Good Prose (14 page)

The Atlantic
was to publish an excerpt, actually a condensation, of his forthcoming book
, The Soul of a New Machine.
This was logical—not only was it an Atlantic Monthly Press book, but it had virtually been written in the offices of the magazine—and it was also good news for the book’s prospects. By this time, the book had been copyedited, but it still had to go through the magazine’s own routine. Kidder’s galleys now faced Whitworth’s scrutiny
.

A number of issues came up, but the one I remember best had to do with an indelicate quote. A computer engineer was quoted as saying of the new machine he was designing that it would go “as fast as a raped ape.” Whitworth struck the line on grounds that it was vulgar, which, of course, it was. But was that sufficient reason to deny the writer the use of it, given the distancing effect of quotation marks? And (my immediate concern) how was Kidder going to react to this proposition?

There are two kinds of dog. One will drop a stick at your foot. The other will clamp down harder on the stick the more you try to pry it
out of his mouth. Reporters tend to be the second kind of dog. Kidder is ordinarily quite open to suggestion, but it was clear that he did not want to let go of his quote, and he resented the assumption that he would do so
.

I was caught in the middle. On the one hand, one would not want to lose one’s life or job, or even a night’s sleep, defending the phrase “raped ape.” On the other hand, this was my writer, and the quote was the quote and it was only a quote, and to lose it would leave a hole in the scene. It did seem to me that the dignity of the magazine could survive our printing the distasteful words
.

Whitworth was so exercised on the point that he had devoted a long sardonic marginal note to imagining the sort of person who would use the phrase. He said among other things that it sounded like a college sophomore who had bongo drums in his room and fake African tribal masks on his wall (admittedly a telling argument)
.

But
we
were not the people who used it, I argued
.

But by implication we were, Whitworth countered. Our use of it, he said, was “endorsive.”

What does he mean by that? said Kidder, in a more emphatic way. Where did he come up with that word?

In the end the quote did not survive. Whitworth showed no sign of yielding and Kidder, though not convinced, stopped insisting. Was the right thing done? It’s certainly true that Whitworth was trying to protect the elegance of his new magazine’s pages. But he also had a point, which we might have seen more clearly had antler bashing not been involved. Out of curiosity I recently looked back at the passage in question. It was one in which Kidder describes his subject in a way that was clearly meant to make the engineer sound interesting to the reader.
If the reader thought the author was impressed with the wit of “raped ape”—well, that would indeed have been “endorsive,” and bad news for the author
.

This miniature moment suggests the varieties of ways in which the style of a piece of writing is formed—the choice of a quote, a single word, the honoring or dishonoring of a grammatical nicety. We think of an author’s style as if it were some sort of fixed identity, but it is made up of an accumulation of granular decisions like this one. I remember once in those early days giving Kidder some advice about style. I said in effect, “Look, you are not always the calmest and most reasonable person in the room, and there is no need to be. But you admire such people. Why don’t you just pretend to be a reasonable man in your prose?” I think it was useful advice, actually, but it’s not as if a style is a one-time discovery. It is created and re-created sentence by sentence, choice by choice
.

Whitworth and Kidder ultimately made their peace and became friends. One day years later, in a different situation, Kidder and I found ourselves wondering without irony if the use of another questionable quotation sounded “endorsive.” Meanwhile
, The Atlantic
under Whitworth’s direction went on to become what was, at least at the level of sentence and paragraph, the best-edited magazine in America
.

A couple of H. W. Fowler’s more eloquent pronouncements appear in this chapter. Perhaps they will win some more converts. Really, every writer who doesn’t already have one should buy a copy of
Modern English Usage.
Note that I said “buy,” however, and not “purchase.” No one who has read Fowler on “genteelisms” will ever again use “purchase” as a verb
.

—RT

“Omit needless words” goes the advice from
Elements of Style
, by Strunk and White, and no one would disagree. On the other hand: How do you recognize a needless word? Should Lincoln have written not “Four score and seven” but “eighty-seven”? In King Lear’s dying speech—“Never, never, never, never, never”—which word would you cut?

The familiar rules about writing turn out to be more nearly half-truths, dangerous if taken literally. They are handy as correctives, but not very useful as instruction. The authorities say to avoid the verb “to be” and the passive voice, and to write with active verbs instead. Sit down at a desk declaring, “Today I write with active verbs,” and you will likely end up in parody or paralysis. But notice that a paragraph depends too much on the verb “to be,” and you may open a route to revision.

The verb “to be” and the passive voice are unfairly maligned. God invented both for a reason. Just turn to the Bible: “In the beginning was the word, … and the word was God.” No one would accuse that verb of weakness. Or Shakespeare: “There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which, taken at the flood …” (the verb “to be” and the passive both). Occasionally the supposed weakness of a verb can accentuate the nouns around it. Hemingway demonstrates this throughout his work. Any writer should use “to be” forms without apology when defining, or naming, or placing something. Consider the passive voice when the thing done is more important than the doer. Don’t lean on these usages, but don’t contort your prose to avoid them, either.

“Never use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do” said Mark Twain, and this advice seems to be universally accepted. True, there is no faster way to make a passage impenetrable
than to accumulate long Latinate words. But much of the force of English derives from the conquests and invasions that gave it multiple sources. It is almost impossible to write prose in English without blending short, blunt Anglo-Saxon with more formal Latinate words, and the way you blend them matters. It is a little-noted fact that a reader’s eye, just glancing at a page, can tell something about the contents simply by registering its texture. The mere look of your prose can invite readers to go on, or can warn them off before they read a word.

Great writers across the centuries have found their own ways to exploit the great variety of sounds available in English. Take for instance these lines of Emily Dickinson:

A vigorous hybrid diction enforces the natural rhythms of English. So do be wary of an abundance of Latinate words, but don’t automatically favor shorter words.

Although many are simplistic, all rules of writing share a worthy goal: clear and vigorous prose. Most writers want to achieve that. And most want to achieve something more, the distinction that is called a style. It’s an elusive goal, but the surest way to approach it is by avoiding the many styles that offer themselves to you. The world brims over with temptations for the writer, modish words, unexamined phrases, borrowed tones, and the habits of thought they all represent. The creation of a
style often begins with a negative achievement. Only by rejecting what comes too easily can you clear a space for yourself.

Some modes of writing are so familiar that they fall easily into categories. Let’s take four of them, starting with the language in which so many writers have begun their professional education:

Daily journalism offers invaluable lessons in the venality of human nature and in the universal logic of politics, and also skills of great value to all nonfiction writers: getting facts right, saying no more than facts support, and writing fast. But reporting the news, especially on tight deadlines, is a specialized form of expression, a style of its own that finds its way into kinds of writing where it doesn’t belong.

It’s as if the world of news is governed by special physical laws. Things
skyrocket
or
soar
, or they
plummet
or
plunge
. They
slam into
other things (airplanes into mountainsides, hurricanes into shores). If many journalistic clichés are dramatic, others are unnecessarily cautious. In journalese, events seldom cause one another; they tend to happen
in the wake of
other events. Sometimes events simply happen
amid
other events, “amid widespread charges of corruption” or “as corruption charges
swirl
.” These clichés get used for a good reason: that cardinal virtue of journalism, of not overstepping one’s bounds. But the writer unbound by newsroom conventions can avoid such stale evasions.

It is a premise of newswriting that “space is tight.” Sometimes
it is, sometimes not, but by convention it always is, and so methods for compressing language have become conventional, too. Possessives replace prepositional phrases: “Chicago’s O’Hare,” “New York’s Central Park.” Nouns are used as adjectives: “Novelist William Faulkner” (or “Nobel Prize–winning novelist William Faulkner”). Similar identifiers become slightly absurd: “Motorist Rodney King,” “Missing Mom Susan Powell,” “Two-time Grammy nominee …” Many writers outside of newsrooms have adopted this construction, maybe in an effort to seem official or urgent.

There is no need to rush. Give everything the time it deserves. Here is a very slow sentence from an article by Janet Malcolm in
The New Yorker
, a magazine that has long stood watch against journalese: “On the second day of David Souter’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, in September, 1990, Gordon Humphrey, a Republican senator from New Hampshire, with something of the manner of a boarding school headmaster in a satiric novel, asked the nominee, ‘Do you remember the old television program
Queen for a Day
?’ ”

This sentence doesn’t have much urgency. In fact, it has a studied leisure, but one senses that the author is up to something. Here is the sentence rewritten in journalese:
“ ‘Do you remember the old television program
Queen for a Day?’
asked headmasterly New Hampshire Republican senator Gordon Humphrey of then nominee David Souter at his September 1990 Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings.”
That’s about half the words of the original, and with the pertinent information up front. The facts are all there, but the tone is gone. And if you
listen to these sentences, you realize that the original has the motion, let’s say, of a woman bending over gracefully to pick something up, while the other is more like a woman falling down stairs.

That’s the real problem with these sentences filled with nouns as adjectives—not that they violate a grammatical rule, but that they violate normal rhythms of speech. Good readers and good writers use both eyes and ears. And for a reader who hears the words, the shorter sentence actually takes longer to register. It is hard to hear, and thus the reader resists it. Sometimes longer is shorter.

The habit of compression, along with the exigency of a deadline, can lead a reporter to insert information into a sentence randomly, as if tucking in loose shirttails. Let’s say you’re writing a story about a drug bust that involves a young mother from Indiana. In the lead you establish that the woman, named Polly Wabash, is being held for possession somewhere in Ohio and that she denies the charges. But you look back and see that you didn’t give her age. So in the next paragraph, when you quote her, you make a small addition:
“I have no idea how that stuff got into my car,” said the twenty-eight-year-old
.

Or, if you’ve forgotten something else:
said the twenty-eight-year-old Indiana native
.

Shirttail tucking can happen in a small way, with the use of an adjective to convey information that might otherwise require a sentence. The sports reporter, instead of saying that a certain player is injured, compresses the information to
the injured Gronkowski
. Similarly:
the vacationing Smiths, the breakaway republic,
or even the very common
in nearby Park Ridge
. None of these usages is wrong, and yet they all subtly lower the tone of a sentence.

Such alterations can get very subtle indeed, as in the following made-up passage:
A forty-year-old New York man was held today on charges of public indecency. Henry Hudson was arrested while buying a pair of shoes in a midtown department store
. By convention we know that “the New York man” is one and the same as “Henry Hudson.” But nothing in the syntax says that. Logically, we would be justified in thinking that we were reading about two different people.

It is possible to be a journalist without sounding like a newspaper.

Writing in the vernacular has produced some of the glories of American prose. “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called
Huckleberry Finn
,” said Hemingway, celebrating that distinctive strain in our writing that makes the diction and rhythm of common speech into art. From Huck to Holden Caulfield and beyond, the vernacular has been the expression of youthfulness, both literally and in the broader sense of freshness and impatience with convention.

Of course the unconventional can become conventional, and quickly too, and that seems to have happened in the new vernacular. An aggressive informality infects contemporary prose. The Internet has helped to spread it; informality is the natural
voice of the blogger. Here is an example from a blog much loved by solvers of the
New York Times
crossword,
Rex Parker Does the NY Times Crossword Puzzle
. In this quotation, Rex is away and his friend “PuzzleGirl” sits in: