My blog's "mission statement" asserts my intent that it be "An exercise in careful writing, traditional grammar and tidy penmanship." And yet my posts are often replete with sentence fragments, slangy terms and unanswerable rhetorical questions.
So what's with that?
In an essay in today's New York Times Magazine, Maud Newton deplores the sloppy conventions, the "folksiness," of today's internet writing in general and of blog composition in particular. She spends much of her essay ascribing today's stylistic morass to the writings of David Foster Wallace, the author whose essay "Consider the Lobster" received extravagant worship from me in an earlier blog posting.
She dislikes Wallace's "second guessing" -- by which she means Wallace's frequent acknowledgement that his own point of view is not without weakness -- and his rapid alternation between formal speech and slacker slang. As example, she presents his felicitous phrase, "hard not to sort of almost actually like," which of course incorporates both "second-guessing" and slacker slang, along with a dollop of equally deplorable self-irony.
In fairness, Newton recognizes that Wallace had a brilliant mind and that his unfortunate style was part of his appeal. What she really hates is how his style has been adopted unreflectively by bloggers of lesser skills and intelligence.
Like me.
Like Newton, I've spent many years engaged in legal writing. And together with Newton, when I write professionally, I agree that the
idea is to provoke and persuade, not to soothe. And the best way to make an argument is to make it straightforwardly, honestly, passionately, without regard to whether people will like you afterward.
But when I do write a brief, my sole purpose is to persuade a judge that no reasonable person could disagree with my argument. I write only to persuade, not to entertain, and not to muse together with my reader on the complexities of life.
This blog is something of an escape from years of legal writing. I write partly to force myself to think clearly about issues I find interesting. I write partly to persuade, just as I do as a lawyer, but also partly to acknowledge that every point of view, including my own, has both merits and weaknesses, and to invite whomever stumbles upon my blog to think for himself.
And, sure -- I write to entertain. To entertain myself as I write -- an admitted self-indulgence -- and to entertain, or at least interest, my readers.
Newton's essay is interesting, and worth considering. There is, in fact, a tendency among modern writers to shun formality, and to write in the same casual manner as we speak. This tendency can be overdone, and the result can be not merely an informal style, but an irritating lack of clarity in expression.
But the writer needs to consider the purpose of his writing. If expressing an argument or fact with clarity is less important than conveying a mood or observing the humor in some quirk of life, the style of writing should -- or, at least, may -- reflect this purpose.
So yeah. What y'all think of that, huh?
2 comments:
Writing is performed by a writer, sometimes to make money, sometimes to clarify things, sometimes to "blow the whistle" or "blow the lid off" something, occasionally to pass along information, often to get something off the writer's chest or his/her to-do list, not infrequently, as you suggest, to entertain an audience that, of course, includes one's self, and every now and then merely to gripe, as in crank letters to the editor, to fulfill an obligation, after one has promised to write a press release for the neighborhood bake sale, for instance, or to create a bit of art. It is possible and even preferable to try to accomplish all at once.
--King of the Monopoly Board
Zounds! An Anonymous Message! Whoever could it be!
Anyway, well put, stranger. Well put.
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