The density of this passage has two possible explanations: The writer is writing, not for a general audience, but for a specialized one, legal experts already familiar with the issues. Or, the writer thinks that form should follow function, that complicated ideas should be communicated in complicated prose.
He needs the advice of writing coach Donald Murray, who argues that the reader benefits from shorter words and phrases, and simpler sentences, at the points of greatest complexity. What would happen if readers encountered this translation of the editorial?
The state of New York often passes laws telling local governments what to do. These laws have a name. They are called "state mandates." On many occasions, these laws improve life for everyone in the state. But they come with a cost. Too often, the state doesn't consider the cost to local government, or how much money taxpayers will have to shell out. So we have an idea. The state should pay back local governments for some of these so-called mandates.
The differences in these passages are worth measuring. The first one takes six and a half lines of text. The revision requires an additional half line. But consider this: The original writer has room for fifty-eight words in six and a half lines, while I get eighty-one words in seven lines, including fifty-nine one-syllable words. His six and a half lines give him room for only one sentence. I fit eight sentences into seven lines. My words and sentences are shorter. The passage is clearer. I use this strategy to fulfill a mission: to make the strange workings of government transparent to the average citizen, to make the strange familiar.
George Orwell reminds us to avoid long words where short ones "will do," a preference that exalts short Saxon words over longer ones of Greek and Latin origin, words that entered the language after the Norman Conquest in 1066. According to such a standard, box beats out container; chew trumps masticate; and ragtop outcools convertible.
I am often stunned by the power that authors generate with words of a single syllable, as in this passage from Amy Tan:
The mother accepted this and closed her eyes. The sword came down and sliced back and forth, up and down, whish! whish! whish! And the mother screamed and shouted, cried out in terror
and pain. But when she opened her eyes, she saw no blood, no shredded flesh.
The girl said, "Do you see now?" (from The Joy Luck Club)
Fifty-five words in all, forty-eight of one syllable. Only one word ("accepted") of three syllables. Even the book title works this way.
Simple language can make hard facts easy reading. Consider the first paragraph of Dava Sobel's Longitude:
Once on a Wednesday excursion when I was a little girl, my father bought me a beaded wire ball that I loved. At a touch, I could collapse the toy into a flat coil between my palms, or pop it open to make a hollow sphere. Rounded out, it resembled a tiny Earth, because its hinged wires traced the same pattern of intersecting circles that I had seen on the globe in my schoolroom — the thin black lines of latitude and longitude. The few colored beads slid along the wire paths haphazardly, like ships on the high seas.
Simplicity is not handed to the writer. It is the product of imagination and craft, a created effect.
Remember that clear prose is not just a product of sentence length and word choice. It derives first from a sense of purpose — a determination to inform. What comes next is the hard work of reporting, research, and critical thinking. The writer cannot make something clear until the difficult subject is clear in the writer's head. Then, and only then, does she reach into the writer's toolbox, ready to explain to readers, "Here's how it works."
WORKSHOP
1. Review writing you think is unclear, dense with information. A tax form, perhaps, or a legal contract. Study the length of words, sentences, and paragraphs. What have you discovered?
2. Repeat the process with your prose. Pay attention to passages you now think are too complicated. Revise a passage using the tools described in this section.
3. Collect examples of stories where the writer has turned hard facts into easy reading. Start by browsing through a good academic encyclopedia.
4. Look for an opportunity to use the sentence, "Here's how it works."
I coined the phrase word territory to describe a tendency I notice in my own writing. When I read a story I wrote months or years ago, I am surprised by how often I repeat words without care. Writers may choose to repeat words or phrases for emphasis or rhythm: Abraham Lincoln was not redundant in his hope that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Only a mischievous or tone-deaf editor would delete the repetition of "people."
To preserve word territory, you must recognize the difference between intended and unintended repetition. For example, I once wrote this sentence to describe a writing tool: "Long sentences create a flow that carries the reader down a stream of understanding, creating an effect that Don Fry calls 'steady advance.' " It took several years and hundreds of readings before I noticed I had written "create" and "creating" in the same sentence. It was easy enough to cut "creating," giving the stronger verb form its own space. Word territory.
In 19781 wrote this ending to a story about the life and death of Beat writer Jack Kerouac in my hometown of St. Petersburg, Florida:
How fitting then that this child of bliss should come in the end to St. Petersburg. Our city of golden sunshine, balmy serenity and careless bliss, a paradise for those who have known hard times. And, at once, the city of wretched loneliness, the city of rootless survival and of restless wanderers, the city where so many come to die.
Years later, I admire that passage except for the unintended repetition of the key word "bliss." Worse yet, I had used it before, two paragraphs earlier. I offer no excuse other than feeling blissed out in the aura of Kerouac's work.
I've heard a story, which I cannot verify, that Ernest Hemingway tried to write book pages in which no key words were repeated. That effect would mark a hard-core adherence to word territory, but, in fact, does not reflect the way Hemingway writes. He often repeats key words on a page — table, rock, fish, river, sea — because to find a synonym strains the writer's eyes and the reader's ears.
Consider this passage from A Moveable Feast (the emphasis is mine):
"All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.
As a reader, I appreciate the repetition in the Hemingway passage. The effect is like the beat of a bass drum. It vibrates the writer's message into the pores of the skin. Some words — like "true" and "sentence" — act as building blocks and can be re-
peated to good effect. Distinctive words — like "scrollwork" and "ornament" — deserve their own space.
Observing word territory eliminates repetition, but its best effect is to craft writing with distinctive language in support of the work's purpose. Consider this wonderful rant written by John Kennedy Toole for the lips of Ignatius J. Reilly, the elephantine hero of A Confederacy of Dunces. The city in question is New Orleans, and the object of scorn is a police officer who has told Reilly to shove off:
"This city is famous for its gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, anti-Christs, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs ... all of whom are only too well protected by graft. If you have a moment, I shall endeavor to discuss the crime problem with you, but don't make the mistake of bothering me."
In a paragraph of fifty-three words, only two are repeated ("you" and "the"). The rest is a fountain of interesting language, an inventory of deviance that defined the dark side of the Crescent City before Hurricane Katrina was
hed so much of it away.
One final piece of advice: Leave said alone. Don't be tempted by the muse of variation to permit characters to opine, elaborate, cajole, or chortle.
WORKSHOP
1. Read something you wrote at least a year ago. Pay attention to the words you repeat. Divide them into three categories: (a) function words (said, that), (b) building-block words (house, river), and (c) distinctive words (silhouette, jingle).
2. Do the same with a new draft. Your goal is to recognize unintended repetition before it is published.
3. Read selections from novels and nonfiction stories that make use of dialogue. Study the attribution, paying close attention to when the author uses says or said, and when the writer chooses a more descriptive alternative.
4. Imagine that you have written a draft in which you repeat on a single page of text the following words: sofa, mouth, house, idea, earthquake, friend. Consider which of these you might revise with a synonym to avoid repetition.
Just as a sculptor works with clay, a writer shapes a world with words. In fact, the earliest English poets were called shapers, artists who molded the stuff of language to create stories the way that God, the Great Shaper, formed heaven and earth.
Good writers play with language, even when the topic is death. "Do not go gentle into that good night," wrote Welsh poet Dylan Thomas to his dying father. "Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
Play and death may seem at odds, but the writer finds ways to connect them. To express his grief, the poet fiddles with language, prefers "gentle" to gently, chooses "night" to rhyme with "light," and repeats the word "rage." Later, he will pun about those "grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight." The double meaning of "grave men" leads straight to the oxymoron "blinding sight." Wordplay, even in the shadow of death.
The headline writer is the poet among journalists, stuffing big meaning into small spaces. Consider this headline about a shocking day during the war in Iraq:
Jubilant mob mauls 4 dead Americans
The circumstances are hideous: Iraqi civilians attack American security officers, burn them to death in their cars, beat and dismember their charred carcasses, drag them through the street, and hang what's left from a bridge — all while onlookers cheer. Even amid such carnage, the headline writer plays with the language. The writer repeats consonant sounds (b and m) for emphasis, and contrasts the words "jubilant" and "dead" with surprising effect. "Jubilant" stands out as well chosen, derived from jubilare, the Latin verb that means "to raise a shout of joy."
Words like "mob," "dead," and "Americans" appear in news reports all the time. "Mauls" is a verb we might see in a story about a dog attack on a child. But "jubilant" is a distinctive word, comprehensible to most readers, but rare in the context of news.
Too often, writers suppress their vocabularies in a misguided attempt to lower the level of language for a general audience. Obscure words should be defined in texts or made clear from context. But the reading vocabulary of the average citizen is larger than the writing vocabulary of the typical author. As a result, scribes who choose their words from a deeper well attract special attention from readers and gain reputations as "writers."
A rich writing vocabulary does not require big or fancy words. One of America's greatest essayists was M. F. K. Fisher, known for writing about food, but always adding the flavor of playful language to all her work. This vivid childhood memory describes a small room carved out of the side of a garage to house a favorite workman:
The room had been meant for tools, I assume. It was big enough for a cot, which was always tidy, and an old Morris chair, and a decrepit office desk. The walls were part of the garage, with newspaper darkening on them to keep out the drafts. There was a small round kerosene stove, the kind we sometimes used in our Laguna summer place, with a murky glow through its window and a good warm smell. There was soft light from an overhead bulb. There was a shelf of books, but what they were I never knew. From the roof beams hung slowly twirling bundles of half-cured tobacco leaves, which Charles got through some strange dealings from Kentucky. He dried them, and every night ground their most brittle leaves into a pipe mixture in the palm of his hand. He would reach up, snap off a leaf, and then sit back in his old chair and talk to us, my sister Anne and the new one Norah and me, until it was time to puff out more delicious fumes, (from Among Friends)
Fisher uses no elaborate metaphors here or easy puns. Her play comes in the form of a constellation of precise words and images that transport us from our own time and place to that little room so long ago.
Fisher's restraint stands in sharp contrast to the hallucinatory wordplay in Act of the Damned by Antonio Lobo Antunes:
At eight a.m. on the second Wednesday of September, 1975, the alarm clock yanked me up out of my sleep like a derrick on the wharf hauling up a seaweed-smeared car that didn't know how to swim. I surfaced from the sheets, the night dripping from my pajamas and my feet as the iron claws deposited my arthritic cadaver on to the carpet, next to the shoes full of yesterday's smell. I rubbed my fists into my battered eyes and felt flakes of rust fall from the corners. Ana was wrapped, like a corpse in the morgue, in a blanket on the far side of the bed, with only her broomhead of hair poking out. A pathetic shred of leather from a dead heel tumbled off the mattress. I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth and the heartless mirror showed me the damage the years had wrought, as on an abandoned chapel.
Even those who prefer a much plainer style need an occasional swim in a surrealistic sea of language — if only to cleanse us of our word complacency.
All of us possess a reading vocabulary as big as a lake but draw from a writing vocabulary as small as a pond. The good news is that the acts of searching and gathering always expand the number of usable words. The writer sees and hears and records. The seeing leads to language.
"The writer must be able to feel words intimately, one at a time," writes poet Donald Hall in Writing Well. "He must also be able to step back, inside his head, and see the flowing sentence. But he starts with the single word." Hall celebrates writers who "are original, as if seeing a thing for the first time; yet they report their vision in a language that reaches the rest of us. For the first quality the writer needs imagination; for the second he needs skill.... Imagination without skill makes a lively chaos; skill without imagination, a deadly order."
WORKSHOP
1. Read several stories in today's newspaper. Circle any surprising word, especially one you are not used to seeing in the news.
2. Write a draft with the intention of unleashing your writing vocabulary. Show this draft to test readers and interview them about your word choice and their level of understanding. Share your findings with others.
3. Read the work of a writer you admire, paying special attention to word choice. Circle any signs of playfulness by the writer, especially when the subject matter is serious.
4. Find a writer, perhaps a poet, whose work you read as an inspiration for writing. Circle the words that interest you. Even if you know their meaning, look them up in a historical lexicon, such as the Oxford English Dictionary. Find their etymologies. Try to locate their first known use in written English.
Novelist Joseph Conrad once described his task this way: "by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see." When Gene Roberts, a great American newspaper editor, broke in as a cub reporter in North Carolina, he read his stories aloud to a blind editor who would chastise young Roberts for not making him see.
When details of character and setting appeal to the senses, they create an experience for the reader that leads to understanding. When we say "I see," we most often mean "I understand." Inexperienced writers may choose the obvious detail, the man puffing on the cigarette, the young woman chewing on what's left of her fingernails. Those details fail to tell — unless the man is dying of lung cancer or the woman is anorexic.
At the St. Petersburg Times, editors and writin
g coaches warn reporters not to return to the office without "the name of the dog." That reporting task does not require the writer to use the detail in the story, but it reminds the reporter to keep her eyes and ears opened. When Kelley Benham wrote a story about a ferocious rooster that attacked a toddler, she not only got the name of the rooster, Rockadoodle Two, but also the names of his parents, Rockadoodle and one-legged Henny Penny. (I cannot explain why it matters that the offending rooster's mother had only one leg, but it does.)
Before the execution of a serial killer, reporter Christopher Scanlan flew to Utah to visit the family of one of the murderer's presumed victims. Eleven years earlier, a young woman left her house and never returned. Scanlan found the detail that told the story of the family's enduring grief. He noticed a piece of tape over the light switch next to the front door:
BOUNTIFUL, Utah — Belva Kent always left the front porch light on when her children went out at night. Whoever came home last turned it off, until one day in 1974 when Mrs. Kent told her family: "I'm going to leave that light on until Deb comes home and she can turn it off."
The Kents' porch light still burns today, night and day. Just inside the front door, a strip of tape covers the switch.
Deb never came home.
Here's the key: Scanlan saw the taped-over switch and asked about it. His curiosity, not his imagination, captured the great detail.
The quest for such details has endured for centuries, as any historical anthology of reportage will reveal. British scholar John Carey describes these examples from his collection Eyewitness to History:
This book is ... full of unusual or indecorous or incidental images that imprint themselves scaldingly on the mind's eye: the ambassador peering down the front of Queen Elizabeth I's dress and noting the wrinkles;... the Tamil looter at the fall of Kuala Lumpur upending a carton of snowy Slazenger tennis balls.... Pliny watching people with cushions on their heads against the ash from the volcano; Mary, Queen of Scots, suddenly aged in death, with her pet dog cowering among her skirts and her head held on by one recalcitrant piece of gristle; the starving Irish with their mouths green from their diet of grass.
Writing Tools Page 5
