I can see looking at these next two essays, both chapters called “Words” from two different writing guides, that they are, (and we’re scraping the bottom of the stack here), not from the Sarah Lawrence essay class. I can tell this due to a teacher’s critical cursive scrawl at the bottom of one of them:
“Put all pages in a notebook This makes the unit look sloppy” (no punctuation which, ahem, makes her sentences look sloppy).
I had let these chapters exist free floating in my secondary education class assignment on “unit planning,” (it hurts my ears just to type out those two words), because I was envisioning photocopying them to waves of students over the forthcoming years. I was trying to avoid those photocopied, ghostly black ring-binder holes we all remember from the handouts of teachers who were much less sloppy than I was planning to be.
The whole enterprise was misguided though: the idea of me being a teacher and taking these education classes at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Earlier as a teen I envisioned someday having a big family; but I had never so much as babysat any kids before.
Well, once I did for my friend Charlotte in an emergency situation after a 10 minutes phone call that consisted mostly with me protesting to her that I’d never so much as babysat any kids before and her telling me her family had a very important event to attend and their usual babysitter had flaked out.
So I found myself entertaining three kids under nine and one baby. I had not a clue as to how to change the baby’s diaper and admitted as much to the three kids under nine. The oldest one, the eight year old, proudly announced she could do this and so she did. Later, I couldn’t convince them to go to bed; and so my friend and her family came home to find all the kids asleep on their parents’ bed. Charlotte seemed thankful nonetheless and at least we all survived, I figured.
So these handouts were from that time, one from a book called On Writing Well by William Zinsser. a book Howard Schwartz had us use in his intermediate poetry class at UMSL. The second book, The New Strategy of Style by Winston Weathers, was a book I loved from Mr. Moceri’s high-school composition class.
The “Words” chapter from On Writing Well, starts by chiding the “journalese” of periodicals like People Magazine with its “mixture of cheap words” and clichés.
“Never make your mark as a writer unless you develop a respect for words and a curiosity about their shades of meaning that is almost obsessive. The English language is rich in strong and supple words.” (Those shades sound sexy!) “Take the time to root around and find the ones you want.”
When Zinsser attacks lazy writing, he’s usually talking about lazy ideas versus words.
“If you find yourself writing that…a business has been enjoying a slump, stop and think how much they really enjoyed it…the race in writing is not to the swift but to the original.” (Except in journalism where you don’t have all the time…to be fair.) He recommends reading, (“cultivate the best writers”), and habitually using dictionaries, learning etymologies and their word branches, mastering the gradations between synonyms, (“what’s the difference between ‘cajole’ and ‘coax’?”), and heavily using Roget’s Thesaurus, although he seems to see the book as slightly ridiculous:
“Look up ‘villain’…and you’ll be awash in such rascality as only a lexicographer could conjure, obliquity, depravity, knavery, profligacy, frailty, flagrancy, infamy, immortality, corruption, wickedness, wrongdoing, backsliding and sin. You will find rogues and wretches, ruffians and riffraff, miscreants and malefactors, reprobates and rapscallions, hooligans and hoodlums, scamps and scapegraces, scoundrels and scalawags, jezebels and jades.”
That seems more fun than ridiculous to me. “Still,” he says, “there is no better friend to have around to nudge the memory than Roget…find the word that’s on the tip of your tongue, where it doesn’t do you any good….use it with gratitude.”
Also work on how you string words together, Zinsser says. Listen to how the word strings sound, not just how they read. Besides, he says, the inner ear always hears when you read. “Rhythm and alliteration are vital to every sentence.”
He references another canonical composition guide, E.B. White’s The Elements of Style, (which we read in college comp classes, too). He highlights White’s exercise of trying to rewrite Thomas Pain’s “These are the times that try men’s souls.” (“Times like these try men’s souls,” How trying is it to live in these times!” “These are trying times for men’s souls” and finally the funny, “Soulwise, these are trying times.”)
You must care about the “cadences and sonorities of the language,” he says. “Choose one word over another because [of its] certain emotional weight.”
If Zinsser is all about succinctness, (his chapter on words is only six pages long), Weathers’ chapter is comparable verbosity at eleven pages.
“Ponder the various connotations….few words have exact synonyms.” Keep “a large artillery” of short, simple words for clarity and longer, big words for “dictional, variation and emphasis,” large words that generate “more interest and excitement.”
Think about how a word contributes to the rhythm of a sentence, the “rise and fall of accents.” Also keep lists of “foreign words and phrases…literary expressions…quotations.”
He talks about using literary allusions, referencing texts we all know like the Bible, Shakespeare, fairy tales.
He talks about using tough, crude words for shock and surprise, playing around with words (using nouns as verbs, verbs as adjectives). He also recommends Roget’s thesaurus and that we “become sensitive to what are sometimes shadowy distinctions. Consider the connotative as well as the denotative value of words…emotional and associative meanings.”
He lists out types of words to avoid: idioms (give me a ring), vague words (business-speak words like basically, analysis, material, thing), tired, overworked words (he gives no examples), redundant and verbose words, however repetition for the sake of clarity and emphasis is okay.
He talks about pruning your sentences, which sounds more fun than editing them.
Drop spare words, reduce clauses and “prune inconsequential details.” He provides a list of cliches which includes a lot of good stuff I’d like to reuse for some reason. The list is like a poem unto itself:
acid test
at a loss for words
ax to grind
bitter end
blazing inferno
brilliant performance
bring order out of chaos
busy as a bee
depths of despair
dodge the issue
equal to the occasion
force of circumstance
hit the ceiling
it stands to reason
know the ropes
nipped in the bud
play into the hands of
quick as a flash
sad but true
sadder but wiser
shake like a leaf
think out loud
It’s okay to use cliches in fiction, he says, if the phrases are things your character would say.
Avoid “nauseating” pseudo-technical and pseudo-literary expressions,” he says, that are meant to “mainly impress readers,” word combos like “motivating factor” and “appreciable degree.”
And here is something many literary academic writers need to hear: “Remember, the more complex the thought, the more simply you must express it.” I feel many academic writers just like to show off their lit-jargon “artilleries.”
