In his column of January 2nd, New York Times columnist David Brooks writes of the annual Sidney Awards given to recognize some of the best in long-form journalism. One of this year’s awards went to “Professor X,” who, writing in The Atlantic, decried his plight teaching college students today.
Brooks quotes the article in which the professor says the energy and excitement exits the classroom when it comes time to write a paper: “Remarkably few of my students can do well in these classes. Student routinely fail; some fail multiple times, and some will never pass, because they cannot write a coherent sentence.”
Apparently, the professor concludes, this is because his students have done very little reading. He says, “In each of my courses, we discuss…the need for precision in vocabulary, why economy of language is desireable…I explain, I give examples, I cheerlead, I cajole, but each evening when the class is over and I come down from my teaching high, I inevitably lose faith in the task, as I am sure my students do.”
Precision and economy in the words we choose makes our writing sing. When oil lamps lit homes, readers allowed long rambling paragraphs and wordy prose. But today’s readers have the attention spans of my two-year-old granddaughter. Dish them a plate of unnecessary words and all but the most dedicated will put down your piece.
I ran across a couple of excellent, interesting word choices yesterday. A friend of mine e-mailed me that she liked “big weather.” In two words I got what she meant immediately.
And I’m reading Parke Godwin’s The Tower of Beowulf. In it he describes the tracking of a boar: By the depth of the prints in the damp earth, the boar would be of unusual size even for a prime male….
Godwin selected simple everyday words to convey the largeness of the beast —of unusual size even for a prime male—without resorting to more colorful language—behemothic, colossal, cyclopean, elephantine, enormous, gargantuan, gigantic, gross, humongous—which would have raised a different feeling in the reader and not served him as well.
BTW, you’ll never be a great writer until you are a great reader. It’s one of my “Nine Habits of Regularly Published Authors” a presentation I give at writer’s conferences.
One Response to “Choosing the Right Word”
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I can imagine the challenge of teaching today’s high school graduates any subjects that require writing skills. My own honors high school graduate who is an avid reader would have barely graduated from my (British) high school with her woeful lack of expertise in the written expression of complex ideas. Her college has dumbed own their writing assignments (an IT bachelors program) to the level their bright, but not practised, freshmen can attain. I work around the lack of interest in written spec documents for complex IT projects in my workplace, and in the inabiity to follow project plans unless they are doled out in bite-sized chunks. As an IT Project Manager I must avoid boring or insulting my own generation while being careful not to lose the interest of our bright,new members.