for most anyone in history who ever took in hand a quill, pen, or keyboard. The thought that that what I write might have some sort of impact on somebody else is tantalazing, a seduction that keeps me tethered to my computer.

Saul Bellows spoke to the inevitability of writing when he said, "A writer is a reader moved to emulation." Hemingway spoke to the madness of the writing process when he said, "We are all apprentices at a craft where no one is master."

(More writing quotes)

One of my favorite humor writers is syndicated columnist James Lileks. Most writers clog up their work with Latinate words, but despite the breadth of his vocabulary, Lileks tends to choose the best one- and two-syllable words available. A few years back, I elbowed my way to the front of his e-mail box and asked him about the effect of the Internet on writing.

Q: Has the emergence of email and the Web revived or destroyed reading and writing? On the one hand people do more writing and read a wider variety of material thanks to the Internet. Yet the result seems to be the "devastation of diction," as one commentator put it, as the cerebral quality of email, chat rooms, and Web sites is comparable to the nutritional quality of McDonald's.

A: Oy: that's a big question, and on Saturday nights I usually avoid such big sprawling metaphysical disquisitions. Short answer: this is the golden age of text. More words fly over the net in the course of a day than were published in the entire 19th century. (Rough guess, unscientific.) The level of disquisition isn't great, but for one glorious moment in human history millions of people are banging out millions of words every day and millions of people are reading them. Most of those words, of course, seem to be an effort to prove correct the million-monkeys-typing-Shakespeare-by-accident theory, but if I can judge from the scrawls on the back of my substantial old postcard collection, people have been committing drivel for a long, long time.

Chat rooms are nothing but bilge pumps. E-mail is as good as the sender. Web pages permit the publication & dissemination of ideas and projects that would have languished unread just 15 years ago. On balance: it's good. Of course, I ate at McDonald's today, so that should tell you something.