What Ails the Ailing Writer?
by Jonathan Pierson
BSU Writing Center
Awkward sentences, poorly developed ideas, bad transitions, lack of detail. The ailing writer has suffered the same symptoms for years. Still, she hopes. She continues to attend writing classes and to seek out tutors, believing she will some day find her cure. But bad writing is a disease that resists teachers' and tutors' best remedies. This is because almost every beginning writer suffers an affliction deeper than bad sentence structure or poor wording, a problem that, until solved, hampers every attempt to cure more obvious ones. The problem is, most beginning writers believe that writing is science or that writing is magic. Believing this, they expect the cure for their writing to come as a set of clearly defined, scientific rules or as a burst of magical intuition, and this expectation corrupts their understanding of almost every writing concept and technique they learn.
Writing as Science
Our culture loves science. Science promises a predictable universe, where anyone who applies the proper rules to a problem will come up with the right answer no doubt, no question. This perspective has heavily influenced our approach to education, particularly primary and secondary. From kindergarten through high school, students are taught that to every question there is one right answer and that to find this answer, all they have to do is memorize rules, terms, dates, formulas, definitions, and numbers, and then plunk them into the right spaces. After years of fill in the blank, true false, and multiple choice in history, social studies, math, and science, students come to their writing classes expecting that learning to write well will involve nothing more than learning another set of terms, axioms, and formulas a set of scientific writing rules. These students come to class expecting to learn grammar.
Grammar, for most beginners, is a catch all term for the writing rules of the universe. Grammar holds all the mysteries of diction, clarity, coherence, and the ever elusive "flow." And for the ailing writer, this is where the problem arises: the rules of grammar are elusive. The beginning writer expects writing classes and tutors to teach definitive rules that will unfailingly lead to the "right answer," just like (supposedly) the rules of science. Instead, rule after rule, the student encounters contradictions, exceptions, conditions. Opening his handbook, he finds a rule telling him, "Always use the active voice," and then, as an example under the rule "Always put your important words at the end of a sentence," he sees a sentence that seems to be in passive voice.
But because he's been taught that everything operates according to clear, scientific rules, he knows the problem can't be in the grammar it must be in his head. When the handbook says not to use sentence fragments but in literature class he finds what look like sentence fragments in Faulkner and Hemingway, it must mean there's some mystery to the rule of sentence fragments that he's just too dense to pick up on. After all, Faulkner and Hemingway were professional writers. They wrote "right," which means they followed the grammar rules, which means there couldn't possibly be sentence fragments in their writing.
The student who believes writing is science always wants to know if his writing is "good" or "right." To him, every writing situation is a problem with only one right answer, a perfect solution found through grammar. When he writes, he struggles, testing each word and sentence against every rule he can remember, thinking that he must come up with the right answer, the perfect words, before he touches the keyboard. He believes this is how experienced writers write they just do it without thought or effort because they understand grammar.
Writing as Magic
Writing is powerful stuff. Reading Morrison, Melville, Dostoevsky even Stephen King or Danielle Steele we're saddened, excited, thrilled. To many beginning writers, it seems impossible such intense experiences could be created through plain craftsmanship and hard work. There has to be more to writing, the beginner thinks, than poring over a word processor or typewriter, trying one word, then another, then another, then moving the sentence, then cutting it, then bringing it back somewhere else. Real writers sit, ponder a moment, and write genius. Words flow from the gods onto the paper. Perfect sentences coalesce from nothing. Good writing comes through magic, and the magic of writing is talent, a talent with which some are born and some are not.
The ailing writer who believes writing is magic is often worse off than the ailing writer who believes it's science. With science, there's at least a chance the writer will eventually catch on, which encourages her to study, listen, and keep trying to decipher the rules. Her approach may be in the end unworkable, but at least she's putting in active effort. Magic, on the other hand, the writer either possesses or doesn't. It can't be learned, and so the student who believes writing is magic doesn't try. She believes it's possible she has the magic, that it just lies buried inside her, untapped. But she doesn't believe any effort on her part can free it. She still studies, writes, and comes to class. But she doesn't come looking for knowledge; she comes hoping for inspiration. When she seems to be working with tutors and teachers, she is really just waiting: waiting for that revelatory word, reading, or exercise; waiting for that spark that will ignite her talent and turn her into a writer.
The writer who believes writing is magic is the writer who uses words that "sound good," usually words like the ones used by her favorite writers. She wants to move her readers the way her favorite writers have moved her, but she believes those writers' words just came, perfect, from nothing. Not understanding the techniques experienced writers use, she can't make her words do what she wants. Her writing sometimes hints at quality, but there is always a sense of shallowness, of effects attempted but not quite achieved, of words used without confidence, control, or authority. Her writing is flaccid. She recognizes this. She knows that her writing lacks the feeling, the power, that she wants. Fortunately, she knows she's missing something. Unfortunately, she thinks it's magic.
The Cure
The ailing writer's biggest problem isn't in his words, sentences, or paragraphs. It's in his misconceptions about writing. These are his true illness. He believes that for every idea, there is only one right expression, one perfect set of words, and he believes that when he finally unravels grammar or taps his talent, those right words will just come. Whatever idea he wants to express, the rules or the magic will tell him what to say. He thinks writing well means writing without thought or uncertainty.
The truth, of course, is that writing well means writing consciously and deliberately, with intense thought and a constant twinge of uncertainty. Any time a person makes a decision, there's a chance he's decided wrong, and writing is making decisions deciding what words in what order best convey one's thoughts, visions, ideas, and feelings.
In making decisions, everyone relies on two things: knowledge and intuition. Some decisions are made almost entirely through analysis, others almost entirely through instinct; most are made using both, a splash of knowledge and a dash of intuition. Writing decisions are no different. To make the best decisions with his words, a writer must consciously know their limitations and possibilities and unconsciously have a sense of them, a feel for their rhythms and patterns. The more the writer knows about words and the more attuned his sense of words, the better his chance of writing well. This is where grammar and talent re enter the picture, no longer as science and magic, but as the foundations of knowledge and intuition.
Every writer relies largely on intuition, on his instinct for how words work. But this instinct, this talent, is not inborn magic like most beginners think. It's an acquired ability. Talk to a person who has such a talent, and you'll find he's a heavy reader. When he was a child, his parents read The Giant Jam Sandwich or Sam the Firehouse Cat to him and instilled in him a love of books. He's been reading his whole life, and this has tuned his ear (or eye) to the way words work on a page.
However, even people who read little usually possess some writing talent. Everyone who can communicate speaking, signing, writing, or reading has some sense of words. No matter how small, this talent can be improved. What is required, as with music, sports, driving, art, or any talent, is practice. In a way, writing talent is magical, and writers are magicians but magicians like David Copperfield, not Merlin. Copperfield's magic is a skill, practiced intensely, his illusions polished until they are flawless and we're almost convinced that he's walked through the Great Wall of China. Like a stage magician, a writer must practice write, get feedback, rewrite, get more feedback, rewrite again honing his word sense to a thoughtless perfection that can create a book, story, or essay that is smooth, clean, and beautiful.
But no matter how developed, talent can't stand on its own. It's never enough for a writer to rely on his sense of what "sounds right"; he must develop his knowledge of words. This means learning grammar. Despite grammar's bad reputation as a subject of study, knowing grammar helps a writer consciously control his words, sentences, and paragraphs. But to use grammar effectively, the beginning writer must stop thinking of it as a set of rigid rules and start seeing it as a description of how language works. He must approach grammar rhetorically. Grammar shouldn't teach the student not to use sentence fragments; it should teach him what a sentence fragment is and how it can be used. Instead of worrying about identifying adjectives, subordinate clauses, and prepositional phrases by name, the student should focus on recognizing when one word or group of words is connected to another and what specific effects each has on the other's meaning. When this is understood, the names will come.
Learned rhetorically, grammar takes the writer to the cores of words and word combinations, showing him how they work together, unraveling their patterns of meaning. Grammar should make the writer conscious of what his words, phrases, and punctuation marks are doing, improving his ability to decide which will best communicate his ideas. Grammar should open the writer to the possibilities of his words.
This discussion has made knowledge and talent sound like distinct, clearly defined qualities, but in practice, they are inseparable. Each builds on and blends into the other. As the beginning writer's understanding of grammar and rhetoric grows, he learns why his favorite writers' words sound good, and he discovers possibilities, combinations, and effects that he had never before thought of. Knowledge makes conscious what his talent had only hinted at. Later, as he writes and rewrites, making deliberate writing decisions, practice ingrains his writing knowledge. Slowly, choices that he had to think about become instinctive. What went from unconscious to conscious becomes unconscious again, but improved. Knowledge becomes talent. The writer finds himself moving more and more easily through revisions, confident that his words are doing what he wants. But when he hits a stubborn knot of ideas, he can slow down, call on his knowledge, and work through the problem. When he reaches this stage, the ailing writer is cured.
But the most wonderful pill or potion is useless if the patient doesn't know how to take it. Until the ailing writer realizes that writing is neither science nor magic, he will continue to unintentionally undermine the most useful writing techniques and concepts presented to him. Those writers who really want to write well will eventually work past their own misconceptions, but such a healing is long, hard, and painful. Teachers and tutors can ease this process by focusing not only on curing the problems in a beginning writer's writing, but on curing his misconceptions.
For Further Reading Murray, Donald M. Write to Learn. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1984.
Elbow, Peter. Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981
Kolln, Martha. Rhetorical Grammar: Grammatical Choices, Rhetorical Effects. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1996.
Cheney, Theodore A. Getting the Words Right: How to Revise, Edit, and Rewrite. Cincinnati: F&W, 1983.