For the next few weeks, I’ll be traveling in Great Britain and France. I will do my best to keep my posting schedule (look for a few pieces of travel writing) and I’ll be posting pics in the UnTaking chat (in the Substack app). In the meantime, I’d love it if you could share the newsletter with your contacts, since I will be largely ex communicato on social media for a bit. Also, please do share your thoughts in the comments, but please be patient as you await my responses. Travelling, as I said.
Now enjoy this bit of grammar-based class resentment!
In the world of our educated classes, few things are more accepted as gospel truth than the rules of good writing. Though Strunk and White by now have their legions of detractors among The People Who Know Things, their basic ideas for good writing still dominate. Using fewer words rather than more words, choosing the straight-forward over the opaque, show don’t tell, etc. The religion at the core of this dogma is that good writing adheres as closely to the pattern of subject-verb-object as possible. If it does not, if the clauses multiply, if the image-bearing adjectives texture over the empty space, if in front of the noun lies the verb, if the writer apostatizes himself and rejects simplicity, then the writing is, according to orthodoxy, objectively bad.
This ideology is built on a key mistake. It ignores a first principle of rhetoric: communication is situational. In a given moment, the writer and reader come together (I would like to say convocate but here I’ll try and stick to the orthodoxy) and then makes decisions about how best to communicate their message to that particular reader. In other words, considerations of audience and moment dictate what good, or at least effective, writing is. Of course there are circumstances where an un-ornamented style is called for. Many of Clint Eastwood’s films are cinematic examples of the power of a bare style. But to mechanically rubber-stamp the precious and difficult as “bad” is ridiculous. As much as I might enjoy Unforgiven, it would be foolish to hold Andrei Tarkovsky to that same, minimalist standard. One might even say that it would be laughably foolish, if only to prove the stupidity of “rules” against using adverbs by defiantly breaking them.
As I made clear above, there are times when the Strunk and White ethos makes sense. In his useful and entertaining memoir of the craft, On Writing, Stephen King justifies with a reasonable degree of success adherence to those rules. But thank God that Michael Chabon knows when to call Strunk and White and King on their BS. My life would be worse without those magnificent, elaborate sentences.
Let me tone my own rhetoric down momentarily.
There is nothing wrong with admiring and developing the ability to write a simple and direct sentence. Anyone who has been made to diagram sentences will surely appreciate those when they come across them.
As I examine my own motivations for writing this, I must admit that what I grate at is a phony populism pulsating just below the surface of this religion of minimalist style.
As I see it, there are basically two philosophical defenses of the minimal style. First is the school probably most recognizably embodied by Hemingway and Eastwood, which argues the plain-spoken has an immediate, visceral effect on the reader or viewer. It is, in short, powerful. This is reasonable to me if the effect one wishes to achieve is blunt and emotional. Those situations call for exactly the kind of writing prized by Strunk and White.
But one should always use the right tool for the job. When that effective and useful tool is taken as a universal principle against which all writing is judged, what we end up with is the second kind of justification for minimalism: the authoritarian “because I said so.”
Let me be clear, I do believe that the “trained professional” class of writer preaches its gospel and prosecutes its heretics with good intentions. There is an ostensibly democratic belief that ideas should be shared by and with all, regardless of education level. The straight-forward style can be easily communicated across a wide swath of readers, not just those in specialized fields. I don’t disagree with that whatsoever. But taking a quick survey of the history of teaching writing (a good place to start is Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, about the Iowa Workshop’s influence over American fiction), it’s clear that the strict disciplining of style is itself a powerful force of anti-democratic gatekeeping.
In fact, to achieve the status of “good writer” among America’s scribbling classes, a fair amount of elite education is required more often than not. How else does one gain access to the workshops that discipline your style into shape with the shiny leather whip of journalistic prose standards?
I challenge the reader to take a day and survey prestigious online magazines. These are of course the places where all the good writers work. Find as many successful writers as you can that did not attend at least prestigious state university, if not an Ivy or one of their peers. Needle, meet haystack.
Believe me or don’t, but I’m not begrudging anyone over their success, either earned or claimed by birthright. It’s just a simple fact that the arbiters of good taste, who, from a deep and sincere ideological place, want writing to be accessible to the great masses of readers, themselves live in tightly-bound, exclusive communities. And in spite of pretensions of writing for the Everyman, the closest to the actual populace the work of many of these writers will ever get is a segment of This I Believe on NPR, written and delivered safely from the comfort of a suburban home outside some major city or, let’s face it, Brooklyn.
For these apostles of the simple and direct, the plain-spoken approach is not a careful decision to be applied with thought and consideration. It is rather the careless and thoughtless policing of private property, carried out with little consideration.
The mechanical enforcement of these “rules” has the effect of masking an extravagant cultural privilege under the mask of everyday simplicity. It is the linguistic equivalent of that minimalistic design aesthetic one sees on HGTV that allows the wealthy to feign humility.
As I leave this conversation, let me just ask you this. What is so wrong with adverbs? Perhaps no part of speech is as mocked by the gatekeepers of style as the adverb. Stephen King devotes several pages to this war horse in On Writing. And the truism that most writing workshop leaders thoughtlessly default to is “if you need an adverb, you’ve just chosen the wrong verb.” This just isn’t true. They don’t simply default to that truism, they actually do so “thoughtlessly.” If a part of speech calls you on your BS, don’t blame the grammar.
Adverbs literally alter verbs. Things happen in a sentence and adverbs are a tool that gives us control over those events. They allow us to pass judgment on the things that happen. To simply write them off as “weak” isn’t just “writing,” it is “simplistic.” Adverbs are power to the people.
As a working-class instructor of working-class students, I typically thrill to your anti-elitist smackdowns, but “adverbs are power to the people” is stretching me and I don’t think it’s just internalized classism. I find that adverbs can make strong verbs better, but they can’t redeem weak verbs. But that’s usually why novice writers reach for them—to compensate for the more fundamental issue of weak verbs (that, and adverbs help the word count, let’s be honest). Same goes for most of the old saws of prescriptivist style bibles—sentence fragments, starting sentences with conjunctions, ending them with prepositions. I find most of these dicta stylistically suspect (laughable, even) but pedagogically useful. Yes, adverbs are important tools. But they are precision tools that should at times be kept in the box.
In any case, I’ll be mulling this in the off season. Your capacity for poking sacred cows amazes me. Tremendously. Safe travels.
David Bentley Hart has a similar view on this: https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com/p/on-writing-part-one