When I was in first grade and just beginning to construct sentences beyond the most simplistic type, I had something of a revelation: I was just better at it than most of my peers. I say this not to brag—it would be morally suspect for me to dunk on first-graders’ writing skills—but to illustrate an obvious but overlooked fact: Most people don’t write well. I first learned this when my teacher, Mrs. Groves, asked me to read aloud a sentence I had written that contained an ellipsis (three periods in a row). It was clear that this was one of the first times she had seen this type of grammatical construction from a first-grader. At the time, I was confused as to why she had singled me out. After all, this punctuation mark was commonplace in the books I had been reading; nothing that I wrote was in any way remarkable compared to the prose I encountered on a day-to-day basis. But it slowly dawned on me, while glancing around the room and seeing several blank faces, that my writing was light years ahead of what my peers then could construct.
Thus began my fascination with writing. That fascination lives on today, with the most obvious consequence being the weekly(ish) production of this newsletter. So today, in lieu of a more in-depth discussion on an education topic or a review of a decades-old book that nobody talks about anymore, I figured I’d expound upon the art of writing. Ironically given the subject, I don’t expect this to be particularly structured, or to yield any special insights. Rather, I invite you to join me as I explore some of the thoughts that have been bouncing around my head for nearly 20 years.
What is the point of writing? This is a good question to try to answer. Human beings wouldn’t have produced so much writing had they not sensed that they were fulfilling some sort of purpose in doing so. There are, in fact, many purposes in writing things down. The first and most obvious is as a way to accurately reflect reality. If you write down how many apples you have, and then you open your fridge to discover that there is one fewer than the number on your sticky note, you know that either your counting skills are up to par or that there is an apple thief in your midst.
It’s also a useful way to set the record straight. Imagine, for instance, a game of telephone where instead of whispering a phrase into the ear of your neighbor, you simply wrote it down on a piece of paper and passed it along. This would destroy the game of telephone and make you wonder why you are all sitting in a circle and passing a piece of paper back and forth. After all, the point of telephone is to discover how fluid spoken language is, and how the original message can be completely corrupted by the time it has made its way around. Writing things down makes the message much clearer and harder to misinterpret.
The act of writing itself fulfills a unique purpose. It is, in many ways, an extension of thought. Contra Socrates, who feared that writing would diminish a man’s mental capacities because he would no longer have to remember his thoughts, writing has in fact been a boon to the production of ideas. Oftentimes, writers don’t know exactly what they’re thinking until they actually begin writing things down. I think this is because when you actually see the words on the page, you begin to fully grasp the meaning of those words, and you may realize that you disagree profoundly with what you wrote. I have begun and deleted several paragraphs of material in this very newsletter simply because I didn't know exactly what I would say until I started writing it. This process is incredibly important to the development of one’s mind. And it enriches our society when thinkers are allowed to express opinions through their writing.
Of course, I haven’t yet touched on one of the most crucial reasons for writing: telling stories. Throughout history, human beings have told each other stories. At first they were told by word of mouth. But when writing developed to such a degree that words on a page could capture those spoken by bards, people began writing them down. This serves two purposes: It sets the story in stone (as it were), such that it becomes immortalized and unchanging; and it facilitates dissemination across cultures. This was especially true when the printing press was invented, which supercharged the process of communicating stories to places beyond where word-of-mouth could reach.
One reason why the destruction of many Native American cultures was so devastating—beyond the obvious tragedy of thousands or millions of lives lost—is that most Native American languages had no written component. Because they passed down their traditions orally, much of their culture was wiped out along with the people whose minds contained the cultural memory of their ancestors. For whatever reason, Native Americans never developed the skill of writing. This was terrible for their progeny.
But beyond the purposes for writing, I am fascinated by it for other reasons. I love that the process of writing is both a science and an art. It’s a science because there are specific grammatical rules that one must follow in order to be intelligible. If my verbs no antecedents and my adverbs were before used improperly, you would have a hard time reading what I wrote. (Yes, that previous sentence is grammatically unsound; see how silly it sounds?) Writing is also a form of art because it’s not a process in the same way that the scientific method is. While there are strategies to produce writing—which professional writers employ to their advantage—it’s not like there is one official way to perform the task. That’s one reason why different writers produce drastically divergent works on the same subjects, or why some writers take ten years to release books while others can do it in mere months.
A good example of the diversity of the written word is the corpus of Supreme Court justices’ opinions. As one might expect given their jobs, Supreme Court justices care deeply about their writing. After all, their words carry significant weight in the functioning of American democracy. Recognizing this, justices on the Court carefully craft their opinions, ensuring to the best of their abilities that their words cannot be misinterpreted. But beyond the differences in their judicial reasoning, each Supreme Court justice has his own style of writing. I recently read the entire opinion on Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (all 267 pages of it), and the thing I was struck by most was the way each justice crafted his opinion. Of the nine justices, six of them (John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Sonia Stomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson) wrote their own opinions. And the prose of each was strikingly different. John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, was perhaps the best (in my opinion) stylist of the bunch. Clarence Thomas—whose reputation is as a judicial bomb-thrower—was more reserved than I expected, and his prose was stiffer and more formal than I anticipated. Ketanji Brown Jackson’s style was the most vibrant and perhaps memorable, even if I preferred Roberts’s construction (and reasoning). My limited understanding of such matters is that the late Justice Scalia also wrote quite eloquently (though I suspect some would accuse him of writing erratically).
Obviously, differing prose is not merely evident at the exalted level of the Supreme Court. Opinion journalists, whose livelihoods are based on constructing prose, also come up with vastly different ways of writing their columns, articles, and books. My favorite living nonfiction writer, Kevin Williamson, prefers long sentences with lots of commas, em-dashes, and tight grammar. Other writers are not such sticklers for the rules of grammar, and often break up longer sentences into smaller ones that aren’t quite grammatically correct for emphasis. Like this. Or this. While I prefer the more formal (and, to my inner ear, eloquent) construction of longer sentences that contain both a subject and a predicate, others stick with the shorter sentences that are more redolent of speeches than articles.
Nonfiction is not the only realm where different authors play around with different styles. In fact, fiction authors are perhaps more famous for shaking things up. Some authors, like the recently-deceased Cormac McCarthy, eschew conventional grammar and punctuation that they think distract from the actual narrative. When you read The Road or Blood Meridian, you’ll see that McCarthy writes “dont” instead of “don’t,” and doesn’t use quotation marks to indicate that someone is speaking. Other authors, like Salman Rushdie, write in stream-of-consciousness form that feels breathless, like the narrator desperately needs to divulge the story before it’s too late. Still others—Hemingway being the most famous—write sparsely, using words that seldom reach above a middle-school vocabulary. In fact, Hemingway’s style was enormously influential because it broke away from what he viewed as the overly stiff and dramatic words of authors like Dickens.
The evolution of prose is remarkable to behold. I just finished reading John Stuart Mill’s basic writings: three short books collected into one volume. Mill lived in the 19th century, and his writing style was formal and difficult to master. Here’s a random sample from his book The Subjection of Women:
“I readily admit (and it is the very foundation of my hopes) that numbers of married people even under the present law, (in the higher classes of England probably a great majority,) live in the spirit of a just law of equality. Laws never would be improve, if there were not numerous persons whose moral sentiments are better than the existing laws.”
Contrast that with the much simpler prose of Donald Robertson, author of How to Think Like a Roman Emperor (2019):
“By now you’ll appreciate how much confusion is caused by people mixing up ‘Stoicism’ (capital S) with ‘stoicism’ (lowercase s). Lowercase stoicism is just a personality trait: It’s mental toughness or the ability to endure pain and adversity without complaining. Uppercase Stoicism is a whole school of Greek philosophy.”
Whichever style you prefer, there’s no denying that they are completely different. I used to think that more complex prose like Mill’s was the height of intellectual achievement, and that we’ve gone downhill since the time of high-minded stylists like the American Founding Fathers. But lately, I’ve come to recognize that this type of change is natural and in no way detrimental to the state of the English language. In fact, I increasingly believe that simpler sentences reflect a more refined version of the written word. As I mentioned earlier, one of the reasons we write things down is to clearly communicate our intentions. If you write like a 19th century philosopher, you actually make yourself harder to understand than if you adapt your language to today’s standards. You’ll notice that if you read ancient texts—actually, English translations of ancient texts—their prose is usually much easier to read than you’d expect given their age. I suspect the reason for this has more to do with the era in which they were translated, rather than the inherent simplicity of their sentence structure etc., but that’s an exploration for another day. Whatever the case, it’s clear that reading Plato, while daunting, is probably more worthwhile than reading Kant—simply because the former wrote much earlier than the latter, and because his prose is clearer.
Some argue that this focus on prose distracts from a deeper examination of the underlying meaning of the actual words. A coworker and friend of mine is in this camp: While he appreciates a clean sentence, he’d rather read a sloppy text which nonetheless imparts profound wisdom on the reader than a well-written tract that doesn’t contribute anything to the conversation. He says that writing is a tool to reflect ideas, not something in itself to be admired. I take his point. Still, I’m a sucker for a well-written paragraph. Indeed, sometimes I find myself getting distracted from the main point of a sentence by my admiration for the way it was written. Like I said: Writing is both an art and a science. I both appreciate the meaning behind the words and the way the sentence looks. I also think that a well-written sentence enhances the meaning of a text. It increases my admiration for the writer (and also inspires me to improve my own writing) and paints a clearer picture of what he was trying to say.
By now, I expect to have lost some readers. Not many people get as bogged down in the minutiae of English usage as I do. When talking about this stuff, I sometimes feel like an art critic, whose observations usually go beyond the obvious visual production and sometimes leave his critics shaking their heads. But I can’t help it: Writing is just too interesting for me to not examine at such a deep level. It is, after all, what I hope to do with my life down the road.
I hope I didn’t lose too many of you. Writing is meant to be read, not disseminated into the void. But even if lots of people dropped off somewhere along the way, I’m okay with that. Sometimes the products of writers don’t hit the mark, or their subjects are too arcane for the general reader. That’s all part of the process. With this newsletter, I hope to refine my writing skills such that I can make a greater contribution to the world of ideas.
Well I did finish this and found it to be interesting. I also write; my writings are assessment reports on kids with sexual behavior problems. (They can easily be 15-20 pages) I am fearful that many of the “rules” you shared regarding writing probably apply to what I do; but I believe I would be hesitant to have you “critique” these writings. I guess my goal is to present a “picture” of the client and then make some observations/recommendations as to what may be helpful for his caretakers as they make efforts to help the client. I admire your writing ability; with an understanding that I am better than I was 20 years ago; …it is clear to me- especially after reading your “thoughts” , I can be better. 🤪
I guess all writing is a story...
The Bible - The story of creation.
The Constitution - The story of democracy.
The Declaration of Independance - The story of freedom.
Your Last Will and Testament - The story of your intentions.
On The Origin Of The Species - The story of evolution.
An Inquiry Into The Nature And Causes Of The Wealth Of Nations - The story of free markets.
Jonathon Livingston Seagull - The story of reaching heights.
Tuck Everlasting - The story of immortality.
To Kill A Mockingbird - The story of social justice.
A Gift From The Sea - The story of self-connection.
Man's Search For Meaning - The story of inner will.
Either write a story worth reading, or do something worth a story :)