Your Writing Style Won’t Save You from A Boring Idea
I owe my writing career to a first-year English professor who gave me a terrible mark.
It was an essay on Hamlet and back then I had this idea that the more citations I could cram into my essay, the better. The more academic I sounded, the more brilliant the essay would be.
I crafted what I considered to be an award-winning essay in two weeks, but the mark told a different story.
“I appreciate the enthusiasm” the professor’s comment read, “but I want more of what you thought of Hamlet, not all the sources you’ve cited. 65. Satisfactory.”
I was angry at the mark and vowed to do better. I did more research, read craft books and swore to write with as much erudition as possible. Three years later, when I was ready to work on my thesis, the same problem came back to bite me in the ass:
“No, no, no.” My thesis supervisor said, “I want more Waldun, please. Less of these people you’ve read.” Then he sent me away with a prescription: “Why don’t you turn in an essay with no citations next time you come to see me? Just as an exercise.”
The exercise was terrifying even though I was familiar with my literature. What do you mean you want to hear what I have to say?
Then it dawned on me that my overly academic style was shielding me from two things:
1: I’m scared that people would think I’m stupid if I truly wrote what I thought.
2: I just haven’t spent enough time thinking things through for myself to write in my voice.
So, I did the best thing a liberal arts student could do on a Friday night: I got a pint at the university pub, stared at the ceiling for a few hours and wrote with a few glasses of white in my system. After some light editing over the weekend, I turned in what I thought was the worst essay I’ve ever written.
“This is great!” my supervisor commented, “It's the best thing you’ve ever turned in. 93. First Class Honours.”
I was fully convinced that he also had a few glasses in him when he marked it, but in retrospect, it made a lot of sense. The fatal flaw with my old writing style was that I prioritized how I sounded over what I was saying.
E. B. White (again, this fella saved my life) in The Elements of Style scolded people like me and wrote:
“Young writers often suppose that style is a garnish for the meat of prose, a sauce by which a dull dish is made palatable.”
Sometimes we’ll conceive an idea that’s half-baked and a little bland. The right thing to do is to put it aside and let it breathe, but if we still run with it anyway, we’ll end up with what White called “breezy prose” that has
“Managed in two sentences to commit most of the unpardonable sins: [the writing] obviously has nothing to say.”
We all know what this kind of writing sounds like and my freshman literature essays are ripe examples. In short: puffing up a dumb idea with too many long words.
Whereas true style, according to White and my experience, is a by-product of communicating a well-thought-out idea.
“To achieve style, begin by affecting none,” White wrote,
“As you become proficient in the use of language, your style will emerge, because yourself will emerge, and when this happens you will find it increasingly easy to break through the barriers that separate you from other minds, other hearts-which is, of course, the purpose of writing.”
This is the core challenge of writing. It’s not about stringing together pretty words or trying to sound impressive. It’s about getting what’s in our heads into a coherent common language we share.
This isn’t to say that good writing is simple writing. Sometimes a difficult idea demands long words, and sometimes a simple idea deserves lengthy paragraphs. But knowing how to switch from one to the other is the essence of craft. It’s also about conversing with people instead of listening to the sounds of our own voices, and this process alone will take decades to perfect.
But for now, I’ll leave you with what White instilled in me a few years ago:
“The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity.”
Until next week
Robin
