On (teaching) writing well.
Not long ago, parenth_blog blogged about a talk given by William Zinsser called "Writing English as a Second Language." This post started out as a comment on that blog post, but it is mostly about the article. It got a little overheated, and a little overlong, and isn't about what Sam said, so I decided to post it here, instead. It turns out that teaching writing is a subject about which I have a rather elaborate opinion.
I disagree with Zinsser. A lot. Wholeheartedly. Completely and truly. His advice is just reheated Strunk and White. Writing would be better at all levels if teachers of writing would finally get over Strunk and White and their useless obsessions and their baseless prescriptions, and instead paid attention to, and taught, practical, concrete, and actually useful tools for writing well.
Zinsser's thesis? Latinate words are bad, Anglo-Saxon ones good. Why? Basically, because Anglo-Saxon is good and concrete and Latin is bad and abstract. The same goes for passive voice because, well, because it uses more words. His slogan: Clarity! Simplicity! Brevity! Humanity!
Clarity is a good goal, but is precisely a matter of technical skill. Simplicity is a situational good. Brevity is something Zinsser himself seems to struggle with (and is also a situational good). And humanity? "Humanity" is not something I would know how to begin to go about defining, let alone teaching my students, and asking them to exemplify. (Zinsser's explication of what he means by humanity: "Be yourself. Never try in your writing to be someone you’re not." I think that's rather, "don't be pretentious." Which is indeed good advice; but it is not equivalent to being human, or humanist, or humanity-loving, or whatever "humanity" might mean here.)
But even from a technical standpoint, his examples are misleading. He takes his example of a really, really good sentence from Thoreau: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of nature, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." First, this is not a good sentence. It closes with a terribly awkward parallelism. The reason it is awkward (at least to my contemporary ear) is that "I" is the subject both of the parallelism and of the subordinate clauses embedded within it. That particular trick is difficult to pull off, and requires being very explicit about the structure of parallel. (Thoreau ought to have written, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of nature, to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not to discover, when I came to die, that I had not lived." This has the advantage of putting "to die" and "not lived" closer together. But even then, the shift in temporal frame can't be fixed with more explicit structure.)
This is one of Zinsser's examples of good, active voice. Which is slightly silly, when you consider that most of the verbs in this sentence aren't conjugated, but are infinitives. Worse, his example of the evils of the passive voice is not (tellingly, I think) something somebody actually wrote, but a bizarro-world passive voice mirror image of Thoreau's original. This bizarro-Thoreau sentence is not awful because it's passive, but because it's awful. "A decision was made to go to the woods because of a desire for a deliberate existence and for exposure to only the essential facts of life, and for possible instruction in its educational elements, and because of a concern that at the time of my death the absence of a meaningful prior experience would be apprehended." Even if this sentence were in the active voice ("I made a decision to go to the woods..."), it would still seriously suck. What he's done is replace infinitive verb constructions with abstract nouns, which is, indeed, bad English (but not bad German!).
In fact, passive voice is just one of Strunk and White's (many, often very silly) red herrings. Far more important to clear and comprehensible writing are (1) consistent subjects or characters, and (2) sentence structure that places noun and conjugated verb as close as possible to one another. Passive voice is an invaluable tool in making sure that the subject of this sentence was the same as the last sentence. It's also important for arranging subject and verb close together.
As for brevity: ZOMG, really? Zinsser seems rather to have a love of overblown parallelism (I must admit that I do, too). Look at how long the sentences he quotes from Lincoln and Thoreau. (And the first sentence of his own example!) And, let's recall, that sentence from Thoreau he just adores doesn't even do parallelism well.
Listen, I'm an academic and he's a journalist; I'm afraid this will sound like just another academic defending complex language over against stupid journalistic convention. But I'm not claiming that journalists have a bad idea of what language is and does, while academics have a better idea. Academics are often really terrible writers! The last thing we need is to spread further that awful academicese that's really just German or French sentences structure masquerading as English. Instead, I'm claiming that properly managing readers' attention involves different things than the old hobbyhorses of Brevity! Clarity! Active verbs! Anglo-Saxon!
Sometimes you need Latinate abstractions to say abstract things. The world is not made up only of people doing things to other people (active verbs! concrete subjects!), but also of abstract things like laws and corporations and norms and feelings and neurotransmitters and gravity. In fact, much of the terrible state of political journalism lies in that it reduces politics to people and what they do to each other, at the cost of covering institutions and laws and policies. Thus politics collapses into horse-race bullpucky. Writing well about abstract things often requires abstract words. Now, Zinsser is right that obfuscation often takes the form of spurious synonymizing. And, if your goal is to obfuscate, such synonymizing will often look like substituting a rare, Latinate word for a more common Anglo-Saxon one. But it simply does not follow that use of Latinate abstraction is therefore, in itself, unclear or obfuscating.
And yes, absolutely: impress upon writers (at all levels! including emeritus professors!) the fact that a sentence is the unit of logical thought. "One sentence, one thought!" makes for a very good slogan. I'll take it. And indeed, long sentences are often bad. But when they are bad, they're bad because they're poorly written, not because they're long. Long sentences just give you more opportunities to run your prose off the rails. (They also demand that your reader pay attention, which, sadly, journalism can't much expect. But that is a different story for another time.) Students should instead learn how to ask what about a sentence makes it so long. Frequently (at least in my experience teaching writing), long sentences most often result from a whole bunch of unnecessary qualification of a subject before the conjugated verb. (NB: This means students need to learn about grammar in order to write well! Oh noes! But writing is a technical craft, after all.) For example, "Zinsser, a journalist who teaches writing at the Columbia School of Journalism, which has a substantial population of foreign-born and ESL students, who need to learn the norms and conventions of good standard English prose, gave a talk which merely rehashed Strunk and White's positively useless Elements of Style." Perhaps, however, this is a pathology particular to a certain sort of university.
This is not to say that Zinsser's project is a bad one; in fact, it's laudable. Learning to write in another language means learning the conventions and norms of good writing in that language, beyond the bare minimum of proper grammar and spelling. But that just means: learning to write well means learning style. And thus teaching students to write well means teaching students style. But "style" here is not something superfluous, tacked on after you've had your thought. Rather, it's a set of norms--which already orient your readers' attention before they even look at your first word--that readers and writers and speakers use to articulate logical thought. (Language itself itself, of course, "merely" conventional.) Learning to write well means learning how to use style to guide your readers' attention through a series of thoughts. Strunk and White knew this (they called their book The Elements of Style, after all), but their idea of style boils down to a collection of persnickety prescriptions that are either underspecified to the point of vacuousness (avoid useless words! --but how do I know which words are useless?) or, when they are specific, are tyrannical and capricious (don't use however when you mean nevertheless! --for the life of me, I can't tell the difference, and the OED agrees with my apparent stupidity).
Platitudes about simplicity and humanity just won't get writers anywhere, and are frequently counterproductive, because they don't explain the whys and wherefores of style--which ultimately comes down to understanding how readers read. Complexity, it turns out, is just fine. You just need to do it well. Teaching writing means teaching students how to do complexity (and clarity, &c.) well. Which means, no surprise, mastery of style. Teaching style entails giving students the tools to understand how written language works, and why it has the effects it does. And that, it turns out, is actually a matter of really concrete technique. (These technical tools and concepts will be familiar to anybody who's encountered the Little Red Schoolhouse methods of writing, and teaching writing. Don't worry, I'm not going to elaborate. But they are, in addition to the basics of English grammar: character, theme, warrant, problem.)
For what it's worth, the best essay I've read on the art of teaching writing, and on the stakes of style (which is thankfully devoid of technical anything), is David Foster Wallace's "Authority and American Usage," in Consider the Lobster. Which you should read anyway. Because how could you not love a book that put deeply, deeply human essays about pornography and lobsters next to one another? And so, after all this, humanity, I suppose, is rather like pornography: I don't know how to define it, but I sure as hell know it when I see it.
I disagree with Zinsser. A lot. Wholeheartedly. Completely and truly. His advice is just reheated Strunk and White. Writing would be better at all levels if teachers of writing would finally get over Strunk and White and their useless obsessions and their baseless prescriptions, and instead paid attention to, and taught, practical, concrete, and actually useful tools for writing well.
Zinsser's thesis? Latinate words are bad, Anglo-Saxon ones good. Why? Basically, because Anglo-Saxon is good and concrete and Latin is bad and abstract. The same goes for passive voice because, well, because it uses more words. His slogan: Clarity! Simplicity! Brevity! Humanity!
Clarity is a good goal, but is precisely a matter of technical skill. Simplicity is a situational good. Brevity is something Zinsser himself seems to struggle with (and is also a situational good). And humanity? "Humanity" is not something I would know how to begin to go about defining, let alone teaching my students, and asking them to exemplify. (Zinsser's explication of what he means by humanity: "Be yourself. Never try in your writing to be someone you’re not." I think that's rather, "don't be pretentious." Which is indeed good advice; but it is not equivalent to being human, or humanist, or humanity-loving, or whatever "humanity" might mean here.)
But even from a technical standpoint, his examples are misleading. He takes his example of a really, really good sentence from Thoreau: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of nature, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." First, this is not a good sentence. It closes with a terribly awkward parallelism. The reason it is awkward (at least to my contemporary ear) is that "I" is the subject both of the parallelism and of the subordinate clauses embedded within it. That particular trick is difficult to pull off, and requires being very explicit about the structure of parallel. (Thoreau ought to have written, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of nature, to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not to discover, when I came to die, that I had not lived." This has the advantage of putting "to die" and "not lived" closer together. But even then, the shift in temporal frame can't be fixed with more explicit structure.)
This is one of Zinsser's examples of good, active voice. Which is slightly silly, when you consider that most of the verbs in this sentence aren't conjugated, but are infinitives. Worse, his example of the evils of the passive voice is not (tellingly, I think) something somebody actually wrote, but a bizarro-world passive voice mirror image of Thoreau's original. This bizarro-Thoreau sentence is not awful because it's passive, but because it's awful. "A decision was made to go to the woods because of a desire for a deliberate existence and for exposure to only the essential facts of life, and for possible instruction in its educational elements, and because of a concern that at the time of my death the absence of a meaningful prior experience would be apprehended." Even if this sentence were in the active voice ("I made a decision to go to the woods..."), it would still seriously suck. What he's done is replace infinitive verb constructions with abstract nouns, which is, indeed, bad English (but not bad German!).
In fact, passive voice is just one of Strunk and White's (many, often very silly) red herrings. Far more important to clear and comprehensible writing are (1) consistent subjects or characters, and (2) sentence structure that places noun and conjugated verb as close as possible to one another. Passive voice is an invaluable tool in making sure that the subject of this sentence was the same as the last sentence. It's also important for arranging subject and verb close together.
As for brevity: ZOMG, really? Zinsser seems rather to have a love of overblown parallelism (I must admit that I do, too). Look at how long the sentences he quotes from Lincoln and Thoreau. (And the first sentence of his own example!) And, let's recall, that sentence from Thoreau he just adores doesn't even do parallelism well.
Listen, I'm an academic and he's a journalist; I'm afraid this will sound like just another academic defending complex language over against stupid journalistic convention. But I'm not claiming that journalists have a bad idea of what language is and does, while academics have a better idea. Academics are often really terrible writers! The last thing we need is to spread further that awful academicese that's really just German or French sentences structure masquerading as English. Instead, I'm claiming that properly managing readers' attention involves different things than the old hobbyhorses of Brevity! Clarity! Active verbs! Anglo-Saxon!
Sometimes you need Latinate abstractions to say abstract things. The world is not made up only of people doing things to other people (active verbs! concrete subjects!), but also of abstract things like laws and corporations and norms and feelings and neurotransmitters and gravity. In fact, much of the terrible state of political journalism lies in that it reduces politics to people and what they do to each other, at the cost of covering institutions and laws and policies. Thus politics collapses into horse-race bullpucky. Writing well about abstract things often requires abstract words. Now, Zinsser is right that obfuscation often takes the form of spurious synonymizing. And, if your goal is to obfuscate, such synonymizing will often look like substituting a rare, Latinate word for a more common Anglo-Saxon one. But it simply does not follow that use of Latinate abstraction is therefore, in itself, unclear or obfuscating.
And yes, absolutely: impress upon writers (at all levels! including emeritus professors!) the fact that a sentence is the unit of logical thought. "One sentence, one thought!" makes for a very good slogan. I'll take it. And indeed, long sentences are often bad. But when they are bad, they're bad because they're poorly written, not because they're long. Long sentences just give you more opportunities to run your prose off the rails. (They also demand that your reader pay attention, which, sadly, journalism can't much expect. But that is a different story for another time.) Students should instead learn how to ask what about a sentence makes it so long. Frequently (at least in my experience teaching writing), long sentences most often result from a whole bunch of unnecessary qualification of a subject before the conjugated verb. (NB: This means students need to learn about grammar in order to write well! Oh noes! But writing is a technical craft, after all.) For example, "Zinsser, a journalist who teaches writing at the Columbia School of Journalism, which has a substantial population of foreign-born and ESL students, who need to learn the norms and conventions of good standard English prose, gave a talk which merely rehashed Strunk and White's positively useless Elements of Style." Perhaps, however, this is a pathology particular to a certain sort of university.
This is not to say that Zinsser's project is a bad one; in fact, it's laudable. Learning to write in another language means learning the conventions and norms of good writing in that language, beyond the bare minimum of proper grammar and spelling. But that just means: learning to write well means learning style. And thus teaching students to write well means teaching students style. But "style" here is not something superfluous, tacked on after you've had your thought. Rather, it's a set of norms--which already orient your readers' attention before they even look at your first word--that readers and writers and speakers use to articulate logical thought. (Language itself itself, of course, "merely" conventional.) Learning to write well means learning how to use style to guide your readers' attention through a series of thoughts. Strunk and White knew this (they called their book The Elements of Style, after all), but their idea of style boils down to a collection of persnickety prescriptions that are either underspecified to the point of vacuousness (avoid useless words! --but how do I know which words are useless?) or, when they are specific, are tyrannical and capricious (don't use however when you mean nevertheless! --for the life of me, I can't tell the difference, and the OED agrees with my apparent stupidity).
Platitudes about simplicity and humanity just won't get writers anywhere, and are frequently counterproductive, because they don't explain the whys and wherefores of style--which ultimately comes down to understanding how readers read. Complexity, it turns out, is just fine. You just need to do it well. Teaching writing means teaching students how to do complexity (and clarity, &c.) well. Which means, no surprise, mastery of style. Teaching style entails giving students the tools to understand how written language works, and why it has the effects it does. And that, it turns out, is actually a matter of really concrete technique. (These technical tools and concepts will be familiar to anybody who's encountered the Little Red Schoolhouse methods of writing, and teaching writing. Don't worry, I'm not going to elaborate. But they are, in addition to the basics of English grammar: character, theme, warrant, problem.)
For what it's worth, the best essay I've read on the art of teaching writing, and on the stakes of style (which is thankfully devoid of technical anything), is David Foster Wallace's "Authority and American Usage," in Consider the Lobster. Which you should read anyway. Because how could you not love a book that put deeply, deeply human essays about pornography and lobsters next to one another? And so, after all this, humanity, I suppose, is rather like pornography: I don't know how to define it, but I sure as hell know it when I see it.