The idea of knowing the rules first in order to break them later is perhaps the stupidest idea about writing ever promulgated. And I don't mean stupid in the positive sense of the word. I mean stupid as in asinine. The problem comes when the rules you are supposed to know before breaking are not really rules at all, but prescriptivist poppycock, zombie rules, and usage-Fascist shibboleths like the use of hopefully.
Take the rule against beginning a sentence with the word and. Good writers use and and but at the beginning of sentences all the time. I was just reading Gary Wills in the New York Review of Books and he did this several times. Wills is an excellent stylist. The idea that we should first teach writing students not to do this, and then later let them in on the secret that many good writers do this all the time, makes absolutely no sense. It isn't a "rule" in the first place, stupid.
Monday, June 7, 2010
Sunday, June 6, 2010
The Base Style
You should get to be a good enough writer so that you can write quickly and well for routine tasks. Your worst writing, in other words, should be good enough for you to get by. I think of this as my blog style: good enough not to be embarrassed by on the blog, but lacking the refinement that would come through serious revision and editing. Writing on blogs since 2002 has given me a certain facility for this kind of writing.
A review of an article that only the editor and the author will see does not have to be as refined as a tenure letter perused by many committees. The tenure letter can still use boiler- plate phrasing like "serious contribution to the field" as long as it is clear, forceful, and concise. The blog post can be more casual and might even include jocular tmesis like "a whole nother thing." I personally would not use "thusly" ever, even in the most casual blogging or emailing. When I see this word in a dissertation, I go crazy. "Thusly" is not an acceptable word in academic writing.
The base style is your best, ordinary writing with nothing fancy added; a style easily improved upon with minimal revision, but still adequate for basic communication.
A review of an article that only the editor and the author will see does not have to be as refined as a tenure letter perused by many committees. The tenure letter can still use boiler- plate phrasing like "serious contribution to the field" as long as it is clear, forceful, and concise. The blog post can be more casual and might even include jocular tmesis like "a whole nother thing." I personally would not use "thusly" ever, even in the most casual blogging or emailing. When I see this word in a dissertation, I go crazy. "Thusly" is not an acceptable word in academic writing.
The base style is your best, ordinary writing with nothing fancy added; a style easily improved upon with minimal revision, but still adequate for basic communication.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Instrument
Think of Ella Fitzgerald's voice. It is distinctive--you recognize it when you hear it--but not eccentric or excessively mannered. It is capable of many different special effects, growling or scatting, but at its core it is relatively pure and "straight," at least whenever she wants it to be. She has a wide range, but she also knew where the sweetest part of her register was and how to exploit that.
I love Sarah and Billie too, but they don't have that quality of neutrality or purity.
Now think of your "instrument," your writing voice. It can be distinctively yours without being at the extreme fringe. There's plenty of room for personality even in a seemingly neutral style. You don't have the exaggerate your differences from other writers in order to be original.
Mannerisms that are shared mannerisms, those that every singer uses, are even worse, because they sound at once mannered and non-individualistic. Like the old joke: "How many jazz singers does it take to sing 'Summertime'?" --"All of them." One example might be the parenthesis in the title, like "(Un)queering the Renaissance...." or "(De)Constructing (Dis)ease." Very clever, but clever exactly in the same way everyone else is. I'm very allergic to that; you might have your own preferences and (dis)agree with me, but either way it's something to think about.
I love Sarah and Billie too, but they don't have that quality of neutrality or purity.
Now think of your "instrument," your writing voice. It can be distinctively yours without being at the extreme fringe. There's plenty of room for personality even in a seemingly neutral style. You don't have the exaggerate your differences from other writers in order to be original.
Mannerisms that are shared mannerisms, those that every singer uses, are even worse, because they sound at once mannered and non-individualistic. Like the old joke: "How many jazz singers does it take to sing 'Summertime'?" --"All of them." One example might be the parenthesis in the title, like "(Un)queering the Renaissance...." or "(De)Constructing (Dis)ease." Very clever, but clever exactly in the same way everyone else is. I'm very allergic to that; you might have your own preferences and (dis)agree with me, but either way it's something to think about.
Friday, June 4, 2010
Rxdxndxncx
Xmxgxnx thxt wx rxplxcxd xll thx vxwxls xn x pxrxgrxph wxth thx lxttxr x. Cxxld yxx stxll xndxrstxnd xt?
o w cld jst lv t ll th vwls cmpltl! Tht gts lttl hrdr, dsn't t?
o w cld jst lv t ll th vwls cmpltl! Tht gts lttl hrdr, dsn't t?
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Concision
Concision is not brevity. ( A history of the world in 1,000 pages might be very concise.) Concision is the ratio of the number of words to the information conveyed. Consider Allen Ginsberg. You might consider "Howl" to be a very prolix work, but then you would be wrong. Look how these five lines recount five concise narratives:
You couldn't eliminate a single word from "who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York." It even has a passive voice! Eventually, though, Ginsberg's stories become similar to each other, overlapping in thematics so that the reader gets the (false) impression of verbosity. The same happens, however, with the Collected Stories of John Cheever or The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis.
I love really concise writing, because of its memorability and forcefulness. I resent, as a reader, having to plod through many pages to get a tiny bit of new information. With verbosity also comes a lack of clarity, since the information becomes harder to locate and analyze. Nevertheless, I don't advocate a nitpicking elimination of every word that could, conceivably, be eliminated. That is, at best, a heuristic experiment: see how many words in a paragraph you can take away without effecting the meaning. Can you say the same thing in 75% of the words? 50%? 25%?
who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
You couldn't eliminate a single word from "who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York." It even has a passive voice! Eventually, though, Ginsberg's stories become similar to each other, overlapping in thematics so that the reader gets the (false) impression of verbosity. The same happens, however, with the Collected Stories of John Cheever or The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis.
I love really concise writing, because of its memorability and forcefulness. I resent, as a reader, having to plod through many pages to get a tiny bit of new information. With verbosity also comes a lack of clarity, since the information becomes harder to locate and analyze. Nevertheless, I don't advocate a nitpicking elimination of every word that could, conceivably, be eliminated. That is, at best, a heuristic experiment: see how many words in a paragraph you can take away without effecting the meaning. Can you say the same thing in 75% of the words? 50%? 25%?
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Overstatement
Geoffrey Pullum of language log is a master of a rhetorical strategy I will call "overstatement." See for example his post Worthless Grammar Advice from Harvard:
Nothing here is overstated or hyperbolic in the factual sense: Pullum believes all this quite literally. What is overstated is in the provacativeness of the tone: unpleasantly dogmatic, insane, disastrous damage, nervous cluelessness. The justification here is that Strunk & White's book is so revered yet so nefarious that only that kind of tone will suffice. I find this technique just as effective as the case of understatement I analyzed in May. You can have a nice effect on your readers either way, by objecting to something outrageous in very measured tones, or by objecting to something seemingly unobjectionable with outrage. Both techniques make the reader aware of the writer's perspective and attitude.
Pullum, by the way, is a wonderfully comic writer, deploying hyperbole, sarcasm, feigned (or real) outrage, and other similar effects with unforgettable aplomb.
Oh, dear. Again and again and again, American professors with absolutely no background in English grammar insist that their 21st-century college students should study this unpleasantly dogmatic little work, written by men born in the 19th century. But the dictats given in The Elements of Style range from the redundant to the insane. Anyone who read the book again and again and again, and took its edicts literally, would do disastrous damage to their writing.
Most of those who dip into it come out with some signs of a nervous cluelessness about grammar: they get edgy around adverbs and prepositions and instances of the verb be, without exactly knowing why they feel like that, or what they should do about it.
Nothing here is overstated or hyperbolic in the factual sense: Pullum believes all this quite literally. What is overstated is in the provacativeness of the tone: unpleasantly dogmatic, insane, disastrous damage, nervous cluelessness. The justification here is that Strunk & White's book is so revered yet so nefarious that only that kind of tone will suffice. I find this technique just as effective as the case of understatement I analyzed in May. You can have a nice effect on your readers either way, by objecting to something outrageous in very measured tones, or by objecting to something seemingly unobjectionable with outrage. Both techniques make the reader aware of the writer's perspective and attitude.
Pullum, by the way, is a wonderfully comic writer, deploying hyperbole, sarcasm, feigned (or real) outrage, and other similar effects with unforgettable aplomb.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Books
As people were asking about the value of my books after my recent apartment fire, I decided that value could be determined 3 ways.
(1) Economic. How much would it cost to replace the book? How much did I pay for it originally? Some were gifts, some would be expensive to replicate in that I would have to order them from Spain.
(2) Sentimental. The book is not only a gift, but bears the signature of the author, or a water-color drawing. Or it's a book I've had many years and one that has formed a part of my identity.
(3) Use value. A book I need right now or in the immediate future to do my research.
Obviously these categories overlap but don't coincide completely. The scholarly library is a main part of one's usable scholarly base: it is amassed over years, at considerable expense, cumulatively speaking. A few hundred dollars here, fifty there, ten or twenty there, over a virtual lifetime. There were books ruined that I've had since high school. And one forms sentimental attachments. I felt sick to my stomach when I saw a copy of some particularly prized volumes covered with ash and soaked in water.
(1) Economic. How much would it cost to replace the book? How much did I pay for it originally? Some were gifts, some would be expensive to replicate in that I would have to order them from Spain.
(2) Sentimental. The book is not only a gift, but bears the signature of the author, or a water-color drawing. Or it's a book I've had many years and one that has formed a part of my identity.
(3) Use value. A book I need right now or in the immediate future to do my research.
Obviously these categories overlap but don't coincide completely. The scholarly library is a main part of one's usable scholarly base: it is amassed over years, at considerable expense, cumulatively speaking. A few hundred dollars here, fifty there, ten or twenty there, over a virtual lifetime. There were books ruined that I've had since high school. And one forms sentimental attachments. I felt sick to my stomach when I saw a copy of some particularly prized volumes covered with ash and soaked in water.
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