Good Prose (15 page)

This is fun and highly readable. Like its antecedents, the new vernacular represents a democratic impulse, an antidote to vanity and literary airs. It’s friendly, it’s familiar. But familiar in both senses. The new vernacular imitates spontaneity but sounds rehearsed. It has a franchised feel, like the chain restaurant that tells its patrons “You’re family.”

In part this is just a matter of cliché. Some writers try to casualize their prose with friendly phrases such as “you know” or “you know what?” Or even “um,” as in “um, hel-lo?” The op-ed columnist, repeating a point for emphasis, says, “Oh, and did I mention?” The blogger’s beloved initialisms, such as “OMG,” “LOL,” “OTOH,” now find their way off the screen and into type. “Whatever” serves to dismiss an argument. Or maybe just “Duh.”

The new vernacular writer is studiedly sincere. Sincere even
when ironic, ironically sincere. Whatever its other goals, the first purpose of such prose is ingratiation. Of course, every writer wants to be liked, but this is prose that seeks an instant intimate relationship. It makes aggressive use of the word “you”—“bet you thought”—and even when the “you” is absent, it is implied. The writer works hard to be lovable.

The new vernacular prose is studded with amiably self-questioning qualifiers, such as the all-purpose “kind of,” especially useful as a modifier of otherwise extravagant remarks. Things aren’t wrong, they are “kind of heinous.” Things aren’t good, they are “really sort of magnificent.”

These last usages are, far from being street talk, the vernacular of a branch of the intelligentsia. The late David Foster Wallace entitled an essay on contemporary fiction “Certainly the End of Something, One Would Sort of Have to Think.” Wallace was both a supple and complicated thinker, and a master of the self-effacing mode, his busy mind darting easily from slang to hermeneutics. In fact, a writer in
The New York Times
, Maud Newton, traced the origin of “the whole thing,” a favorite phrase of his, to Wallace. The problem with “the whole thing,” she allows, lies not with the brilliant Wallace but with his imitators, who mimic his tics but lack his intellect. And they are legion.

Breeziness has become for many the literary mode of first resort, a ready-to-wear means to seeming fresh and authentic. The style is catchy, and catching, like any other fashion. Writers should be cautious with this or any other stylized jauntiness—especially young writers, to whom the tone tends to come easily. The colloquial writer seeks intimacy, but the discerning reader,
resisting that friendly hand on the shoulder, that winning grin, is apt to back away.

To those who weigh in on styles of American English prose, the archvillain is the anticolloquial mode, the megaphone of The Organization. If the person behind the colloquial style sounds a little too perky, there appears to be no person at all behind institutional prose, typically the language of concealment and pomposity. Its characteristics are well known, much maligned, and therefore, one would incorrectly think, generally avoided.

Institutionalese tends to obscure responsibility for what is being said, or to locate it in a heavenly source. One hears that old bugaboo, the passive voice: “Mistakes were made”; “Actions will be taken.” Everyone recognizes the phenomenon. Why does it continue? The skeptical reader will credit the offending writer not with ineptitude but with a positive talent for obfuscation. The annual report writer declares, “Year-end results were negatively impacted by seasonal downward profit adjustments, consistent with global trends, insufficiently offset by labor force reductions.” It’s not that the guy doesn’t know how to say, “We lost money last fall, fired some people, but it was a tough year all around.” He either doesn’t want to say that, or, more likely, would get fired if he did. Sometimes people simply have to give the appearance of saying something without the risks that come with doing so. Then prose becomes dowdy clothing, concealing more than it reveals.

One expects this kind of prose from governments and corporations, but the academy produces some wondrous examples too, prose that is opaque unto incomprehensibility. Here is a sentence from a highly respected literary scholar, published in the journal
Diacritics:

This is not a parody, just an extreme example of its type. The passage, published several years ago, achieved a certain immortality when it won first prize in a “bad writing” contest sponsored by another journal,
Philosophy and Literature
. The sentence is notable for its reliance on academic jargon, but even without understanding its meaning, one can sense that revision would help. Indeed you want to save the sentence from itself, to suggest, perhaps, that the writer shorten the distance between the first subject and its predicate (thirty-three words). Often one of the most helpful things an editor can say to a writer is, “Make
this two sentences.” In this case the answer would probably be more like five. Not that one would want to put a word limit on sentences. Some great writers (Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf, for instance) have spun them out at impressive length. But clarity can sometimes be achieved simply by giving every idea a sentence of its own.

Much overstuffed prose reflects a desire to bully, to impress, or to hide. And yet it must be granted that some writers in this mode do not really find themselves in the morass by choice. Some are actually trying to be clear, even literary. What makes them fail? Inflation of language is sometimes not a boast but a cosmetic for insecurity. It takes some confidence to write clearly.

Certain constructions attract writers in hiding. One, at least, is old enough for Fowler to have given it a name: “the sentry clause.” He describes it under the heading “
PARTICIPLES
. 4. Initial participle &c.” The passage reads in part:

A contemporary example of the sentry clause might go something like this:
A longtime student of history, he entered politics as a state representative at age thirty-five
. There is nothing grammatically wrong with this sentence, but it betrays a desire on the part of the writer to sound serious or literary at the expense of clarity. It is unlikely that the writer would ever speak such a sentence
in conversation. But to the uncertain stylist, simple declarative sentences sound insufficiently important.

The initial dependent clause is a dubious construction under the best of circumstances. A sentence built on it is usually weaker than a straightforward declarative sentence.
A devoted husband, he bought her a diamond bracelet
. The usual problem is that the reader expects the clause to be logically connected to the statement that follows, but the nature of the logic is fuzzy. Do diamonds suggest devotion, or does the guy have something to hide?

Things get worse when the two parts of the sentence don’t connect at all:
An avid duck hunter, he likes opera and soft porn. An Indiana native, Polly is the mother of three
. Does the writer mean to suggest that Hoosiers are naturally fertile? Obviously not. Readers aren’t supposed to think anything. It only sounds as if they are. The ghost of logic haunts these constructions. They have been around for a long while, but tradition does not validate them.

The nervous writer is also likely to exhibit a morbid fear of repetition. Here is a recent candidate for the presidency, Governor Rick Perry of Texas, struggling for gravitas: “Even if someone is attracted to a person of the same sex, he or she still makes a choice to engage in sexual activity with someone of the same gender.”

In cases like this, the effort to avoid repetition only calls attention to itself. Here, too, Fowler can be helpful, with his term “elegant variation,” which sounds like a compliment but isn’t. Fowler writes of this error with evangelical feeling, both excessive and splendid:

What is elegant variation? Suppose you are writing about housing prices in Boston and you say, “Houses on Beacon Hill without exception list above seven figures, but the occasional residence in Back Bay can be found for under a million dollars.” Expressing “a million” in two different ways isn’t confusing, but the careful reader might well wonder whether you are making a distinction between “houses” and “residences.” The second word stands out because the reader suspects it is there only to avoid being the first. But the reader can’t be sure. You could be fudging the statistics, for instance, to include lower-priced apartments as “residences.”

Finally—finally at least for a short list—the pompous but self-doubting writer has a penchant for overfamiliar metaphor, sometimes for multiple familiar metaphors.
We need to grease the skids if this project is ever going to catch fire and take us to the Promised Land
. When metaphors are fresh they are a form of thought, but when they are stale they are a way to avoid thought.
Tip of the iceberg
offends the ear as a cliché, and it offends reason because it is imprecise, if not spurious—just as when people say, “And the list goes on,” and one knows that they have actually
run out of examples. Often the writer will try to excuse the cliché by acknowledging it (“the proverbial cat that ate the canary”) or by dressing it up (“the icing on the marketing cake”). These gambits never work. A cliché is a cliché. Orwell took a hard line on tired metaphor. In “Politics and the English Language” he wrote, “Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” One wouldn’t want to forbid writers from using the occasional ancient phrase—
a dog in the manger
or
the boy who cried wolf
—but on the whole, Orwell gives sound advice. The mind that relies on cliché does not really know what it is saying.

But read the pompous writer with sympathy! A scared and a confused creature lurks behind the self-important drone of that voice. He is hiding things from the reader but also, in all likelihood, from himself. And if you should find yourself sounding that way, ask yourself what you are trying to avoid.

Ever since Orwell’s novel
1984
, the world has had a keener ear for the manipulation of vocabulary in the service of ideology or of the state. It is not unusual in any political contention to hear one side or another accuse the opponent of “Orwellian” language, the blatant distortion of meaning to benefit one’s position. Ongoing debates are framed in self-serving terms, and these terms are depressingly effective at preventing discussion. Early in the game, the abortion controversy froze into a dualism: “right to life” vs. “freedom to choose.” In 2011, the debate over marginal
tax rates created two loaded ways of characterizing rich people: “America’s most fortunate” vs. “job creators.” If you feel passionately about one side or the other in such debates, fine; only you must not succumb to the language that seeks to persuade merely by naming.

The most dangerous propaganda is that which one fails to recognize—the language that insinuates itself into the general consciousness, language that seems to represent consensus but, on a closer look, obscures differences. This is the language that truly blocks understanding.

Let’s take a single word much with us in early-twenty-first-century America: “terrorism.” Objecting to a word is usually a fool’s game. There are no bad words, only bad contexts. The most vulgar obscenity can be made tender by lovers; the worst racial epithet can be tamed by its victims. But since the destruction of the World Trade Center, “terrorism” has come about as close to a bad word as the American language contains. Bad in its imprecision, its unexamined premises, its power to confuse, its unique ability to demonize.

“Terrorism.” This big, capacious, amorphous word, big enough for everyone’s hatreds and fears, has been used by so many people for so many ends that writers simply have to know what they mean when they use it, and somehow make that meaning plain to their readers.

The economy of words is a wondrous system. Language is free and available to all in limitless quantities, an utterly democratic commodity. But as soon as you help yourself to this bounty you can begin to trade in your own identity. A great deal of the common language is borrowed without much thought from a
part of the culture that may or may not represent the writer, a culture with which the writer may or may not want to be allied. Use enough words wantonly and you disappear before your own eyes. Use them well and you create yourself. This is why writers must own their language. Own your language or it will own you.