Alas, a Blog

The two best writing teachers I’ve ever had were Sallie Sears, who taught a course in the contemporary novel, which I took during my junior year, and June Jordan, who led the poetry workshop, my first, which I took that same year. Professor Sears taught me how to revise my prose with an eye towards clarity and coherence, but, more than that, she taught me a profound lesson in humility. Before Professor Sears got hold of the first essay I wrote for her class, a paper on Andre Gide’s (the revised version of which I still have), I had been pretty much a straight-A writer. I’d even gotten an A in the writing class that all English majors had to take, the one taught by the professor who informed us the first day–I have long since forgotten his name–that he’d gotten his PhD at Yale, that he intended to hold us to the high standards he’d acquired at that institution, and that, since no one our age knew how to write a sentence anymore, none of us should expect to get an A in his class. I was, in other words, pretty full of myself as a writer and as the intellectual I presumed to think I was when I was all of twenty or twenty-one years old. So you can imagine my surprise and indignation when Professor Sears handed me back my paper not just filled with her red-ink, chicken scratch comments and corrections all over every page, but also with a big fat C-, also in red ink, on the front.

Who the hell does she think she is? I actually remember thinking to myself–a memory that now makes me look with (an admittedly amused) compassion and tolerance on the students I’ve had over the years who have, sometimes to my face, said the same thing about me. (I remember in particular the straight-A honors student who came to my office in tears to tell me that she didn’t get C’s, that I must have made a mistake, and who steadfastly refused for most of the semester to try any of the strategies for improvement that I offered her. When she finally did, she turned out to be one of the strongest writers I have ever taught.) Anyway, there was no way I was going to let that C- stand, and so I went to Professor Sears’ office, well-prepared in my young arrogance to show her a thing or two about writing, or at least about my writing.

Things did not, as you might imagine, go as planned. Before even I had a chance to roll out my first argument, she was showing me, at the level not of reasoning or logic, but of the sentence, where my writing lacked clarity and focus. How, she wanted to know, could I expect a reader to give my thesis any credence when I had not even had the courtesy to make sure that he or she could follow the simple meaning of my sentences? She was right, of course, and I knew it, and I left her office humbled but determined; and when I was done revising my essay, what had been a superficial five pages had transformed into a substantial fifteen page analysis that earned me one of the most important A’s of my academic career.

The lessons I learned from June Jordan were less about the sentence–I was taking a poetry workshop with her, after all–and more about how to craft a poetic line, one that had rhythmic structure, whether it held to a traditional meter or not, and in which that rhythmic structure moved not just the language forward, but the meaning as well. Central to this kind of line, she insisted, were strong, concrete verbs. Indeed, one of the best exercises she gave us was to write a poem in which we did not use any form of the verbs to be or to have. I have given this exercise to different kinds of writing classes over the years–creative writing, composition, even technical writing–but I never connected what I’ve alway thought of as a straightforward matter of word choice to the actual structure of a sentence, to what it means to make the simple meaning of a sentence clear, until now.

The next two chapters of The Well-Crafted Sentence are called “Well-Focused Sentences: The Subject-Verb Pair” and “Well-Balanced Sentences: Coordination and Parallel Structure,” and what I like about them is that they connect what are normally taught as the kind of thing you just have to learn to matters of style that are really very important for writers to pay attention to. English, she starts out by explaining, is a subject-verb-object (SVO) language. We say Cats eat mice, not Cats mice eat, as they do in subject-object-verb (SOV) languages like Persian or Korean. For writers, she goes on

the SVO order has particular significance because it represents the norm. Without really thinking about it, readers develop an expectation that, as they approach a new sentence, they’ll encounter first the subject, then the verb, and then the object. [As a result], I want to make a case for choosing subjects carefully, taking full advantage of the subject position. Because readers intuitively expect the first noun phrase in a clause to be the subject, they pay attention to that noun phrase. A wise writer will direct the reader’s attention to the key player, using the subject position to name the person or thing that the clause is really about. A sentence is well focused when the most important actor and action appear as the subject and verb. (36-37)

Bacon then goes on to illustrate both the semantic and stylistic importance of clear subjects and verbs by taking passages from some of the readings she’s included in the text and rewriting them in ways that resemble (though she doesn’t say it this way) the kind of writing my students most often produce: paragraphs in which most of the sentences have some version of the the subject-verb structures It is, It has, or There are. I have, of course, taught lessons designed to show students the weaknesses of these kinds of sentences, but it had never before occurred to me to tie those lessons explicitly to the subject-verb grammatical structure, and I like the idea of doing so because, at least potentially, it gives students a more or less objective conceptual framework on which to hang the stylistic principle I want them to learn. Whether this will work, of course, is a whole other question.

The chapter on coordination does something similar. Bacon begins by explaining the rules of coordination and parallelism, something my students often have trouble with, and I like the way her exercises hone in on identifying not just the coordinating conjunctions themselves, but also the parallel structures that are required for coordination to be done correctly. Where this chapter really shines, however, is in the exercises that ask students to imitate the authors of some of the sample readings she has chosen, providing analytical practice–if that phrase makes sense–in producing the stylistic effects of long coordinate series, as well as the various flavors of what she calls the echo effect. Here she focuses on President Obama’s speech, A More Perfect Union and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s essay Sin Boldly. Here, for example, is the sentence she uses from Obama’s speech to illustrate the echo effect of pairing:

What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part–through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience, and always at great risk–to narrow the gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time. (70)

And here is the paragraph by Gates that Bacon uses to illustrate the echo effect of repetition:

My speech was about Vietnam, abortion, and civil rights, about the sense of community our class shared, since so many of us had been together for twelve years, about the individual’s rights and responsibilities in his or her community, and about the necessity to defy norms out of love. (73)

These are structures that my students have a notoriously hard time handling. I am excited to see how they do with the imitative exercises.

Whenever I teach ENG 105, I always begin with the same lesson, the point of which is to get students thinking about how much they know about the grammar of American English without even realizing they know it. I start by putting the following sentence on the board:

The boy hit the dog with a fish.

Then I ask them to tell me how many different meanings they can find in that sentence. Eventually, usually pretty quickly, someone will raise their hand and explain that either the boy is holding the fish and using it to hit the dog, or the dog has a fish in its mouth when the boy hits it. How, I ask, is that possible? Not just that one string of words can have two different meaning, but that someone who has never formally studied grammar at the college level is able to find those two meanings with relatively little difficulty. Then I make the sentence a little more complicated:

The boy hit the dog with a fish in a box.

We spend some time puzzling out the different ways of reading that one, and then I put some other ambiguous sentences on the board:

• Visiting relatives can be boring.
• I gave her cat food.
• Did you see the girl with the telescope?
• Prostitutes Appeal to Pope.

The last one is an actual headline I copied down from somewhere a very long time ago, but even though it is a slightly different kind of ambiguity because it has to do not with the syntactical structure of the sentence per se, but with the two different meanings of appeal as a verb, it helps to make the point that my students (and remember I am talking in this series about native speakers) all have an unarticulated understanding of the underlying semantic and syntactic structure of English. If they didn’t, they would not be able to find the ambiguities.

Next, to make this point from a slightly different direction, I put on the board some sentences like these:

• The plittle gliffered the lokain.
• The foreign lankert is graffingly tired of too much voomin.

When I ask them what these sentences mean, it takes a little longer, but someone will eventually explain that, in the first instance, something called a plittle performed an action known as to gliffer on something called a lokain and that, in the second sentence, lankert, which comes from another country, has had enough of whatever a voomin is. Again, I ask my students how it is possible that they can know this, despite the fact the words most central to the sentences meaning are clearly not English. This then leads into a discussion of what linguists call the surface structure of a language, which more or less corresponds to the part of the language we see when we read or hear when we listen, and, again, the point is to illustrate for my students their own pre-existing knowledge of the subject they have taken my class to study.

Finally, just for fun, though its actually a serious kind of fun, I ask my students to tell me whether they wait in line or on line, why we (for most of us in New York anyway) get in a car but on a train, plane, or bus. Then I will ask them to tell me whether they are in school or at school, in class or at class, and to see if they can figure out the circumstances under which they would choose one preposition over the other. As they struggle to figure that out—and it doesnt really matter to me whether or not they come to any firm conclusions—I point out, again, that they would not even be able to have the discussion if they did know quite a bit about how to use their native language properly.

In the past, my goal for this lecture has been simply to pique their interest, to get them to see grammar as a subject they can own, and I use that idea to segue into the value of learning to diagram sentences as an intellectual exercise. This semester, though, I need to use this lecture, which I am loathe to change if only because it works so well, to introduce the idea that learning grammar (and we will be doing some diagramming in connection with that) will, as Nora Bacon puts it in her chapter called Clause Structure, help my students gain…control over written language [by enabling them] to read the work of other writers with a discriminating eye, which she defines as the ability to look at sentences analytically, seeing what the parts are and how they fit together (The Well-Crafted Sentence 18). ((I should say that I am skipping over the fact that, if past experience holds true, I will have to spend a weeks worth of class reviewing the parts of speech.)) Bacon begins with clause structure, which makes eminent sense, not just because it allows her to cover the three kinds of verbs (transitive, intransitive, and linking), but also because it allows her to make the point that good writers are good in large measure because of their skill in manipulating clauses. She offers these two sentences as an example of how important the conscious placement of clauses can be:

• Even though I want a piece of cherry pie, I’m committed to my diet.
• Even though I’m committed to my diet, I want a piece of cherry pie. (30)

One of these sentences represents someone who is planning to stick to her or his diet; the other represents someone who is planning not to. While my students will almost certainly be able to tell intuitively which is which, I am looking forward to finding out whether and to what degree teaching them about adverbial clauses will help them figure out how to translate that intuitive knowledge into a conscious writing practice.

Cross posted on my blog.

I have always loved this Calvin and Hobbes cartooon. It reminds me of Dr. Aaron Carton, one of my favorite undergraduate linguistics professors. One day, I was sitting in his office and he was telling me about a conference paper he was just about done with. All he needed, he said, was the right title. I do not remember what the paper was about, but it wasn't the whole title he needed help with, just what a colleague of mine always refers to as the colonic, the part of the title in academic papers that follows the colon, that is ostensibly supposed to make what precedes it more specific, more clear, and also more profound. We batted a few ideas around, and mine were always pretty straightforward. Finally, with a look of affectionate exasperation on his face, Dr. Carton said, Don't you get it, Richard? The whole point of the title of a conference paper is to sound so sophisticated and obscure that no one will really understand it, and because they won't want to admit that they don't really understand it, they will assume that it must be brilliant and won't dare ask you any questions when you're done presenting it. This was, he went on to explain, an especially useful strategy when you yourself suspected/feared (or knew) your paper was a load of bullshit.

While Dr. Carton was being tongue-in-cheek about his own work–he was one of the most lucid teachers I've ever had and rarely, that I remember, engaged in that kind of bullshitting–anyone who has had any experience sitting through panel presentations at academic conferences knows there is more than a grain of truth in what he said. All too often these papers–and I don't think it much matters what academic discipline we're talking about–are mired in jargon that even the long-initiated have a hard time following. More to the point, it doesn't matter whether the people who present such papers have made a conscious decision to (at least attempt to) dazzle their audience with bullshit; the stylistic choices they have made bespeak a relationship between themselves and their audience that is precisely the opposite of what most people are trying to achieve when they write. ((I don't want to give the impression that I am hostile to jargon. It definitely has its place, and it can, when used appropriately within a discipline, or appropriately explained to an audience outside its discipline, be remarkably clarifying. I am talking here about people whose use of jargon results in–and even appears to have been designed to result in–obfuscation.)) This fact, that writing style is not just a matter of expressing ideas, but that it also establishes a relationship between yourself and your reader, is something many of my students have a hard time understanding and that many more of them find almost impossible to integrate into their writing practice.

I'm not talking here about the fact that my students make mistakes. Of course they do; mistakes are a prerequisite of learning. I'm talking about those students who resist seeing that their mistakes are indeed mistakes, things that can be corrected and improved on with practice. As I suggested in part one of this series, some of this resistance comes from the fact that the workings of the sentence, which is the cornerstone of any effective writing style, are a mystery to most of my students, but it also comes, I think, from the fact that they've never really examined writing-as-a-practice through the lens of style, which is why I appreciate the fact that the first chapter of Nora Bacon's The Well-Crafted Sentence is called Approaches to Style. She writes:

Style can be understood as the quality of writing that makes it uniquely and recognizably the creation of one writer; as the ornamentation that transforms pedestrian prose into something beautiful or memorable; and as the effort to make language clear and concise.

There is a lot to like about this chapter, and I am going to spend some time later today working through how I want to teach it, but what interests me right now is how reading this chapter has crystallized for me an idea I have been kicking around for quite a while: that there is a connection between and among the fact that style defines identity, that my students (or at least the students I am talking about in these posts) are native speakers of English, and their seemingly intractable resistance to revision.

In an essay called The Three Faces of Love, the Australian poet A. D. Hope asks why no one has thought much about the education of poets in our society. ((In The Poet's Work, edited by Reginald Gibbons, 110)) No one would need to ask that question today, at least not in the United States, given the proliferation of MFA programs in creative writing, though it may still be a relevant question in countries that do not have, or do not have many, such programs. I am less interested in the question itself, though, than in the way his answer distinguishes between what it takes to learn to master the the materials of other artforms and what it takes to master the medium of poetry, which is language.

[A]ny painter or musician or dancer has to spend years of concentrated effort under a teacher before he can give a rudimentary performance of his art. To become an accepted artist, of course, requires further years of independent and intelligent practice. Now little of this preliminary training is needed to become a writer. The physical skill required is negligible and one that all literate people possess. Only in countries like China is calligraphy actually a part of the literary skill…. (110-111)

Hope, of course, is pointing out that the skill it takes to hold a pen in one's hand and write legibly is not only considerably easier to master than the skill it takes to hold a brush in one's hand and paint competently, but also that it is most likely a skill that anyone who has gone to school mastered a long time before the idea of wanting to be a poet ever came to her or his head. This prior mastery of the poet's medium, however–or the novelist's, the playwright's, the essayist's, and so on–goes even deeper, since anyone who knows enough to know that he or she wants to be a writer is already a native speaker of her or his first language.

We tend to discount the mastery that native fluency is because our relationship to our first language is in some ways like the relationship between a fish and the water it lives in. We take it for granted. At the level of day-to-day business, all else being equal, our first language moves through us just as we move through it, pretty much effortlessly. More to the point, the shape of that effortlessness–the way we speak: our accent, our syntactic and semantic idiolect, our intonation and body language–is hard to separate from who we are, as both an interior experience and an exterior presentation. We know who we are, in other words, and we are known as who we are, in large measure, through our use of language. Part of the process of learning to write is learning to extend that sense of self–again, as both interior experience and external presentation–onto the written page. We want there to be, I would even say that we need there to be, some continuity between who-we-are-face-to-face and who-we-are-on-the-page. Indeed, if I had to characterize the most common form of helplessness I see in my students when they confront the challenge of writing and revising anything, it would be as a kind of paralysis before the certainty that what they write just won't sound like them, by which I mean that it will not bespeak the native-speaking competence that they know they possess (even if they don't know it explicitly), along with the equal certainty that they don't know how to make it otherwise.

The confidence that you can make it otherwise is one characteristic of a competent writer, even if that confidence is, as Robert says of himself as a student in this comment on my first post, rooted more in intuition than formal grammatical knowledge (though Robert's writing is far from merely competent). The question I am confronted with on a daily basis when I am teaching is how to help students who don't have that kind of intuition acquire some measure of that confidence. Bacon's first chapter has started me thinking again about how threatening it must be, at the level of selfhood, for students who don't have that kind of intuition about language–for whom language has never really been a manipulatable medium for making meaning, but has always been, simply, the unselfconscious way they say what they mean–to be told that their grammar is wrong, that they need to learn the rules. More and more I am becoming convinced that the way to help these students to develop the kind of confidence I am talking about it is to demystify the sentence, not simply as a static structure with parts that can be labeled, but as a structure with movable parts that can be used to build, to change, to hone, to communicate in a voice and with a style that is no less true to the person who writes it than her or his spoken communication.

Next post: clause structure.

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