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I can’t think of any books more inclined to be smug and scoldy than those about writing. Listening to English professors, linguists, poets, and writer go on about the craft of writing is like watching a cat lick its own butt. You got to admit they know what they're doing, but so what -- and on top of that, it's no fun to watch.
A lot the trouble with advising people about writing seems to stem from the misconception that language and writing are fully analyzable as logical systems. They aren’t. (Even Noam Chomsky admits that now.) It’s a bogus hope that books about writing (grammar books, style books, self-help books, etc.) can tell you how to write in the same way that chemistry books tell you how to make stink bombs or cookbooks help you with white sauces. A book about writing is more like an inspirational pamphlet or a prayer book that offers meticulous instructions on how to fold your hands and genuflect. The rest happens behind the curtain.
I will not begin to tell you how full of baloney I think most school writing textbooks and writing programs are. I admire the very hard job they are trying to do. We all want to help our students. It’s just hard for us to deal with the reality that no one actually knows how good writing comes about. And it is often the case that the best and most magically gifted writers are the worst guides. (When you can fly, it doesn't help those left standing around on the ground, when you tell them to just flap their hands.)
The problem is that if you admit no one has a clue, no one will pay a sou for what you have left to say on the matter. That’s why this site is free.
There are a few books you can buy that really stand out from the others in the genre. On this side of the Atlantic , E.B. White’s slim and simple guide, The Elements of Style, was built off the handout sheets of White’s Cornell English professor, Alfred Strunk, and is hard to beat for its modesty and clarity. But even White, while never smug, gets scoldy. (It helps that White was one the finest essayists writing in the 20th Century.)
As for smug, back on English’s home soil, the Fowler brothers (H.W. and F.G., but, in particular H.W.) own the game. They co-authored a 1906 catalogue of Rights and Wrongs, The King’s English, and then H.W. delivered that great hope and disappoint of all questioning writers, the 1926 Dictionary of Modern English Usage, a pleasingly cubical volume that has subsequently been edited and put into a supposedly more accessible form by Sir Ernest Gowers (Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Revised, 1965). The Fowlers offer opinions, advice, analysis, and a blistering catalogue of the do’s and don’t's of formal English, all couched in entries that read like a private language. Hear these guys at the outset of their 23-page discussion of the use of “shall” and “will” explain how to use the word “would” in its ancient and proper role as the past tense of “will.”
A lot the trouble with advising people about writing seems to stem from the misconception that language and writing are fully analyzable as logical systems. They aren’t. (Even Noam Chomsky admits that now.) It’s a bogus hope that books about writing (grammar books, style books, self-help books, etc.) can tell you how to write in the same way that chemistry books tell you how to make stink bombs or cookbooks help you with white sauces. A book about writing is more like an inspirational pamphlet or a prayer book that offers meticulous instructions on how to fold your hands and genuflect. The rest happens behind the curtain.
I will not begin to tell you how full of baloney I think most school writing textbooks and writing programs are. I admire the very hard job they are trying to do. We all want to help our students. It’s just hard for us to deal with the reality that no one actually knows how good writing comes about. And it is often the case that the best and most magically gifted writers are the worst guides. (When you can fly, it doesn't help those left standing around on the ground, when you tell them to just flap their hands.)
The problem is that if you admit no one has a clue, no one will pay a sou for what you have left to say on the matter. That’s why this site is free.
There are a few books you can buy that really stand out from the others in the genre. On this side of the Atlantic , E.B. White’s slim and simple guide, The Elements of Style, was built off the handout sheets of White’s Cornell English professor, Alfred Strunk, and is hard to beat for its modesty and clarity. But even White, while never smug, gets scoldy. (It helps that White was one the finest essayists writing in the 20th Century.)
As for smug, back on English’s home soil, the Fowler brothers (H.W. and F.G., but, in particular H.W.) own the game. They co-authored a 1906 catalogue of Rights and Wrongs, The King’s English, and then H.W. delivered that great hope and disappoint of all questioning writers, the 1926 Dictionary of Modern English Usage, a pleasingly cubical volume that has subsequently been edited and put into a supposedly more accessible form by Sir Ernest Gowers (Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Revised, 1965). The Fowlers offer opinions, advice, analysis, and a blistering catalogue of the do’s and don’t's of formal English, all couched in entries that read like a private language. Hear these guys at the outset of their 23-page discussion of the use of “shall” and “will” explain how to use the word “would” in its ancient and proper role as the past tense of “will.”
The past tense can here be done all through, both positively and interrogatively. For though we cannot tell other people’s present will, we can often infer their past will from their actions. So (I was asked, but) I would not, and Why would I do it? all through. And similarly in the conditionals, I would not (if I could), &c.
Twenty-two pages later, the brothers end the section on this hopeful note:
We have purposefully refrained until now from invoking the subjunctive, because the word is almost meaningless to Englishmen, the thing having so nearly perished. But on this instance it must be remarked that when conjunctions like lest, which could once or still can take a subjunctive (as lest he die) use a compound form instead, they use the Sh.[Shall] forms for all persons. It is a matter of little importance, since hardly anyone would go wrong in such a sentence.
I particularly like this last paragraph because it models at least three points of usage that might catch a wagged finger (okay, three wagged fingers) in an English class today: "Since," "hardly," and "like lest," not to mention the passive “it must be remarked” and the expletive “it."
Still Fowler (or the Fowlers) is (or are) the best game in town and the closest thing to a Great Book in the genre. I will go to it for, first, entertainment (these boys have a crafty, cranky style that you will find no where else), authoritative prescriptions (most of the time they are thoroughly logical and persuasive), and simple guidance (gotta love the catalog of “word choice" do’s and don’ts on p. 11 of the first edition. )
So to my mind, those 23 pages on the use of shall and will are among the most remarkable of texts. It comforts me to know that somewhere in space and time there are these nervous, nerdy, language-obsessed gentlemen (long gone now from the visible universe) who wrestle at such close quarters with the intricacies of the English language and do it with a sort of brusque, decisive, citizens' duty (what!), call to arms quite distant from the fogged lenses of university grammarians.
But if I had to have a university grammarian, it would be that landlord in the House of Intellect, Jacques Barzun, who floated haughtily between Paris and Texas, perching for 40 years in New York City to record the disintegration of intellect's house at his alma mater, Columbia University. He brought to the conversation his own uncharitable and unforgiving perspective (he wrote a books with title like A Stroll with William James (1983) and The Culture We Deserve: A Critique of Disenlightenment (1989). I like Barzun because you always know where you stand (beneath him, usually) and his sever, and I will say, hide-bound injunctions are clearly stated and offer a sort of backboard off of which to bounce you own habits and approaches to usage. His collection of brief essays on language, A Word of Two Before You Go . . . , will do you no harm and will help you make wise choices.
Twenty-two pages later, the brothers end the section on this hopeful note:
We have purposefully refrained until now from invoking the subjunctive, because the word is almost meaningless to Englishmen, the thing having so nearly perished. But on this instance it must be remarked that when conjunctions like lest, which could once or still can take a subjunctive (as lest he die) use a compound form instead, they use the Sh.[Shall] forms for all persons. It is a matter of little importance, since hardly anyone would go wrong in such a sentence.
I particularly like this last paragraph because it models at least three points of usage that might catch a wagged finger (okay, three wagged fingers) in an English class today: "Since," "hardly," and "like lest," not to mention the passive “it must be remarked” and the expletive “it."
Still Fowler (or the Fowlers) is (or are) the best game in town and the closest thing to a Great Book in the genre. I will go to it for, first, entertainment (these boys have a crafty, cranky style that you will find no where else), authoritative prescriptions (most of the time they are thoroughly logical and persuasive), and simple guidance (gotta love the catalog of “word choice" do’s and don’ts on p. 11 of the first edition. )
So to my mind, those 23 pages on the use of shall and will are among the most remarkable of texts. It comforts me to know that somewhere in space and time there are these nervous, nerdy, language-obsessed gentlemen (long gone now from the visible universe) who wrestle at such close quarters with the intricacies of the English language and do it with a sort of brusque, decisive, citizens' duty (what!), call to arms quite distant from the fogged lenses of university grammarians.
But if I had to have a university grammarian, it would be that landlord in the House of Intellect, Jacques Barzun, who floated haughtily between Paris and Texas, perching for 40 years in New York City to record the disintegration of intellect's house at his alma mater, Columbia University. He brought to the conversation his own uncharitable and unforgiving perspective (he wrote a books with title like A Stroll with William James (1983) and The Culture We Deserve: A Critique of Disenlightenment (1989). I like Barzun because you always know where you stand (beneath him, usually) and his sever, and I will say, hide-bound injunctions are clearly stated and offer a sort of backboard off of which to bounce you own habits and approaches to usage. His collection of brief essays on language, A Word of Two Before You Go . . . , will do you no harm and will help you make wise choices.
George Orwell and John D. MacDonald both have excellent essays on style. Orwell’s “Politics and the English Lauguage” is a rock star of an essay around which English teacher sway with lighted Zippos. We like it because of its dubious claim that clear, honest writing styles will lead to a clear, honest civilization. And also because it pillories the kind of writing typically produced by governments, businesses, universities, and journalists. What's not to like?
MacDonald’s essay, “Creative Trust” is a forgotten gem that appeared as an introduction in the 1982 edition of Getting Published, a handbook for kitchen-table belletrists. (Irrelevant digression: I met Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. at his kitchen table in Barnstable, Mass. in 1969, just before he dropped acid, divorced his wife, grew-out his hair, and moved to New York City never to write a memorable book again.) MacDonald, who died in 1986, wrote a nearly endless series of tough-guy adventure thrillers that jumped off airport book racks like fleas off a sprayed cat. It is probably true that more sentences written by John D. MacDonald have been read by American readers that those of any other writer, ever. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. said of John D. MacDonald, "To diggers a thousand years from now . . . the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen." Listen to MacDonald lay out the terms of what he calls the Creative Trust:
MacDonald’s essay, “Creative Trust” is a forgotten gem that appeared as an introduction in the 1982 edition of Getting Published, a handbook for kitchen-table belletrists. (Irrelevant digression: I met Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. at his kitchen table in Barnstable, Mass. in 1969, just before he dropped acid, divorced his wife, grew-out his hair, and moved to New York City never to write a memorable book again.) MacDonald, who died in 1986, wrote a nearly endless series of tough-guy adventure thrillers that jumped off airport book racks like fleas off a sprayed cat. It is probably true that more sentences written by John D. MacDonald have been read by American readers that those of any other writer, ever. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. said of John D. MacDonald, "To diggers a thousand years from now . . . the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen." Listen to MacDonald lay out the terms of what he calls the Creative Trust:
The writer and the reader are involved in a creative relationship. The writer must provide the material with which the reader will construct bright pictures in his head. The reader will use those materials as a partial guide and will finish the pictures with the stuff from his own life experience.
I do not intend to patronize the reader with this analogy: The writer is like a person trying to entertain a listless child on a rainy afternoon.
You set up a cart table, and you lay out pieces of cardboard, construction paper, scissors, paste, crayons. You draw a rectangle and you construct a very colorful little fowl and stick it in the foreground, and you say, “This is a chicken.” You cut out a red square and put it in the background and say, “This is a barn.” You construct a bright yellow truck and put it in the background on the other side of the frame and say, “This is a speeding truck. Is the chicken going to get out of the way in time? Now you finish the picture.”
If the child has become involved, he will get into the whole cut-and-paste thing, adding trees, a house, a fence, a roof on the barn. He will crayon a road from the truck to the chicken. You didn’t say a word about trees, fences, houses, cows, roofs. The kid puts them in because he knows they are the furniture of farms. He is joining in the creative act, enhancing the tensions of the story by adding his uniquely personal concept of the items you did not mention, but which have to be there.
Or the child could cross the room, turn the dial and see detailed pictures on the television tube. What are the ways you can lose him?
You can lose him by putting in too much of the scene. That turns him into a spectator. “This is a chicken. This is a fence. This is an apple tree. This is a tractor.” He knows those things have to be there. He yawns. And pretty soon, while you are cutting and pasting and explaining, you hear the gunfire of an old western.
You can lose him by putting in too little. “This is a chicken,” you say, and leave him to his own devices. Maybe he will put the chicken in a forest, or in a supermarket. Maybe the child will invent the onrushing truck, or a chicken hawk. Too much choice is as boring as too little. Attention is diffused, undirected.
Along the same lines, here is the Italian storyteller and essayist, Italo Calvino, talking to an audience at the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard: “I would say that the moment an object appears in a narrative, it is charged with a special force and becomes like the pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships.”
A knot in the network of invisible relationships. Imagine that, if you will. Picture a network of invisible relationships. Isn’t that what a piece of writing is? An essay, a poem, a novel, a business letter – a paragraph, a sentence even? All of these offer us a network of thoughts that are related, related merely by being part of the essay or the sentence, but invisible – the ink on the page or pixels on a screen may spell the word elephant or longing but there is neither an elephant nor a longing present. Well, you might say they are sort of present, but they are invisible.
Objects, simply by virtue of their being tangible and visible, sniffable and kickable, when they crop in writing, will mark the closest point you are going to get to reality. Use them whenever you can. They are ground zero in the battle for attention in a world committed to not attenting.
In his poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” (1939), William Butler Yeats famously pokes around for the origins of his “masterful images,” and he remembers that he had found them in his “ pure mind” but then he wonders how they happened to grow there, and asks “out of what began?” His answer is telling (hopeful Nobel laureates take note ): Turns out Yeats thinks his poetry grew out of “A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,/Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,/Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut/Who keeps the till.”
Things and a slut. All right then. Duly noted.
I do not intend to patronize the reader with this analogy: The writer is like a person trying to entertain a listless child on a rainy afternoon.
You set up a cart table, and you lay out pieces of cardboard, construction paper, scissors, paste, crayons. You draw a rectangle and you construct a very colorful little fowl and stick it in the foreground, and you say, “This is a chicken.” You cut out a red square and put it in the background and say, “This is a barn.” You construct a bright yellow truck and put it in the background on the other side of the frame and say, “This is a speeding truck. Is the chicken going to get out of the way in time? Now you finish the picture.”
If the child has become involved, he will get into the whole cut-and-paste thing, adding trees, a house, a fence, a roof on the barn. He will crayon a road from the truck to the chicken. You didn’t say a word about trees, fences, houses, cows, roofs. The kid puts them in because he knows they are the furniture of farms. He is joining in the creative act, enhancing the tensions of the story by adding his uniquely personal concept of the items you did not mention, but which have to be there.
Or the child could cross the room, turn the dial and see detailed pictures on the television tube. What are the ways you can lose him?
You can lose him by putting in too much of the scene. That turns him into a spectator. “This is a chicken. This is a fence. This is an apple tree. This is a tractor.” He knows those things have to be there. He yawns. And pretty soon, while you are cutting and pasting and explaining, you hear the gunfire of an old western.
You can lose him by putting in too little. “This is a chicken,” you say, and leave him to his own devices. Maybe he will put the chicken in a forest, or in a supermarket. Maybe the child will invent the onrushing truck, or a chicken hawk. Too much choice is as boring as too little. Attention is diffused, undirected.
Along the same lines, here is the Italian storyteller and essayist, Italo Calvino, talking to an audience at the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard: “I would say that the moment an object appears in a narrative, it is charged with a special force and becomes like the pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships.”
A knot in the network of invisible relationships. Imagine that, if you will. Picture a network of invisible relationships. Isn’t that what a piece of writing is? An essay, a poem, a novel, a business letter – a paragraph, a sentence even? All of these offer us a network of thoughts that are related, related merely by being part of the essay or the sentence, but invisible – the ink on the page or pixels on a screen may spell the word elephant or longing but there is neither an elephant nor a longing present. Well, you might say they are sort of present, but they are invisible.
Objects, simply by virtue of their being tangible and visible, sniffable and kickable, when they crop in writing, will mark the closest point you are going to get to reality. Use them whenever you can. They are ground zero in the battle for attention in a world committed to not attenting.
In his poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” (1939), William Butler Yeats famously pokes around for the origins of his “masterful images,” and he remembers that he had found them in his “ pure mind” but then he wonders how they happened to grow there, and asks “out of what began?” His answer is telling (hopeful Nobel laureates take note ): Turns out Yeats thinks his poetry grew out of “A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,/Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,/Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut/Who keeps the till.”
Things and a slut. All right then. Duly noted.
And now, lo, a new champion has entered the lists. Wiry fiery Stephen Pinker, MITvard linguist, bestselling author, TED-talker, and Late Night guest has written a book on style (The Sense of Style, Viking, 2014) that comes at the issue of prose style through the lens of formal Chomskian linguistic science. But Pinker can be a stinker (to steal a rhyme from P.G. Wodehouse). In the name of creating an if-they-only-understood-the-science-behind-language sort of argument, he spends way too much time piddling down the collars of well-meaning grammarians and English teachers in an effort to cast himself as the Simon Bolivar of language, riding to the rescue of an oppressed population of English-class campesinos. He even resorts to the worn-out tradition among revisionist grammar mavens of sucker-punching poor old Miss Thistlebottom, the imaginary hissy-fit grammar teacher whom everyone is supposed to detest.
But I hyperbolize. Pinkers final chapter, "Telling Right from Wrong" is a well-constructed item-by-item tour through a large collection of traditional stylistic do's and don'ts that unmasks many of the don'ts for the unnecessary cultural baggage they are. Some examples are:
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
But I hyperbolize. Pinkers final chapter, "Telling Right from Wrong" is a well-constructed item-by-item tour through a large collection of traditional stylistic do's and don'ts that unmasks many of the don'ts for the unnecessary cultural baggage they are. Some examples are:
UNDER CONSTRUCTION