Communication 273
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Memo to the class:
River people in Missouri
travel in pickup trucks with Busch beer cans bouncing off the back. Here
the traffic was bicyclists in Day-Glo riding outfits. On the Russian River,
people were living what you might call a whole grain existence. In Missouri,
it's more of an animal protein lifestyle. In any case, after a day
of kayaking, Martha and the kids took me to dinner at a fancy place on
the ocean right where the Russian River empties into the Pacific. It was
sunset, and I imagined that somewhere at the end of a fiery straight line
into the west was Shanghai. There's a school of architecture,
someone told me half jokingly, which holds that every failure of design
can be fixed by pouring water over it -- with fountains, facades with
cascading waterfalls and so forth. This restaurant was run by people who
think there is not a single dish, not even a lamb chop, that cannot be
improved by stuffing it with crabmeat. When I saw this on the menu, I
thought of my students -- and that soon I'd be reading the first of the
writing from this class. I say that because of what
I often see in the early work by students. Usually it contains some very
nice writing, as I mentioned about yours on Thursday. But there is something
else, which I alluded to when I talked of simplicity. Let me try to illustrate
it with a story you can think of as the Parable of the Potato. Once upon a time, there lived
a king who loved to eat. He kept the finest table in the world, presided
over by the finest chef anywhere. Life was good, but dinner was even better.
Then one day the master of the royal kitchen told the king that he was
old and the time had come for him to return to his village for his final
days. Although saddened, the king
understood and asked of his chef just one favor. "Stay a week longer"
the king said, "and cook for me the very best dishes you can."
The master of the royal kitchen
thanked him and went to work. He made roasts and stews, omelets and casseroles,
soups and sauces and breads and cakes. Everything was wonderful. So it came to pass that the
week came to an end. There was only one meal left. The old man went to
the royal pantry for the last time, and there he took . . . a potato.
Then he set about to make a boiled potato fit for a king. After all the seasonings
and all the sauces, all of the preparations and all the presentations,
it came down to the simplest thing of all: a boiled potato that had to
be done exactly right. Now a boiled potato cannot be disguised or made
to seem that it is something grander than it is. It is plain and devoid
of pretense: a little salt, a little pepper, a spot of butter and that
is that. As the chef set the potato
before the king, he said, "It has taken me a lifetime to make this
dish." And when the king ate the boiled potato, he declared that
he had never tasted anything better. In my own way, as a journalist,
I am still trying to make that boiled potato. I have spent more than 40
years in journalism and I am still trying to write a simple declarative
sentence -- one which, if I had a king and I wished to go to my rest,
I could put before him as the summation of all the things I have tried
to learn: A sentence that was just right, a thing of itself, full and
complete, devoid of all pretense, a subject and a verb and the merest
sprinkling of salt and of pepper, a sentence that would be a joy to read
with every fact in it chaste and immaculate. The longer I think about
it and the longer I try to do good writing, the more convinced I am that
the secret to putting words together in ways that make them interesting
is simplicity. The old wisdom of using simple words and simple constructions
is the enduring writing lesson. The great teachers of writing,
from William Strunk and E.B. White to William Zinnser, all tell us this.
As Zinnser says, "the secret of good writing 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 which carries the same
meaning that is already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves
the reader unsure of who is doing what -- these are the thousand and one
adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence." Or as an editor I knew would
say, get rid of words that are along just for the ride, words that don't
work for a living. Get rid of words that are full of empty calories --
words that taste good but have no nourishment. Forget location, location.
Think simplicity, simplicity. Think of load-bearing words that can take
the weight of a thought and still carry it lightly where you want it to
go. Sturdy words, working words. Remember George Orwell, who noted that
if you are determined to write pretentiously, begin by eliminating simple
verbs. Inexperienced writers often
think that exactly the opposite is true -- that their thoughts are too
significant or complicated or beautiful to be conveyed by the familiar
transport of one-syllable words or the simple declarative sentence. I
try to persuade them that what was good enough for Shakespeare ("to
be, or not to be: that is the question" -- 10 words, 11 syllables)
might actually be good enough for them, but often to no avail. They struggle
to find the fancy word, the convoluted construction. In jargon and euphemism,
they find substitutes for plain, ordinary English. They stuff their sentences
with Dungeness crab. The language they speak with
such good effect is abandoned for words and sentences that they imagine
will be more impressive. Since childhood they have learned to speak plainly,
but they have no confidence that what has served them so well for a lifetime
can also serve them in a 600-word news story. Now, as the old chef of our
parable, pointed out, it took him many years to learn to make the perfect
boiled potato. Writing simply but well is difficult. I carry around a
quotation from T.S. Eliot, probably the most careful writer of the last
century, who talks about how terribly hard it is -- how every start at
writing "is a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always
deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling . . . " Writing begins with thinking, of course, and if we do not think clearly, we cannot write clearly. But once we have thought, it comes down to doing it the old fashioned way, one sturdy, load-bearing word at a time. This is the long train of
thought that began at the River's End restaurant, overlooking the Pacific.
I’ll end it with another passage from Eliot, the lovely concluding
lines from the last of his quartets, "Little Gidding":
I've been discussing today
the place we all began as writers, whether we realize it or not, and that
is with some nouns and verbs and a few adjectives and adverbs and some
punctuation marks. I've been talking about simple words, but they have
meanings that we need to learn anew every time we use them. Otherwise
we won't use them precisely and well. We don't need dictionaries
so much for fancy words as we need them for ordinary ones. I hope by the
end of this course, you'll see some of those everyday words a little differently,
perhaps as if for the first time. Regards, Bill Woo |