Spence Green

For the past year I’ve been improving my writing. More specifically, I’ve been learning how to communicate technical information efficiently and with style. By “efficient” I mean that each word, paragraph, and sentence is contentful, and that thematic strings bind the story together in an accessible way. A reader can use the document as one might use an encyclopedia, i.e. there are elements throughout the running text that help the reader navigate. And by “style” I mean the cultivation of a voice: the arrangement of sentences; the careful use of symmetric; lexical choices. In technical writing, style decisions are made to help rather than to impress the reader.

“Style” in the popular sense should be avoided. In other words, don’t read Strunk and White. Geoffrey Pullum, co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, wrote recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education,

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.

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While in Atlanta last week I was digging through the magazines that tend to wash up at my family’s house. We’ve lived there for 25 years, and my dad never seems to cancel subscriptions. In Sports Illustrated I found this historical article from 16 August 1954:

The art of running the mile consists, in essence, of reaching the threshold of unconsciousness at the instant of breasting the tape. It is not an easy process, for the body rebels against such agonizing usage and must be disciplined by the spirit and the mind. It is infinitely more difficult in the amphitheater of competition, for then the runner must remain alert and cunning despite the fogs of fatigue and pain; his instinctive calculation of pace must encompass maneuvers for position, and he must harbor strength to answer the moves of other men before expending his last reserves. Few events in sport offer so ultimate a test, and the world of track has never seen anything equal to the “Mile of the Century,” which England’s Dr. Roger Gilbert Bannister–the tall, pale-skinned explorer of human exhaustion who first crashed the four-minute barrier–won last Saturday from Australia’s world-record holder, John Michael Landy.

Here is the difference between describing and articulating. Good writers describe what they see, but in an artful manner that informs the reader. Thus fatigue becomes “agonizing usage,” and we grasp the difference between running as exercise and the very different requirements of competition.  This kind of writing is increasingly hard to find in the popular press.

Is free speech free? For a moment consider this question independent of politics and economics and law. As a human being, are you free to express yourself absent some social cost? Of course not. And this certainty has inspired some reflection recently:

I can’t mention success because I will look arrogant.
I can’t admit failure because I will look weak.
I can’t really ask stupid questions because people will think I’m stupid.
I can’t show too much enthusiasm without appearing glib.
I can’t despair because that’s a treatable medical condition.
I can’t dress carelessly because I’ll look unprofessional.
I can’t wear fine fabric because I’ll be called a dandy.
I can’t be indecisive because men, even in these liberal times, are expected to act.
I can’t be too sure because I’m probably wrong anyway.
I can’t write these words without knowing that some employer, some admissions committee, some friend, some colleague, some family member, or some stranger will pause and think:

Wow, what a (   ).

And that is what we do. We are classifiers, all of us.

The usual objection to this reasoning is that self-worth should not be influenced by external opinions. But suppose that I am confident in myself. Will that get me a job? Into graduate school? A promotion? A new house? A happy marriage? Moral children? And if I am confident, and I don’t have any of these assets, how many people will believe that my confidence is real, that I am not delusional?

The more I ponder this question, the more I realize that total indifference to the opinions of others is a form of madness, or at least it’s seen that way.