The Essay Project: Simplicity and Clutter

Two things about my mother: she was a stickler for grammar at the diner table. She made much ado over the difference between well and good. Which was well and good but like putting our elbows on the table, it seemed pretty strict at the time. She also kept a spotless house. I know this because I often cleaned it for money to buy record albums. (I also diverted my lunch money for that purpose, too.) To give you an idea of how particular my mother was, one time we were visiting a relative and she complained that the toilet-paper-roll holder hadn’t been dusted. I remember thinking, “you mean we have to dust that, too?!”

At least I was allowed to create big messes in my own space, spread out my Little People villages with my friend Krissy. We had a friend whose mother made us pick up all the toys at the end of every day, which was very frustrating if you were trying to carry over salacious soap-opera storylines from one day to the next.

Grammar and housekeeping.

There’s a famous Henry David Thoreau quote that I keep on my refrigerator about simplicity. I bought the magnet years ago while on a Thanksgiving trip to Plymouth, Massachusetts, with my friend Coolia and her Dad. We visited Thoreau’s Walden-Pond cabin nearby and hilariously, it had a gift shop where, without any irony, they sold magnets about simplifying your life.

It goes without saying life is made no simpler by the clutter of magnets on a fridge. And although I’m no hoarder, I can tolerate a certain level of clutter in my life and in my writing. My life-clutter is part of what writer Neil Gaiman calls the compost heap of ideas. The clutter of my words is more about wanting to evoke the style of a kaleidoscope instead of the style of a Japanese garden. And I love Japanese gardens but I don’t think anyone would confuse me with one.

My style is me. And it’s cluttered all right. So when I reviewed three chapters I found stapled together in the essay stack, all from William Zinsser’s book On Writing Well, I found myself disagreeing with a lot of it.

He says, “Clutter is the disease of American writing.” And although he’s right about “circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon,” there is a kind of good clutter.

I just took a Smithsonian class on Moby Dick, (which I still haven’t read), and our professor, Samuel Otter of UC-Berkley, lovingly described the whale clutter of that novel. Proust is famously cluttered and frilled. Faulkner, too, has purposefully confusing and circular paragraphs.

Zinsser isn’t really talking about those writers, though. He’s talking about floundering students and the corporate writers who “inflate” business letters, medical plans and instructions for assembling toys. Zinsser’s cure is to

“strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning as the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what…”

I think that is a very good exercise. It is. But it’s also a good to exercise adding big words back in. And sometimes you do want to make the reader unsure of who is doing what. And although he’s correct that clear writing reflects clear thinking, most of the time we’re not thinking clearly and writing is allowed to reflect that too.

If, like Zinsser says, your reader is someone with “the attention span of about twenty seconds,” then yes, clear writing is crucial. Clear logic between sentences, avoiding missing links, knowing what you want to say…all good things to know how to do.

But for many writers the act of writing itself is trying to figure out what they want to say. They surely don’t set out knowing what it is.  Zinsser is a definitely correct to say good writing takes self-discipline and self-knowledge, because the tricky part is knowing when to be clear and when to allow clutter, when to simplify and when to complicate, when the long word serves you better than the short word. This takes trial and error, rewriting and understanding your readers, all of them, the short-attention-spanners and the Moby Dick readers.

A good teacher should allow students to write convoluted, over-complicated sentences until they figure out how to write elegantly long-winded sentences.

Zinsser says “fighting clutter is like fighting weeds” and he calls editing pruning, which is a nice way to think about it. It makes editing sound more fun and artisanal.

He says to fight all jargon and “fad words” like “at this point in time” or prepositional clutter like “facing up to something” instead of just “facing it.” The problem is language is constantly evolving and the new fad words of today becomes card-carrying members of the canon tomorrow. There’s no stopping it. I don’t even consider phrases like “at this point in time” faddish anymore because there’s a whole new slew of  slang words I’m trying to figure out, like “giving Cher.” Zinsser says “the game is won or lost on hundreds of small details,” except that it isn’t. Readers continue to demonstrate they’re willing to make do. We slog through everything from convoluted health care plans to wordless IKEA instructions. Clarity would be nice but…you gotta put together a bookshelf tonight.

Zinsser hates euphemisms, for example calling a slum a depressed socioeconomic area because, he says, it “blunts the painful edge of truth.” But oftentimes jargon is trying to blunt the painful edge of truth, you know, for the people who live there.

It’s simply nicer to call a “dumb kid” an “underachiever” just like it’s nicer to call someone “misinformed” than “an asshole.” And this is where judgement comes in: you get to decide when you want to offend and when you want to be nice. There’s a place for everything. (Even hoarders will try to tell you this.)

He lists some of the obvious rules; but every experimental writer will try to break them (like any good mechanic):

1. Use active verbs. Avoid passive verbs.
2. Most adverbs are unnecessary and redundant. You don’t need to “clench tightly” because there is no other way to clench.
3. Most adjectives are unnecessary and redundant, too, like “effortlessly easy.” All cliffs are precipitous. He says not every oak needs to be gnarled, not every detective hard-bitten.
4. Don’t hedge with timidities (I do this all the time): I wasn’t “too happy” or that was “pretty expensive.” “The larger point here is one of authority” (passive sentence, Zinsser) “…every qualifier whittles away some fraction of trust…be bold.” (Really? We’re not all trying to be alpha writers here.)
5. The period: “most writers don’t reach it soon enough.” (Sigh.)
6. He is right about the overused exclamation point…it doesn’t work when making a joke; “humor is best achieved by understatement, and there’s nothing subtle about an exclamation point.”
7. He loves the dash (over the semicolon) although he calls it “a bumpkin at the genteel dinner table of good English. But it has full membership and will get you out of many tight corners.”
8. One of his worst rules is to avoid Latin words if Anglo-Saxon words convey the same idea. (One type of word is not inherently better than another.)

Clear writing is easily understood but also can be completely boring. Turns out there’s always the rhythm of the sentence to think about. Some of these fillers help the momentum of a sentence just as much as a killer verb will.

And writers need room to practice being bad in all directions, with long and short sentences, and hopefully come up with a balancing act of both. But Zinsser is very discouraging here:

“And don’t tell me about Norman Mailer–he’s a genius. If you want to write long sentence, be a genius. Or at least make sure that the sentence is under control from beginning to end, in syntax and punctuation, so that the reader knows where he is at every step of the winding trail.”

Yeah, don’t do that. Or save that for the later drafts. Go ahead and be messy for a while. Carve a few ridiculous things. Stack up the words like pile of books. Unpack all your boxes.

And then do what I do and when you get a visitor, furiously clean the house like your happy-homemaker mother is coming over.