Writing Right
SIMMONS, TRACY LEE
Writing Right Our words, ourselves BY TRACY LEE SIMMONS We Americans are inveterate self-improvers. But were also a choosy lot. We prefer to hand-select our virtues, punching through some of the...
...Or at least they try to get along...
...The he or she solution is fine, W alsh writes, if you re dealing with one or maybe two pronoun conicts, but if it sends you down an endless road of his or her references, you might as well add a footnote apologizing to hermaphrodites...
...Still, we can quibble...
...And unlike most teachers of decades past, the new recruits dont handle their weapons very well...
...Most person constructions arent necessary at all, and they re almost always ugly...
...Then again we shouldnt dump too much on lame schools...
...This book is full of such simple and balanced rules of thumb...
...Lets remember first, though, the groundbreakers in the field...
...Why a rap forum on word usage anyway...
...Another chapter, called Holding the (V irtual) Fort, delves depressingly into the chaos let loose by the Internet and the empty-headed word bandits itll make of us all if no one is placed on patrol...
...The use of hopefully as a sentence modi-fiermeaning it is to be hoped that marks a signature blooper for many of us who care about the state of the language...
...Whether or not theres a language instinct, as some claim, theres certainly no instinct for g;ood languagethat is, language that can be, in the right hands, clear, complex, exuberant, and subtle...
...I am...
...F or her part, Wallraff says she stays away from this kind of disembodied hoping in her own writing...
...improperly used, it escapes the confines of the office or laboratory and infects the language the rest of us use...
...Within this book, were told, verbal virtue is rewarded, crimes against the language are punished, and poetic justice gets meted out...
...As the American Heritage Dictionary instructs us, while this hopefully can indeed be justified by analogy to other adverbs, this usage is by now such a bugbear to traditionalists that it is best avoided on grounds of civility, if not logic...
...Try as we might to allay or overturn the effects of a lifetime of formulaic, pap reading, we ca^t easily pry open an atrophied ear...
...Some of us still use he as an impersonal pronoun, at least when we can get away with doing so...
...Aficionados of the English language are rarely bipartisan...
...Good language, like the cello, is learned...
...Both authors could have brought jargon, that miscreant extraordinaire, into the dock for more hectoring than they did...
...In fact, its anti-prose: It militates against meaning...
...Historian Jacques Barzun has reminded us that while hordes of the gym-toned, Starbucks-sipping set may give up smoking to avoid cancer, diet to grow more shapely, work on their bad posture or memory, [and] take courses to better their minds or increase their charm, they re not apt to overhaul their vocab -ulary and grammar, let alone improve the quality of the sounds they utter...
...Its good advice, as the pronoun police stand watch at every corner...
...Chairperson she considers harmless enough, and perhaps it is, but its also clunky, and chairman no longer calls up an exclusively male picture...
...Walsh walks into another thicket when he blesses the old light and airy word gay as the mainstream word for homosexuals...
...Wallraff says a bit more about it...
...Wallraff handles delicately a few contemporary hornets nests Fowler knew nothing about...
...Consult your motives the next time they pass your lips...
...Indeed, jargon can almost be scrutinized as a virus...
...Congressperson is even worse...
...Hes not out so much to make us stylists as to prevent us from looking like idiots...
...We dont so much learn it as take it in through our pores...
...Walsh, just civilized...
...It offers brief, practical hints for achieving simplicity on a sheet of paper...
...The answer is that were at a loss for words...
...Barbara Wallraff, a senior editor at the Atlantic Monthly, has been doing the work of angels for years through Word Court, her regular column where alleged sins of the word, mortal and venial alike, are brought to the bench for adjudication...
...In other words, pick your battles...
...Few dispute that judgment calls must be made, but some are apt to apply stricter rules than others...
...But they really make us dimmer...
...They stamp us as certainly as does a cologneor bravado belching . Teachers and other guardians of self-esteem have taught us to believe in our self-sufficiency...
...But amidst the din, we find, some of us are trying to mark ourselves off from the dirty commoners...
...Its not so much the quality of Wallraffs pronouncements that stays with ushigh as that isbut her welcome and refreshing solicitous-ness...
...But no matter...
...They drip with self-importance...
...We cant writeor recognizelilting cadences or well-placed words because we dont often read or hear them...
...Adopting chic contemporary parlance, we could call his thoroughly delightful Lapsing into a Comma a user-friendly book (neither author, by the way, puts paid to that little monstrosity of an adjective...
...Its here...
...What, for instance, about current fashions in usage, especially those touching upon gender...
...Im just the mighty Oz pulling all the ropes and levers behind the curtain...
...Its value as a pocket ank against the sacking of the modern mind is almost scriptural...
...Sitting on an airplane recently, I heard a man ask a co-worker over the phone, Can we access your input at the meeting next Thursday...
...Marriage to these two books will keep us on trimmed, well-trodden paths...
...His chapter titles are worth the price of the book...
...He designed his usage manual, he writes, for all writers and copy editors, which isnt so tiny a group, for in a way all literate people are copy editors, whether they be writers rewriting their own work or simply avid readers noticing a typo on a cereal box...
...Recognizing this fact, though, ought to make us more intelligently skeptical of todays fashions and the foul words they give rise tosay , chairperson...
...Yet Im nowhere to be found in that sentence...
...Thats a cheap shot, because W alsh is too...
...Thats the way jar -gon works...
...we can hear the stilts creaking under the weight...
...And Walsh does too, he admits, if only to avoid the scorn of the misinformed legions...
...And his Dash It All, P eri-od: The Finer Points of Punctuation doesnt lay out the fi ner points at all, just the basic ones, which need expounding a good deal more just now...
...Back then, readers knew in their bones that, for example, mixing pronoun numbers Each plaintiff led their briefs calls the writers care into question...
...Fowlers Modern English Usage, without which civilization might have ended long ago...
...But some are...
...is one, in which he demonstrates to adults the fine art of using a dictionary...
...This is a handbook on usage for those who do^t like usage handbooks...
...Dont laugh...
...Get used to it...
...So we should^t be surprised to fi nd a small but insatiable market for books purporting to keep us on the high road of verbal decency...
...The rigors of grammar, along with activities like counting iambic feet and memorizing august passages from literature written before 1965, have been left behind...
...While some teachers still impose high penalties on students who talk and write like dolts, such teachers are a besieged platoon fighting a rearguard action...
...Take the words that tumble forth from our mouths, pens, and computer keyboards...
...Its a pretentious patchwork sewn together from a box of drab, predictable patterns, designed to convey some misty idea or picture, but mostly to grab our lapels with the writers insight and profundity...
...Our suspicion isnt confined to home...
...Wallraff makes us ponder much that we deemed either instinctive or beyond our mental grasp...
...Many of the old rules werent old as rules go...
...His Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin will be published this fal...
...The urge to use them ought to be stanched, unless were joking...
...Im not quite certain this bilge is even English, let alone prose...
...Word Court assembles her more judicious opinions, and it stands neatly alongside Elements as an entertaining browse through garden-variety blunders we all make every dayvague and improper pronouns, missing antecedents, hopefully, between you and I, et cetera: all those sticking points of grammar most of us would be hard pressed to explain...
...Wait: Whos hoping...
...One sure way to recognize jar-gonother than by buzzwordsis by the way its built...
...Vigilance is the only antidote...
...We use, overuse, and misuse words like parameter and clc^sur^e, probably the two sexiest words aloft today...
...Weve reached a stage in our cultural devolution where newspapers count as literature...
...Slick, mechanistic metaphors may be inevitable in the age of the microchip, but that doesnt palliate or excuse their elemental crappiness...
...Democracy may be a corking good ideal, but somehow it isnt fetching in the mirror...
...Never true...
...Our scant, lumpish vocabularies echo the cheap pomp of techno-speak, the slangy banter of TV sitcoms, and the throbbing dreck of pop music...
...Such an act could become as mysterious as a Masonic Rite before long...
...A glance into a few classrooms will reveal that many English teachers arent teaching English anymore, but something far more lax, an amalgam we might call cultural-consciousness-through-words...
...its quick, elegant, and swerves around that pothole of he or she...
...That last sentence is^t so much an ordering of single, sovereign words as it is a grouping of word clustersat this point in time, paradigm shift, recognized parameters, on a daily basis...
...they were conventions, the verbal fashions of the moment...
...Y et the words we use are part of the gingerly wrapped rsum package we present to the world...
...Hes right, though thats clumsy as well...
...conspicuously educated at all nowadays...
...We get a tour through the minefields of disagreement amongst her faithful and far-ung readerssome seeking advice, others delivering encyclicals on the way things ought to be, all believing profoundly that the way we say things matters...
...The foremost guide is, of course, H.W...
...Here we need fine judgment, and Wallraff provides it with no posturing, and shes usually to be found on the side of good sense...
...Y ou Could Look It Up...
...Its a lazy habit, and one to which the clever are signally prone, especially if theyve been to college...
...Walsh, adroit arbiter that he is, points out that this usage is^t so different from that of frankly in F rankly, what you say isnt true...
...For along with low schooling, jargon has made itself a bottomless fount of turgid verbiage, especially over the last fifty years or so when science has been enjoying high rewards...
...Any writer who doesnt have this one isn t one...
...He belongs to a newer fraternity of authors on style and usage who, while being eminently helpful, also try to make their guidance palatable to the fearful by coaching with a sassy, quirky edge...
...Pay special attention to Giving 110 P ercent: Why You Needed All Those Math Classes After All...
...Its queer...
...We of course need to look up such things...
...Hopefully, he wo^t mind...
...A fairer explanation of our verbal ineptitude in an age of striking practical feats must be the cheapness of our reading...
...One suspects that many of the sensible queries made by Wallraffs readers wouldnt have been brought eighty years ago, not because readers were more intelligent, but because those who read books read better books than we do...
...We think jargon makes us sound in the know, but to those with ears to hear, it reveals within us a dearth of confidence or a want of words...
...Most of us would settle for a little prosaic justice, and here we get it, though its tempered with mercy...
...But choices are usually abundant, and theres no need to cause undue offense...
...Spicing our talk with them makes us feel a little smarter...
...Allow me to pick a skirmish with Walsh...
...We just know bigger, more expensive words...
...He simply takes us by the scruff of the neck and guides us through the funda-mentalsagain, teaching us the tricks that used to come free of charge in public schools...
...Or take this specimen from a memoa general memo not directed to a specialized crowdsomeone passed on to me: At this point in time the paradigm shift extends beyond recognized parameters on a daily basis...
...This should give us pause...
...We prefer to hand-select our virtues, punching through some of the choices clearly and dimpling the rest...
...We wont find Bill Walsh, a senior copy editor at the Washingtton Po^t, laying down Draconian laws, nor yawning over quotidian details...
...But somewhere deep within our spiked self-regard smolders an inkling that, despite all the college fees weve paid and books weve skimmed, we cannot speak or write much better now than we could in the eighth grade...
...Only with a magnifying glass can we set apart the educated from the uneducated stranger, as few people are Tracy Lee Simmons is director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College...
...And as he does with other such obstructions, he provides clean rewrites: A trader can place his or her orders becomes Traders can place their orders...
...Properly used, its a shorthand to ease the work of specialists...
...And Strunk and Whites Elements of Style deserves its press...
...Just so...
...Whenever we peruse books about English usage, we get the sense that the world of word lovers is divided between Apollonians and Dionysians, Guelfs and Ghibellines, Republicans and Democrats, gentlemen and cads...
...W ere not misinformed, Mr...
...Walsh tells us that he is on the side of neither those who follow time-honored rules nor those who let rip whatever occurs to them...
...But we must not ignore new handbooks for the verbally engaged or challenged...
...If theres one book of this kind to post at your elbow as you write, this is the one...
...Yet this is^t a dodge...
Vol. 6 • February 2001 • No. 21
