Great read. As a multilingual speaker, I had quite some chuckles. And then there are pearls like these:
"Now I think it’s lovely that such a decorative language as Arabic exists. I wish I could walk around New York and hear people talking in proverbs."
"It no longer rains in America; your TV weatherman will tell that you we’re experiencing a precipitation probability situation."
"Remember: how you write is how you define yourself to people who meet you only through your writing. If your writing is pretentious, that’s how you’ll be perceived. The reader has no choice."
“Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.” (Mark Twain) (I am German btw)
I'm a big fan of this style, and I recommend Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" as the canonical take on it. He would have a field day with "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques"!
There is a tradeoff here though. Shakespeare's language was elaborate and complex but still powerful. He loved rummaging through the back of the vocabulary cupboard to find just the right word.
Orwell's, more likely than Shakespeare's. The context 'Iambic pentameter blank verse play in Early Modern English' simply doesn't come up that often. Although there is the rare exception -
I share his stylistic preferences, but Zinsser is a prick. (How's that for simple and forceful?) He's a prick suffering from a bad case of déformation professionnelle. (Ha! That isn't even English!) To further express my disdain for his advice, I have made my response extremely long.
Consider his first example:
“Dear member: The board of governors has spent the past year considering proactive efforts that will continue to professionalize the club and to introduce efficiencies that we will be implementing throughout 2009.” That means they’re going to try to make the club run better.
His translation is incomplete. "Better" isn't a synonym for "more professionally and efficiently." "Better" could mean all kinds of things. Perhaps it would be plainer to say they're trying to cut down on waste and sloppiness, but that may not be accurate either. Waste and sloppiness are relative to a person's awareness and capabilities. Perhaps raising their their awareness and capabilities to the point where they recognized waste and sloppiness in their operation was part of the process. That would be rather complicated to explain, but if they refer to "waste and sloppiness" then the reader is likely to get the impression that the waste and sloppiness have long been evident.
He also didn't communicate the time frame: they've spent a year discussing what to do, and now they're going to spend a year (or whatever remains of 2009) doing it. Whatever. He doesn't care. Their version communicates that they've done a lot of careful work to plan the improvements; he prefers a version that implies they don't know what they're doing. How easy it is to be concise when you want your readers to lose confidence in you.
Could he really write what they wanted to say more concisely? Probably so. There are some obvious improvements to make. But he refuses to try or even to offer any useful advice, because he doesn't give a shit about what they wanted to say, or what they were trying to accomplish by sending the letter. He has contempt for the task they are faced with. Contempt for what they do and what they're trying to say.
It's the same story with the next example:
“As I walk around the Academy,” she writes, “and see so many gifted students interacting with accomplished, dedicated adults” [that means boys and girls talking to teachers] and consider the opportunities for learning that such interpersonal exchanges will yield…” Interpersonal exchanges! Pure garbage. Her letter is meant to assure us alumni that the school is in good hands. I’m not assured.
She conjures an image and interprets the image. He would strip out the interpretation and leave only the concrete image of students talking to teachers. Why? Her interpretation is a sentimental, idealistic sales pitch. "Pure garbage." Well, yes, but it's her job to provide a sentimental and idealistic sales pitch. He has contempt for her writing because he has contempt for her job.
Perhaps he could do a better job in these situations, but he obviously isn't interested. In neither case does he suggest a useful alternative. Instead, he suggests they should use language that is utterly inadequate for their purpose, and then presumably start looking for a less distasteful profession.
The words derived from Latin are the enemy—they will strangle and suffocate everything you write.... Those nouns express a vague concept or an abstract idea, not a specific action that we can picture—somebody doing something.
Pity anyone who needs to communicate concepts and abstract ideas and who isn't free to use fiction or anecdote to do so. Clearly their writing skills are inferior to such people as
Joan Didion, who grew up in California and wrote brilliant magazine pieces about its trashy lifestyle in the 1960s. No anthropologist caught it better.
Should we really declare one approach to a subject "better" because it results in punchier prose? I enjoy simple, readable writing as much as anybody, and outside my ...
The article says that this was a talk so perhaps it should be considered as a mild form of entertainment. I've read "On Writing Well" and (as I recall) it's considerably less abrasive than this article.
This talk was, to me, an entertaining rant to get a point across, not a serious critique of others' writing.
> He judges everyone's prose as if they wrote for the same reasons he does
I don't entirely disagree, but the examples he uses fail in their own terms. They don't do the job the writers want them to do.
It's technically true that the timeframes are missing from the club-owners letter, but 'in the past year' is irrelevant to the audience. Do you really think it's exactly twelve months since they started 'considering'? Why should any recipient care?
You're correct that the phrase is there because the writers want to persuade the reader that they've been hard at work on their behalf. It's just such a lazy cliche that it doesn't succeed! How about "Bob, Sue and Mike spent the last three days interviewing staff about how to improve the way we run things." It's far more concrete, and so much more convincing. It's also part of a story, which is a great way to keep people reading.
> His translation is incomplete. "Better" isn't a synonym for "more professionally and efficiently." "Better" could mean all kinds of things.
But really, "to professionalize... and to introduce efficiencies" could mean all kinds of things as well. The big long fluffy phrase is so generic and crammed with platitudes that it's only marginally more specific than "run better." There's a whole lot of phrasing there that doesn't say anything. While you can argue that the big words used have semantic content, their combination nevertheless manages not to tell me anything.
Look at some of the examples he gives of good writing. They're long and complicated, but they're saying something. Unlike the buzzword bingo game above, there isn't anything you can cut that wouldn't change the content. Simpler expression makes it easier to understand complicated content.
I don't entirely disagree with everything you wrote. For example, I agree that field-specific jargon is useful and even necessary for concise communication. However, I felt that one point needed a comment, because it misses the core of his point: the words may mean something on their own, but they still don't add any meaning to the sentence that wasn't there already, and that's why they ought not to be there in the first place.
You are, in the winged words of Lrr, confused and infuriated. For one thing, this is a talk - not a detailed essay or a class. It's meant to be brief and engaging rather than a technical deconstruction of others writing. He isn't going to offer detailed alternatives or examples because he wants his audience to stay awake.
He has contempt for her writing because he has contempt for her job.
He never said such a thing. He does, rightfully, have contempt for her writing because it is bad. It is bad as writing and it is also bad as a 'sentimental, idealistic sales pitch'. Are you saying a sales pitch must be written badly?
Should we really declare one approach to a subject "better" because it results in punchier prose?
Not punchier, but better, more evocative, more accessible to a wide audience. The sort of prose a journalist should write and Zissner is, after all, speaking to future journalists. You insist on interpreting 'better' in a strangely literal, obtuse way - it's a fairly common little flourish (yes, English has them too) - and makes sense in the context. We say things like that -'the artist conveys the sense of grief/longing/joy/whatever better than any neurobiologist/psychologist/etc' all the time. It obviously doesn't mean poetry can replace the sciences.
Now he's just being lazy. He laments that people talk using "the working vocabulary of their field." Why shouldn't they? It's his job as a writer to produce the working vocabulary of his field
He's being lazy? How is he being lazy? He's telling his students that they will encounter this kind of speech and it is, indeed, their job to translate it to something better.
His whole talk is very much patterned after the stylistic advice given by Orwell in Politics and the English Language. Read it if you haven't. You might find Orwell a bit of a prick too. Or at least prickly. He's also right.
The russian language has a special term set aside for this kind of round-about linguistic constructionism – "fish language". It's like the English "legalese", but with no relation to lawyers specifically.
The idea is that a fishes mouth opens and closes all the time, but all that comes out is air-bubbles.
I'm with master George Carlin on this one, "simple, direct language" is appropriate everywhere there isn't a justified need for domain-specific terminology to be used.
> The russian language has a special term set aside for this kind of round-about linguistic constructionism – "fish language". It's like the English "legalese", but with no relation to lawyers specifically.
To me, the most interesting thing about English is that there is a lot of additional meaning invested in what seems to be a choice of synonymous words.
"I am not currently married" conveys to me "I am not married but I will/want to be".
"I am not married now" means "I am not married but I used to be".
No?
[Disclaimer: English is not my first language, though by now I have the greatest fluency in it]
You are correct, there are cases where "currently" carries a shade of meaning over "now." The author is not saying never to use "currently." He's saying that in cases where either are ok, use "now." English diction can give some very dense and precise meanings (try reading Poe!), but often people use the longer word simply because it's more ornamental rather than because of its specific connotations. This tends to hurt more than help, as many of his examples show.
I agree with and like William Zinsser on many points, and I believe he has helped countless budding authors and language learners over the years to develop good writing skills. I know I read his books years ago and profited from them (I will never forget a funny introduction to On Writing Well, where he highlighted the point that good writing skills can only be developed through persistent, hard work over a long period by featuring a conversion between an author and a brain surgeon - who did writing "on the side" - in which the author chimed in that he too planned to do some brain surgery "on the side").
That said, English is a rich, beautiful, and varied language and we should be careful not to box ourselves in with arbitrary rules that limit our style. Mr. Zinsser's admonition not to use or over-use Latin-origin words does just that and is therefore too arbitrary to be productive.
Take the word "productive," which I just used. At its root is the Latin duco, ducere, duxi, ductus, generally meaning "to lead." So we get, in English, a rich range of words such as duke, duct, deduce, reduce, induce, introduce, produce, and all their variants (deductive, inductive, productive, etc.), all useful words in the right context.
Now there are countless words like this in English, and I don't think it is meaningful to try to sort them out from words having an Anglo-Saxon lineage and others thought to have punchier qualities. After all, well over half of English vocabulary derives from Latin and it seems self-defeating to limit yourself to less than half of the words available to you in choosing ways to express yourself.
Yes, do avoid writing in a bloated or hopelessly abstract style. Use punchy verbs to liven things up as occasion allows. But don't waste your time trying to sort words out by their etymological origin because words derived from Latin are not "the enemy" and, even if some of them are stilted, many or even most are not.
If I may suggest my own rule: do not mechanically apply arbitrary rules on word choice but rather choose your words to suit the context, following your instincts for what sounds right for your intended reader.
Use punchy verbs to liven things up as occasion allows
Neither Zinsser, nor Orwell (who wrote the famous essay with similar advice) say the use of such words is to be 'punchy'. I don't know where you and the angry commenter I replied to get that from. It's not advice meant to be make your prose 'punchy' but clearer and better. 'Punchy' is, frankly, dismissive.
Latin words are, of course, unavoidable and necessary in English. They're hardly all bad. Many often sound more 'formal' and important and are thus overused, though. The advice offered is really a call for vigilance and care - it's easy to slip into the overly-ornate style. It's particularly relevant to the foreign students Zinsser was addressing.
No style rules are immutable and absolute. But the guidelines offered by Orwell and echoed by Zinsser and many others form an important baseline. It's not supposed to be a narrow rail of a style you should never stray from. You're better off learning it well, though, before you do.
As I recall, the warning about overuse of Latin derives from Fowler and goes through Strunk and White (might be mistaken about the latter), where I think the contrast is drawn with words that are described as being more "vivid."
I stand corrected on having used "punchy" in a way that appears dismissive. I am in complete agreement with the rest of your analysis as well, including with your admiration of Mr. Zinsser. Believe me, I spent years trying to master style, and I highly value the guidelines put forth by Mr. Zinsser and others to assist in that process. As long as they are not treated as rigid rules, they are most salutary (or is it healthful) for our learning.
Ah you're right, it's in Fowler and in fact, in the earlier (first edition 1906) The King's English. Fittingly, for something that evolved into a classic, it touches on almost all the points discussed in this thread, in one paragraph and a footnote:
27 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 66.1 ms ] thread"Now I think it’s lovely that such a decorative language as Arabic exists. I wish I could walk around New York and hear people talking in proverbs."
"It no longer rains in America; your TV weatherman will tell that you we’re experiencing a precipitation probability situation."
"Remember: how you write is how you define yourself to people who meet you only through your writing. If your writing is pretentious, that’s how you’ll be perceived. The reader has no choice."
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
There is a tradeoff here though. Shakespeare's language was elaborate and complex but still powerful. He loved rummaging through the back of the vocabulary cupboard to find just the right word.
http://www.runleiarun.com/lebowski/
Consider his first example:
“Dear member: The board of governors has spent the past year considering proactive efforts that will continue to professionalize the club and to introduce efficiencies that we will be implementing throughout 2009.” That means they’re going to try to make the club run better.
His translation is incomplete. "Better" isn't a synonym for "more professionally and efficiently." "Better" could mean all kinds of things. Perhaps it would be plainer to say they're trying to cut down on waste and sloppiness, but that may not be accurate either. Waste and sloppiness are relative to a person's awareness and capabilities. Perhaps raising their their awareness and capabilities to the point where they recognized waste and sloppiness in their operation was part of the process. That would be rather complicated to explain, but if they refer to "waste and sloppiness" then the reader is likely to get the impression that the waste and sloppiness have long been evident.
He also didn't communicate the time frame: they've spent a year discussing what to do, and now they're going to spend a year (or whatever remains of 2009) doing it. Whatever. He doesn't care. Their version communicates that they've done a lot of careful work to plan the improvements; he prefers a version that implies they don't know what they're doing. How easy it is to be concise when you want your readers to lose confidence in you.
Could he really write what they wanted to say more concisely? Probably so. There are some obvious improvements to make. But he refuses to try or even to offer any useful advice, because he doesn't give a shit about what they wanted to say, or what they were trying to accomplish by sending the letter. He has contempt for the task they are faced with. Contempt for what they do and what they're trying to say.
It's the same story with the next example:
“As I walk around the Academy,” she writes, “and see so many gifted students interacting with accomplished, dedicated adults” [that means boys and girls talking to teachers] and consider the opportunities for learning that such interpersonal exchanges will yield…” Interpersonal exchanges! Pure garbage. Her letter is meant to assure us alumni that the school is in good hands. I’m not assured.
She conjures an image and interprets the image. He would strip out the interpretation and leave only the concrete image of students talking to teachers. Why? Her interpretation is a sentimental, idealistic sales pitch. "Pure garbage." Well, yes, but it's her job to provide a sentimental and idealistic sales pitch. He has contempt for her writing because he has contempt for her job.
Perhaps he could do a better job in these situations, but he obviously isn't interested. In neither case does he suggest a useful alternative. Instead, he suggests they should use language that is utterly inadequate for their purpose, and then presumably start looking for a less distasteful profession.
The words derived from Latin are the enemy—they will strangle and suffocate everything you write.... Those nouns express a vague concept or an abstract idea, not a specific action that we can picture—somebody doing something.
Pity anyone who needs to communicate concepts and abstract ideas and who isn't free to use fiction or anecdote to do so. Clearly their writing skills are inferior to such people as
Joan Didion, who grew up in California and wrote brilliant magazine pieces about its trashy lifestyle in the 1960s. No anthropologist caught it better.
Should we really declare one approach to a subject "better" because it results in punchier prose? I enjoy simple, readable writing as much as anybody, and outside my ...
This talk was, to me, an entertaining rant to get a point across, not a serious critique of others' writing.
I don't entirely disagree, but the examples he uses fail in their own terms. They don't do the job the writers want them to do.
It's technically true that the timeframes are missing from the club-owners letter, but 'in the past year' is irrelevant to the audience. Do you really think it's exactly twelve months since they started 'considering'? Why should any recipient care?
You're correct that the phrase is there because the writers want to persuade the reader that they've been hard at work on their behalf. It's just such a lazy cliche that it doesn't succeed! How about "Bob, Sue and Mike spent the last three days interviewing staff about how to improve the way we run things." It's far more concrete, and so much more convincing. It's also part of a story, which is a great way to keep people reading.
But really, "to professionalize... and to introduce efficiencies" could mean all kinds of things as well. The big long fluffy phrase is so generic and crammed with platitudes that it's only marginally more specific than "run better." There's a whole lot of phrasing there that doesn't say anything. While you can argue that the big words used have semantic content, their combination nevertheless manages not to tell me anything.
Look at some of the examples he gives of good writing. They're long and complicated, but they're saying something. Unlike the buzzword bingo game above, there isn't anything you can cut that wouldn't change the content. Simpler expression makes it easier to understand complicated content.
I don't entirely disagree with everything you wrote. For example, I agree that field-specific jargon is useful and even necessary for concise communication. However, I felt that one point needed a comment, because it misses the core of his point: the words may mean something on their own, but they still don't add any meaning to the sentence that wasn't there already, and that's why they ought not to be there in the first place.
He has contempt for her writing because he has contempt for her job.
He never said such a thing. He does, rightfully, have contempt for her writing because it is bad. It is bad as writing and it is also bad as a 'sentimental, idealistic sales pitch'. Are you saying a sales pitch must be written badly?
Should we really declare one approach to a subject "better" because it results in punchier prose?
Not punchier, but better, more evocative, more accessible to a wide audience. The sort of prose a journalist should write and Zissner is, after all, speaking to future journalists. You insist on interpreting 'better' in a strangely literal, obtuse way - it's a fairly common little flourish (yes, English has them too) - and makes sense in the context. We say things like that -'the artist conveys the sense of grief/longing/joy/whatever better than any neurobiologist/psychologist/etc' all the time. It obviously doesn't mean poetry can replace the sciences.
Now he's just being lazy. He laments that people talk using "the working vocabulary of their field." Why shouldn't they? It's his job as a writer to produce the working vocabulary of his field
He's being lazy? How is he being lazy? He's telling his students that they will encounter this kind of speech and it is, indeed, their job to translate it to something better.
His whole talk is very much patterned after the stylistic advice given by Orwell in Politics and the English Language. Read it if you haven't. You might find Orwell a bit of a prick too. Or at least prickly. He's also right.
The idea is that a fishes mouth opens and closes all the time, but all that comes out is air-bubbles.
I'm with master George Carlin on this one, "simple, direct language" is appropriate everywhere there isn't a justified need for domain-specific terminology to be used.
You talking about "Канцелярит" (kantceliaryt?). "Канцелярия" means "office". Suffix "ит" here means language or disease. So "канцелярит" means "official language/disease". See http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%86%D0%B5%... http://zhivoeslovo.ru/content/view/85/143/
"Fish" (рыба) - is template or form: you need just to fill gaps between prewritten sentences. It looks like "fish bones".
(No.)
Hmm.
To me, the most interesting thing about English is that there is a lot of additional meaning invested in what seems to be a choice of synonymous words.
"I am not currently married" conveys to me "I am not married but I will/want to be".
"I am not married now" means "I am not married but I used to be".
No?
[Disclaimer: English is not my first language, though by now I have the greatest fluency in it]
That said, English is a rich, beautiful, and varied language and we should be careful not to box ourselves in with arbitrary rules that limit our style. Mr. Zinsser's admonition not to use or over-use Latin-origin words does just that and is therefore too arbitrary to be productive.
Take the word "productive," which I just used. At its root is the Latin duco, ducere, duxi, ductus, generally meaning "to lead." So we get, in English, a rich range of words such as duke, duct, deduce, reduce, induce, introduce, produce, and all their variants (deductive, inductive, productive, etc.), all useful words in the right context.
Now there are countless words like this in English, and I don't think it is meaningful to try to sort them out from words having an Anglo-Saxon lineage and others thought to have punchier qualities. After all, well over half of English vocabulary derives from Latin and it seems self-defeating to limit yourself to less than half of the words available to you in choosing ways to express yourself.
Yes, do avoid writing in a bloated or hopelessly abstract style. Use punchy verbs to liven things up as occasion allows. But don't waste your time trying to sort words out by their etymological origin because words derived from Latin are not "the enemy" and, even if some of them are stilted, many or even most are not.
If I may suggest my own rule: do not mechanically apply arbitrary rules on word choice but rather choose your words to suit the context, following your instincts for what sounds right for your intended reader.
Neither Zinsser, nor Orwell (who wrote the famous essay with similar advice) say the use of such words is to be 'punchy'. I don't know where you and the angry commenter I replied to get that from. It's not advice meant to be make your prose 'punchy' but clearer and better. 'Punchy' is, frankly, dismissive.
Latin words are, of course, unavoidable and necessary in English. They're hardly all bad. Many often sound more 'formal' and important and are thus overused, though. The advice offered is really a call for vigilance and care - it's easy to slip into the overly-ornate style. It's particularly relevant to the foreign students Zinsser was addressing.
No style rules are immutable and absolute. But the guidelines offered by Orwell and echoed by Zinsser and many others form an important baseline. It's not supposed to be a narrow rail of a style you should never stray from. You're better off learning it well, though, before you do.
I stand corrected on having used "punchy" in a way that appears dismissive. I am in complete agreement with the rest of your analysis as well, including with your admiration of Mr. Zinsser. Believe me, I spent years trying to master style, and I highly value the guidelines put forth by Mr. Zinsser and others to assist in that process. As long as they are not treated as rigid rules, they are most salutary (or is it healthful) for our learning.
Gratias tibi ago.
http://www.bartleby.com/116/101.html#5
""" Here’s a typical sentence: “Prior to the implementation of the financial enhancement.” That means “Before we fixed our money problems.” """
"fixed", "money" and "problems" are -- afaik -- what she calls latin words...
oooops!