style Archives - The Elements of Writing

Tom Wolfe’s Lesson on Writing with Pizzazz

Two kinds of mindsets prevail among writers.

Style 1, the Clear and Simple School, insists that the purpose of writing is to inform and entertain as simply as possible. Partisans of this style call for short sentences, simple words, and uncomplicated messages. Forget about symbolism or erudite allusions. The Clear and Simple School is the literary version of Joe Friday: Just the facts, ma’am.

Style 2, the Rococo School, insists that clear and simple is really shallow and boring. Why not jazz up the prose? the Two Group asks. Why not create several layers of meaning, even in the simplest phrases? Why not offer the reader new discoveries with every reading of a piece?

In fact, the two schools are not as incompatible as they might seem. You see, even the most ornate prose is usually just a collection of simple phrases and ideas. When you break down a master of literary riffing, like Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson, you see a string of simplicity.

Consider this passage from Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House, in which Wolfe peals with horrified glee at the foolishness of modern builders. He shows a horde of interior designers and construction crews swarming over a law office, carrying faux-classical materials to dress up the sterile modernist design.

Every great law firm in New York moves without a sputter of protest into a glass-box office building with concrete slab floors and seven-foot-ten-inch-high concrete slab ceilings and plasterboard walls and pygmy corridors-and then hires a decorator and gives him a budget of hundreds of thousands of dollars to turn these mean cubes and grids into a horizontal fantasy of a Restoration townhouse. I have seen the carpenters and cabinetmakers and search-and-acquire girls hauling in more cornices, covings, pilasters, carved moldings, and recessed domes, more linenfold paneling, more (fireless) fireplaces with festoons of fruit carved in mahogany on the mantels, more chandeliers, sconces, girandoles, chestnut leather sofas, and chiming clocks than Wren, Inigo Jones, the brothers Adam, Lord Burlington, and the Dilettanti, working in concert, could have dreamed of.

Now look at this passage, idea by simple idea:

Every great law firm in New York moves
without a sputter of protest
into a glass-box office building
with concrete slab floors
and seven-foot-ten-inch-high concrete slab ceilings and plasterboard walls and pygmy corridors
and then hires a decorator
gives him a budget of hundreds of thousands of dollars
to turn these mean cubes and grids
into a horizontal fantasy
of a Restoration townhouse.
I have seen the carpenters and cabinetmakers
and search-and-acquire girls
hauling in
more cornices, covings, pilasters, carved moldings, and recessed domes,
more linenfold paneling, more (fireless) fireplaces
with festoons of fruit
carved in mahogany on the mantels,
more chandeliers, sconces, girandoles, chestnut leather sofas, and chiming clocks
than Wren, Inigo Jones, the brothers Adam, Lord Burlington, and the Dilettanti,
working in concert,
could have dreamed of.

Each line is as simple as an Amish barn. This passage gets its energy form two things: the specificity of details and the piling-on of these details in just a couple of sentences.

When you want to pepper your prose with style, don’t think you need to be elaborate. In fact, think the opposite — that you need to be as simple as possible. If you find the specific details that others might not notice — and pile these details on top of each other, to create a collective portrait that overwhelms the reader — then you’ll wow the reader.

One warning, though. Don’t overdo it. Audiences love to be dazzled. They love the energy and the color of passages like this. But they can get overwhelmed too. Alternate this kind of linguistic pyrotechnics with a simpler, shorter style. Then you’ll have the best of Style 1 and Style 2.

Fish’s Lament

Why don’t students learn how to write?

If you ever spend any time with college professors, you hear endless complaints about poor writing. At the end of the week, you can tell the ones who have papers to grade. They grimace, anticipating countless lost hours trying to decipher errant sentences in jargon-filled nonarguments.

(If you think the problem is unique to the U.S., think again. The situation is not any better in Britain and other English-speaking countries.)

What’s the source of the problem? College teachers, naturally, say the problem lies with high school. If only high school English classes did a better job, profs say, we wouldn’t have to do all this remedial work. Studies show that only about one-quarter of high school seniors write well. High school teachers, in turn, blame families for not setting limits on TV, computer time, texting, and other diversions.

But this all begs the question.

According to Stanley Fish, one of the innovative legal and literary thinkers of our time, students cannot write because no one ever teaches them.

In a series of columns for The New York Times, Fish reports his alarm at reading the poor writing of his graduate students. When he realized that the grad students were teaching writing to the undergrads, he was even more alarmed. Let Fish pick up the story:

I decided to find out, and asked to see the lesson plans of the 104 sections. I read them and found that only four emphasized training in the craft of writing. Although the other 100 sections fulfilled the composition requirement, instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues — racism, sexism, immigration, globalization. These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truth-in-advertising.As I learned more about the world of composition studies, I came to the conclusion that unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing they are a sham.

Fish proposes ditching all those po-mo classes in favor of classes that teach the basic. He proposes to start with writing strong sentences. In fact, even while serving as dean, he has taught basic composition classes using this method. Again, let Fish explain:

You have to start with a simple but deep understanding of the game, which for my purposes is the game of writing sentences. So it makes sense to begin with the question, What is a sentence anyway? My answer has two parts: (1) A sentence is an organization of items in the world. (2) A sentence is a structure of logical relationships.The second part tells you what kind of organization a sentence is, a logical one, and in order to pinpoint what the components of that logic are, I put a simple sentence on the table, something like “John hit the ball” or “Jane likes cake.” I spend an entire week on sentences like these (which are easily comprehended by students of any background), asking students to generate them, getting them to see the structure of relationships that makes them all the same on a formal level, getting them to see that the motor of meaning production is form, not content.

If that sounds like a grind, think again. Once students write strong sentences, they can do anything. In my writing classes at Yale, we spent hours working on sentences and paragraphs. I insist that my students give every sentence a strong “SVO core.” Every sentence needs to state, clearly, who’s doing what to whom. In fact, I ban the use of the verbs “to be” and “to have.” This artificial constraint turns off the auto-pilot and forces students to think through what they mean to say.

We also spent lots of time on paragraphs. As a basic goal, every paragraph should state and develop a single idea. Writing goes awry when paragraphs lurch in different directions. When you say whatever pops into your head, you lose sight on your point. So I have students mark their paragraphs with two- or three-word labels. If they have two or three labels, they need to recast the paragraph into two or three paragraphs — or, better yet, delete some of the material.

Stanley Fish has taken a lot of grief for his deconstructionist approaches to the law and literature. But even his conservative critics must agree that on the question of basic writing skills, he speaks the truth.