August 8, 2017 – My friend Lori asked my opinion on a Time magazine online article with the above title posted on Facebook. She knows I minored in Linguistics in college and enjoy life as an English grammar freak. Caveat #1: that doesn’t mean I’m a very good writer! Apologies immediately and a plea for lenience. But since I have plenty of opinions to share, here goes, anyway.
For me, there’s writing and then there’s writing. When writing reports for work we tried for pithy, to-the-point, informative, decision-enabling writing. Foremost in mind: what did the recipient need to know? Alternatively, for entertainment, when we compare our favorite romance novelists with a few other best sellers like Cormac McCarthy, Peter Heller, and Pat Conroy – I consider the former efficient storytellers but the latter group to paint word pictures that I call “beautiful sentences.” To the point that, while sitting on the beach, I will read those beautiful sentences aloud, totally out of context, to my very tolerant spouse – because those sentences are so pleasing. I want to chew on them. I want to see and hear them. In sum, I categorize writing into three groups: as report writing, as efficient popular storytelling, and as beautiful sentences in storytelling. Lori asked for my take on Pinker’s rules:
#1 – Be Visual and Conversational. We learned back in grade school to use our adjectives to help readers “see” – “It was a dark and stormy night” and all. The sentences I call beautiful don’t have long lists of adjectives to do the describing but include optimal word choice to paint the sentence-pictures in thoughtful, economical ways. With online, at-your-fingertips thesauri we should all be choosing exactly the right word every time!
Rule #2 – The Curse of Knowledge. As for making people feel dumb on purpose: if you know me, you know I like collecting new words. I used to have my Word of the Week on my office door in a prior life. Most of those “new to me” words came from WPost. I don’t feel dumb reading a movie review by Ann Hornaday and learning “mendicant,” “synecdoche”, or “solipsism” – she’s the pro, she should occasionally use words I don’t know. But I, personally, try to write like I think and talk. Some folks in the past have told me they could hear my voice as they read my writing! Is that maybe a little too conversational? There are also some subjects that don’t take simplification very well. Thankfully I don’t have to know about nuclear physics or the weaknesses in the latest health care law but I do need to know about how oxidizing and reducing environments in a firing ceramics kiln affect the results! So how does the writer know to what level they need to dumb down? Perhaps we should all endeavor to know our audiences better? All I know is that the instructions for putting together those lovely pieces of furniture we get from Ikea and Mayfair need to be more clearly written!!!
And now #3, Don’t Bury the Lead (or the Lede, as it should be spelled!). Writing can be all about keeping the reader reading; especially if we’re journalists or opinionated cusses such as myself. And if it’s work product, if the written analytical report for the big boss took three days to write, you’d probably feel better knowing she read all twelve pages, not just the first one, no matter how unlikely that might be. But, wait, didn’t we learn that we could get the gist of a story by just reading the first sentence of each paragraph? Where did that idea go? And there are some writers (I remember editing examples of reports written by coworkers) who naturally wanted to give background information first, but then ended up burying their conclusions two-thirds of the way through the document. To overcome that we moved to a BLUF model: Bottom Line Up Front. That way our higher-ranking decision-makers could get the analysis condensed in the first few sentences (like the abstract in a scientific journal) and read the background if they wanted to in later pages.
Rule #4 – Playing by the Rules. If you know me, you know I love me some “who/whom” and “if I were” but Pinker’s right, we don’t have L’Academie Francaise for English. The language is going to change, no matter what we do or say. I do like his point “you have to know the rules to break them” especially if breaking them might lead to reader confusion. Avoid confusion! In spoken word, I think my friends and acquaintances who say “ax a question” can easily say “ask” if they need to (perhaps talking to the Queen?). But “ax” for “ask” doesn’t lead to confusion – you still understand the speaker. This makes me think of other fine people, one of whom I might be married to, who don’t capitalize or punctuate regularly while texting – which can cause significant confusion. That’s why we have capitals and punctuation in the first place. Combine those two losses with voice recognition software that switches “are” for “our” and now I have no idea what you’re trying to text me! I must also say, regarding knowing the rules, I’ve (consciously?) broken several rules in this bit of writing: incomplete sentences, comma splices, the miscellaneous hyphen as super comma, run-on sentences and so on.
Which leads us to #5 – Read a lot. He says, “Many great writers have never read a book about writing” – well, for sure – but I think of a very laidback friend with an MA in English Lit (which he does not use in his personnel work in the defense department) but could expound at great length about the different paths the story line of “Lost” was going to take because there are only so many narrative forms. He could predict which characters were going to have to suffer, who might die, and how the series writers could finish off the entire series. I, not as well read, had no clue and just dopily watched the show, hoping for the best for the good guys – and the worst for the bad guys!!! This little entry notwithstanding, even with his MA, I think that I’m a better writer than he is. And, I must add, some of the smartest people I know didn’t get near college or university but are voracious readers. I wonder what their writing is like?
Last rule, #6, Revising. Holy cow, how important is reading something over before hitting the send key? What has email taught us? Reading your emails before hitting “send” is vital to survival! Also, it boggles my mind when I’m reading one of the aforementioned trashy romance novels and find a typo like their/there. I assume many, many editors saw those words after the author wrote, read, rewrote and reread those very same words – and their family members, too. How can a simple misspelling make it through all that scrutiny? I (almost?) always reread my emails multiple times trying to ensure they make some sense. But as an old fogey I disagree with Pinker about twitter improving our writing today – I’m afraid that twitter might just be a big waste of time and really can’t improve anything but our own self-absorption.
So Pinker, as a cognitive scientist and linguist, studies this aspect of the human communication condition at Harvard. I just talk a lot and write a little. I agree with his points for the most part and really, really take heart in knowing there are still American English speakers who don’t care for the easy slangy, loose, messy way of using English. Current examples: “I could care less” when really you couldn’t, “Me and Jim are going to the store” (argh!), and the classic “irregardless”, among hundreds of others. I’m happy to not be alone in emphasizing it’s important to be understood and to respect some of the rules of grammar that help us communicate.
Did you ever think that selfie photos and “Me and Jim” construction came into popularity around the same time? How self-absorbed are we? (And who am I to talk – blog queen?)
