What does it mean when you think a Harvard professor can’t write?
By Heather O., Segullah Editorial Board
The other day, I unexpectedly had an hour of free time (I know, it never happens to me either. I wish I knew what stars had aligned so I could do it again). Of course I headed to Barnes and Noble. I spent some time greeting old friends on the shelves, and then settled down with a hot chocolate from the cafe and a comfy chair to read my books.
I picked up two books that caught my eye: Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, and On Writing Well, by William Zinsser. I had heard of the first, and had been meaing to read it. I hadn’t a clue about the second, but I figured any book with the words “30 Anniversay Edition” printed on the front must have staying power, and deserved a look.
I devoured Zinsser’s book in an afternoon. I felt like he was giving me the secrets of writing, and I reveled in it. I skipped some parts that were specific to journalism, but I paid close attention to the parts about the principles of writing. I was struck by his discussion of clutter.
Zinsser says people always try too hard to make their sentences sound like something an educated person would write. Most people use too many words, and most people can’t get away with it. I always knew that adverbs and adjectives were not the friend my 8th grade English teacher told me they were, but Zinsser took it beyond that. He talked about putting brackets around his students’ clutter in papers. Phrases like “I might add”, “It is interesting to note” “Due to the fact” ”With the possible exception” all got cut. ”Virtually” and “literally” are also some of his least favorite adverbs, because they are repetitive. His description of clutter in a sentence and “journal-ese” stayed with me as I turned to Miss Hurston’s novel.
Zora Neale Hurston does not use clutter in her writing. Her writing is breathtaking. Just FYI.
I was so caught up in the spirit of the novel that I actually read the afterward, something I almost never do. Here is a sentence that appears in the 2nd paragraph:
“Virtually ignored after the early fifties, even by the Black Arts movement in the sixties, an otherwise noisy and intense spell of black image – and myth-making that rescued so many black writers from remaindered oblivion, Hurston embodied a more or less harmonious but nevertheless problematic unity of opposites.”
With Zinsser’s lessons still fresh in my mind, I laughed out loud, and read the sentence to my husband.
“Wow, that’s some serious overblown writing. This guy is trying way too hard to sound smart. Who IS this blow hard, anyway?”
I checked the Table of Contents.
“Have you ever heard of Henry Louis Gates, Jr?” I asked DH.
“Um, yeah. He’s one of the nation’s leading scholars on race relations. He teaches at Harvard.”
A bell rang in my head.
“Was he the guy who was arrested for trying to get into his own house?”
“Yes, that’s him.”
So, I guess he is pretty smart.
But I am still left scratching my head. This guy breaks the rules for writing well, and I don’t think he does it for the sake of style. And the result is exactly what Zinsser describes in his book—the reader loses interest because there is too much to wade through. I’m not saying that the sentence I quoted isn’t worth decoding, or that Gates doesn’t have some insightful things to tell me about Hurston’s exceptional novel. I’m saying that the clutter in his language bogged me down.
But who am I to argue with a scholar of his merit?
It leaves me wondering what good writing is. I was behind Zinsser all the way, and a book like Their Eyes were Watching God is an example of something that can only be described as good writing. But then there is all the stuff in between that sometimes seems a little harder to categorize. I’ll admit to reading an essay that has won some award or another, and think, “Why is this considered good?” And I don’t mean that I’m dismissing it as a piece of junk, it’s that sometimes I just can’t see it. And I want to see it, because if I could, I know that would make me a better writer.
But I’d like to think that sometimes, it just isn’t there.
What does good writing look like to you?
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September 10th, 2009 at 10:57 am
For me, good writing depends on what genre we’re talking about. Fiction? Nonfiction? Academic? But generally I agree with the idea of clarity and concision. Academic writing especially seems to suffer from the problems of wordiness and ‘clutter’; part of the problem is the standard measurement of assignments by word count or page length. It is an easy standard to maintain but too often leads to papers cluttered up by hedging remarks and trite phrases. One of the things I struggled with in graduate school was the fact that I could not write ‘good’ academic writing according to the standard. My master’s thesis was about half the length of many other students’, and when I discusssed this with my advisor he assured me that it was much more readable than that of others. Some professors didn’t agree with him and thought I wasn’t as worthy of a student, but my committee passed me after all.
So, what this long and rambling comment is mean to say is that I feel like wordiness and obfuscation are too often taken to be signs of merit. It’s almost some sort of perverse way of distinguishing those who ‘get it’ from those who don’t. If the idea of writing is to communicate ideas to others, then this kind of writing is not ‘good’ in my opinion.
September 10th, 2009 at 10:59 am
Will Strunk’s Elements of Style provides an elegant argument for and example of uncluttered writing:
“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”
Strunk’s little book has been my writing Bible for nearly four decades now.
September 10th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
“On Writing Well” is my favorite book about writing. I think it should be required read for every college student, and writers can learn so much from this book as well.
I am drawn to the Segullah blog because of the superb writing and content of most of posts and comments. I think good writing is honest, insightful, and smart. Cheiko Okazaki is an excellent non-fiction writer, one of my favorites.
September 10th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Different genres have different conventions. What you’ve hit on is, in my view, a prime example of why universal “standards of good writing” don’t, in my opinion, exist–because the conventions are different from genre to genre.
In the case of academic writing (including academic writing about literature), clarity is not a primary value. Instead, there’s value in nuance, caution, and making connections to established academic ideas. There’s also value in showing that you can juggle lengthy sentences with multiple levels of embedding like the one you quoted. The theory is that complex ideas are reflected in complex constructions. Like poetry, academic writing demands a certain level of engagement and prior preparation on the part of readers.
For myself, I don’t see much reason why literary criticism published by academics couldn’t be a lot clearer than it is. But most of it is written, by intention, to other academics. It’s in-group writing for a specialized audience–and, as we know, in-groups have a tendency to use jargon: partly to keep out the riffraff, but also to communicate distinctions that have meaning for specialists but for no one else.
September 10th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
.
The first thing I do to my AP kids’ papers is cut out the crap. Sometimes there’s nothing left…..
Obfuscation can also be used to hide a paucity of ideas. And as the faux cleverness Jonathan speaks of can also be used to disguise a paper’s nothingness, I say let it go.
The emperor is naked.
September 10th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
I had to read Zissner for an editing class. While the advice seemed sound, the book was so boring I had trouble finishing it. Strunk and White have been criticized lately, maybe rightly. (There was a heated exchange at the Chronicle of Higher Ed available only to subscribers, or I would link to it.) But at least Strunk and White are fun to read. I can’t say the same for Zissner. He needs a little this is a link.
Like rules for living, rules for writing are both helpful and inadequate. I had a high school English teacher who would not allow us to use any form of the verb “to be,” and I’ve known teachers who disallow all passives. Such militance assumes that writing is formulaic, just a matter of rigorously applying all the right style guides. But writing always requires judgment, so maybe the best rule of all is Orwell’s about his own rules: “(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”
Styles go in and out of fashion, and some contemporary styles get more and more telegraphic. (Twitter and texting are the ultimate concision!) Sometimes I can’t help but miss the long, loopy sentences of earlier centuries , and I always like it when someone can still pull them off.
I have to say just a word in favor of the filler phrases Zissner and Strunk and White and practically every other style guide deplore. Most of the time, I think the style guides are right. But (as Jonathan notes) genre makes a difference in such choices. When I blog I sometimes add filler phrases like “I think” and otherwise qualify what I’m saying to soften it, so that I don’t sound too terse. Blogging is closer to conversation than academic writing, and conversational “filler” sometimes seems necessary.
September 10th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
oops…”this is a link” should read “Deluxe Transitive Vampire”
September 10th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
I agree that “Their Eyes Were Watching God” is amazing. It should be read more. ..bruce..
September 11th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
I get that different genres use different jargon, and that it can be a signal to other people about what kind of audience the author is hoping to target. But is it possible that sometimes we give people a pass on bad writing because of who they are?
For example, JK Rowling’s first 3 HP novels are tighter than the last 4. The 4th one, Goblet of Fire, is particularly in need of some more editing, and she has admitted that the book was put out more quickly than she would have liked. It is also the only book where there is a glaring inconsistency (something that is remarkable in itself, that a series that spans 7 books can be so consistent), and she admits it was a mistake secondary to sleep deprivation and a looming deadline. But the stakes were lower with her 4th book–it was already a surefire hit, so the editing didn’t have to be as precise. People were willing to read even a badly written HP book because, well, it’s Harry Potter! Could it be possible that nobody edited Gates’ stuff because, well, he is Henry Louis Gates Jr.?
September 11th, 2009 at 9:42 pm
But is it possible that sometimes we give people a pass on bad writing because of who they are?
I’m sure we do, and I agree with your assessment of Rowling (although personally I thought the fifth novel was worse than the fourth). But I’m not sure Gates’ situation is analogous. In addition to the issue of genre, there’s also the question of why he and other scholars are famous in the first place. Is it for their writing, or for their ideas? Do we read them because they’re such brilliant stylists who tell such riveting stories, or because of what they have to say? I tend to think it’s the latter. Surely no one ever picked up Judith Butler because of her limpid prose.
Academic style is constantly criticized, and I’m sympathetic to the critique. But I don’t know that it’s quite fair to expect academics to write like essayists or journalists. Although idea and expression can’t ever fully be separated, isn’t it also possible that someone has good ideas buried under the rubble of conventionally academic prose? I constantly see students with excellent insights marred by faulty expression, and occasionally I even get a stylistically faultless essay that doesn’t say much of anything.
This guy breaks the rules for writing well, and I don’t think he does it for the sake of style.
But what are “the rules” for writing well? There’s no Anglo-American version of the Academie Francaise. As my sister once pointed out to me, the only authority these venerated style guides have is the authority we confer on them. Although after years of teaching writing I understand the impulse, I think we have to go beyond just declaring “virtually” and “literally” verboten. That’s facile. Instead, we have to do the harder work of deciding if they’re used well in a given context, and why or why not.
[Thanks for indulging me on my soapbox. Rant off.]
September 12th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
You virtually spelled “afterward” wrong. Literally, you did. It is interesting to add, and I believe it’s due to the fact that you misspell sometimes. It’s afterword. You know, the “word” that comes after. I’ll give you a pass because of who you are.
October 29th, 2011 at 9:26 pm
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