Writing

I came across this post I wrote years ago on a now defunct blog. Those doing papers for an MA might, just might, learn something.

Here are a few examples that I've selected of what I consider "good writing".

“I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass.” Maya Angelou

…………………………

The human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out a tune for a dancing bear, when we hope with our music to move the stars. Gustave Flaubert.

…………………………..

Your first thought is to have learners describe pictures that depict various actions (e.g., a man being hit by a ball, a dog being kissed by a boy). Unfortunately, the learners, who are experts at avoidance, produce very few examples of the structure in question. You then modify the task and tell the learners to start with the patient; that is, with the object of the action. You even point to "a man" and to "a dog." This doesn't work very well because the learners do not do what is being asked; they still begin with "ball" and "boy" You are thus left with the question: Did they not produce the requisite passive because (a) they don't have the linguistic knowledge, (b) the active sentence is easier to formulate, or (c) they didn't understand how to carry out the task? There are too many possibilities as you attempt to interpret the data. Only the first interpretation will help you in dealing with your research questions. It is therefore necessary to question the value of this research elicitation method. Alison Mackey and Susan M. Gass

............................

Somewhere there was once a Flower, a Stone, a Crystal, a Queen, a King, a Palace, a Lover and his Beloved, and this was long ago, on an Island somewhere in the ocean 5,000 years ago … Such is Love, the Mystic Flower of the Soul. This is the Center, the Self.  Carl Jung

………………..

Until recently, Marx used to be treated in academic circles with contemptuous silence, broken only by an occasional mocking footnote. But modern developments in academic theory, forced by modern developments in economic life — the analysis of monopoly and the analysis of unemployment — have shattered the structure of orthodox doctrine and destroyed the complacency with which economists were wont to view the working of capitalism. Their attitude to Marx, as the leading critic of capitalism, is therefore much less cocksure than it used to be. In my belief, they have much to learn from him. Joan Robinson.

…………………….

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. Syvia Plath.

.........................

Has this ever happened to you? Summer vacation has started, you’ve just settled in to your cabin on the lake, when suddenly you remember: You have a contract to write an introduction to SLA, and the manuscript is due next week. What do you do?

Well, if you decide not to go back to the office and actually work, you might try to write down as many of the standard topics as come to mind—learning versus acquisition, performance versus competence, morpheme acquisition, processability, critical period, UG, connectionism, and so forth—and scribble a few anodyne lines about each, without actually providing any details about any. If you did that, you might wind up with something not too different from Saville-Troike’s truly embarrassing new book. Kevin Gregg

………………….

I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you

Till China and Africa meet,

And the river jumps over the mountain

And the salmon sing in the street.

I’ll love you till the ocean

Is folded and hung up to dry

And the seven stars go squawking

Like geese about the sky.  W. H. Auden

Discussion

Why are they good? Because they’re rhythmic. They all set up a rhythm, they flow, they lead you on. That’s the first and most important criterion of good writing: it leads you on by getting you in the groove. But it leads you on in different ways, though: rhythm in writing is created by the stress patterns of the words in a sentence, and sentences are hugely variable. 

It’s almost impossible, in my opinion, to lay out the declarative knowledge required to write rhythmically, and here we are again with the declarative versus procedural knowledge conundrum. Is writing a skill? Yes it is. Is it best taught by explaining the rules? No, it isn’t, at least it isn’t if we want to go beyond the rules of a particular genre like academic writing, where the current conventions of citing sources, avoiding the passive voice and not using contractions are so stupidly adhered to.  

The trick is to concentrate on actually producing texts. Write a few paragraphs. Read them out loud. How do they sound? Not good? Why not?  Is SentenceOne too hurried? Is Sentence Two too long? You could say, for example, that different rhythms can be got by using long sentences (fluid, easy, smooth) or short sentences (crisp, snappy, up-beat), but it never really gets to the heart of the matter, does it? Because you have to feel it, and, like Auden’s love poem, you know when you’ve got it right. 

There’s this mixture of trusting your instinct and being aware of what you’re doing. You have to trust your feel for the rhythm of what you write, but you also have to check time and time again that you’ve got the right effect. Bach swings seemingly without effort, but we know he sweated buckets to keep that rhythmic flow and keep it fresh. Charlie Parker was the master: he could keep the rhythm going no matter what. He could let the band go, catch it up and grab the rhythm by the scruff of its neck when you felt it was far too late, and Ella Fitzgerald could do the same. Both Parker and Fitzgerald had rhythm in their bones; their genius was the way they bent it, but anyway, they felt and understood rhythm; they knew about it, they used it knowingly.

In writing, Dickens was a master of rhythm (the first page of Bleak House, for example), and so, in my opinion, were Kingsley Amis, who wrote splendid essays about writing, as has his son more recently (see Martin Amis’ The War Against Clichés). In non-fiction, examples of great rhythmic prose are George Orwell’s Joan Didion's and Cathy Park Hong's essays, Alan Bennett's and Anais Nïn's diaries, and the journalistic pieces of Martha Gellhorn, Nellie Bly, Rima Maktabi, Mariella Frostrup, Christopher Hitchens, Gore Vidal and Clive James.  All these great writers had a natural “don” for swing, for rhythm, but they all combined it with enormous amounts of work honing their craft.

Attention to rhythm goes hand in hand with attention to fresh and lively prose. My advice to writers is to step off the well-trodden path and stop using worn out language. It doesn't matter if you make some grammatical mistakes, find your voice and dance a bit. Take a look again at the examples above: all of them swing rhythmically, all of them use inventive, lively language, none of them uses worn-out clichés.

The rhythm of good writing swings and its fresh use of words excites - it sings. Even when you write a 3,000 word assignment for an MA  module on pronunciation, you can make it swing and sing. You can combine coherence and cohesion with grace and delight. You can step off the well-trodden path and enjoy yourself and the reader. If you don’t believe me, read any article published by Kevin Gregg, whose prose is, IMHO the high mark of lucid, concise, beautiful academic writing. (Just by the way, Gregg has, through his unusually brilliant scholarship and critical acumen, done more than most to advance our understanding of SLA) .

As so often in literary appreciation, it’s easier to give a list of “Don’ts” than “Dos”. George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” is often cited for its list of "Don't"s, but the famous six rules strike me as very thin soup. I'm not impressed by them; in fact, I really don't get why Orwell's essay is so highly regarded.

Here are a few remarks about good writing:

“When in doubt, leave it out!” Charlie Parker

“Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.” Zadie Smith

"Someday the English teachers of the world are going to be made to suffer for what they do to writers." Shirley Jackson

"Say what you're going to say; say it; say that you've said it". Anon

“The only way anybody ever learns to write well is by trying to write well. This usually begins by reading good writing by other people, and writing very badly by yourself, for a long time.” Ursula Le Guin

"Remember your reader does not have access to your mind, only what is on the page; it is easy to believe you have said what you mean just because you know what you mean." Walsh

Best of all, IMHO:

"The golden rule: ‘The only kind of writing is rewriting’. Ernest Hemingway.