‘Your style’ is crap
July 22nd, 2009 § 1 Comment
At dinner two night ago, a friend reminded me that I had told him he had made me a better writer with a single piece of advice a few years ago. He had read a paper I had written for school and ridiculed me: “Do you ever write a sentence with fewer than seven clauses?” Point taken. Now I try to write shorter sentences and think about sentence rhythm, and I make sure no sentence has seven clauses.
A few other, similarly pithy and equally valuable lessons have come my way via my peers. One of the three great editors I have worked under at The Yale Globalist once educated me: “Most of what people call ‘their style’ is actually just bad writing.” When Sean told me that, early in my sophomore year, it both gave me confidence to be a forceful editor and the humility to let others modify my manuscripts. My “style,” I quickly internalized, was not special, nor so clever it should override established rules of clear and concise writing. I’ve since shared that lesson with other Globalist editors, and I’ve applied it to many writers. No writer successful defends against my editing pen by saying something is “her style.”
But the lesson is not as dramatic as Sean conveyed it, or as I once understood it. Some elements of personal style do little but obscure clarity or add unnecessary length. Many others, however, add flair and capture readers, even if the unorthodox additions are objectively unnecessary or even against the rules. I came this see this middle ground over my year of daily editing at the Yale Daily News, and I tried to reach a balance between style and objectively “good” writing in most of the pieces I edited in the spring.
It became easy for me to edit by default: I’d strip unnecessary words (“in order to” became “to” every time, etc.), tighten up meandering sentences, bring arguments to the front, and encourage writers to make their points with as much force as comfort allowed. A lot of editing, especially when I didn’t slow down to think, was almost mathematical. I did a lot of subtraction, and I cut out nuance that didn’t have an obvious point. Most of the time, I think I improved pieces. But I was concerned that sometimes I was not improving pieces as much as I was making them uniform, just more like each other, and more like how I would have written them.
My struggle (which has to be a common struggle among editors) is illustrated colorfully, though not purposefully, in this feature in Vanity Fair. The magazine’s editors have taken their pens to Sarah Palin’s disastrous resignation speech, correcting errors of grammar, punctuation, and fact. But they’ve also done a lot of what I did to columns I edited: They’ve stripped sentences down to the fewest words necessary, and they’ve removed all the personal quirks of Palin’s speech that lend it character, that make it her speech and not anybody else’s. The nonsense she spews is painful to listen to and more so to read, but need it be removed entirely? I’m not sure. Only now that I see the speech edited do I think maybe there was a reason to give it in original form.
Update 8/4/09: This Slate piece by a grammarian, which I just refound in my bookmarks, shows how Sarah Palin’s sentences are complete, nearly indecipherable nonsense. Here’s a taste: “To me, [her speech is] not English—it’s a collection of words strung together to elicit a reaction, floating ands and prepositional phrases (“with that vote of the American people”) be damned. It requires not a diagram but a selection of push buttons.”
Reid to force vote on Obama’s Census nominee
July 9th, 2009 § 1 Comment
I spent parts of the last two weeks researching the census and looking into the stalled nomination of Robert Groves to lead the Census Bureau through the 2010 count. President Obama had nominated Groves on April 2, and, though he sailed through his confirmation hearings in May, anonymous Republican senators have maintained holds on his nomination since then. Today Roll Call revealed the senators who had placed the holds and reported that Majority Leader Harry Reid would try to bring Groves up for a vote this week or next.
My story had to change quickly: I had planned on writing about why an anonymous hold might be placed on Groves and how long it might last. And though much of the original inspiration for the post was voided, I jumped on the new story. I got Reid’s office to confirm late this evening that the senator would be filing for cloture on the nomination vote, and I broke the news.
Beyond headlines
June 4th, 2009 § 1 Comment
Since I was 10, I’ve made memories of headlines. Some are vague; others are detailed and fresh. My first such memory dates to early 1999, when NATO forces began bombing in Kosovo. I remember seeing the headlines, with big accompanying photos, day after day on the front page of The New York Times. The news fascinated me, even though I was completely ignorant about the history, context, or implications of what was going on. I remember asking my parents to explain to me what I was reading, and I remember beginning to learn history and about geopolitics, for the first time, by discussing with them the stories I was reading in the newspaper. A month later I saw the first specific headline that became seared into my memory when I read about a soon-to-be infamous school shooting in Colorado.
Two and a half years later I had grown up enough that, when my city was in the news for even more historical events, I was a regular newspaper reader. No longer did individual days’ headlines grab me and get lodged in my memory the same way, but the events unfolding before me affected me even more as I grew up. My adolescence was framed–even defined, in some ways–by a series of events that could only have been covered on A1. After wars, murders, and terrorism in 1999 and 2001 came a war in 2003 and elections in 2004, 2006, and 2008. Each event was important in world history and equally so in my coming of age.
Given how powerfully these events have affected me, I’m fascinated by other historical events that happened in my lifetime. I’ll never really be able to believe the Cold War ended after I was born, or that apartheid in South Africa fell apart when I was in elementary school. Without memories of those events–of seeing them written about the next day, or over weeks, on the front page of the Times–they feel like history to me, rather than the current events they were not too many years ago.
Another such event was made current again today, on its twentieth anniversary. As with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of apartheid, I’ve also never understood the Tiananmen Square protest, I suspect because I didn’t experience the event as it happened. The narrative as I’ve learned it after the fact–students and intellectuals in China protested for more freedom in 1989, the protest was quashed with a massacre, little more freedom arrived, and twenty years later no one protested–doesn’t make sense. Then again, I can’t expect China to make a lot of sense to me. In every way, it’s as foreign, as far from what I know, as anything on Earth.
I’ve loved learning just a little about China over the last year from a few sources. James Fallows, the Atlantic writer and editor who has lived in China for the last few years, maintains a blog that I’ve read religiously since last summer. He writes about technology, aviation, the craft of journalism and the life of a journalists, and China. All of his writing is interesting; his observations and understanding of China are enlightening. And since January a friend of mine, Dylan Suher, has been studying abroad in China. He too has kept a blog, where he has given a mostly personal account of his time there, but through which he has shared impressive insight into a country he is just getting to know. I’m glad he has blogged so regularly while abroad, disappointed his dispatches will cease when he returns to the U.S. this weekend, and most happy his wisdom will last in his writing. Trusting him to have something interesting to say in response, I recently sent him this Atlantic article by Mark Hertsgaard about China’s balance between economic development and environmental protection. The article is especially interesting because it was written in 1997, and yet it reads as if it could come out tomorrow: all the issues it covers seem as relevant, if not more so, today as they were a dozen years ago. Being the good friend and smart guy he is, Dylan replied to the article with a surprisingly long and thoughtful response, which I’ll assume his permission to reproduce here:
I was only too happy to read this article instead of reading [sic: missing word], although I was sad I couldn’t watch the YouTube video (damn you, China, don’t you know seeing the “Leprachaun” video is an inalienable human right?). I think it’s really right on. I think people who are not here can sometimes get the impression that the Chinese government and the Chinese people just don’t give a shit about the environment. But actually, compared to the Americans, the Chinese lifestyle is much more environmentally friendly (air drying, no heat below the Yangtze by government order, great public transportation, lots of biking). What we’re really worried about is that more and more Chinese will start to live like us, which would undoubtedly lead to a world environmental crisis. Also, the sense I’ve gotten is that in recent years (since this article has been written), the government has taken serious steps to improve the environmental situation. This of course varies from province to province and city to city (Yunnan has a particularly good party boss, according to people I’ve talked to), and some cities are still absolutely awful (I had a hard time breathing in Tai’an in Shandong province and in China’s coal centers in the Northeast, and the smog in Xi’an is really sad). But the government is limited in what it can do, both by corruption and by the economic/demographic situation.
I’ll give you the example of Kunming, since I know a bit about it. Kunming has about six million people, and is growing at an insanely rapid rate. The government expects it to reach ten million people by 2012 or so. Kunming’s main source of water is the filthy Dian Chi lake. Now, in America, most water pollution is agricultural or industrial. However, this is not the case with Dian Chi. Years ago, fertilizer and tanning plants did a number on Dian Chi, but most of those have been shut down; now, the main source of pollution is literally household sewage. But what can you do? It has to go somewhere. It doesn’t help that the marshes that used to clean Dian Chi were drained during the Great Leap Forward, but it’s now not an option to restore the wetland: it would mean the relocation of thousands of people who now live in the reclaimed land. So what can the government do? It can’t stop the migration. All it can do is really what it’s doing now, which is throwing millions at sewage processing plants and punishing people who violate plumbing regulations.
Which brings it back to the point that this guy made that I think is the most insightful and right on. China’s problem is a world problem. We have a billion very poor people, and the real question is, can we fulfill the promises that modern, liberal, capitalist society has made to allow every human being on the planet live a life of unprecedented comfort without destroying the planet. It’s something to lose sleep over.
With friends like these, who needs professionals to tell you about the world? Nevertheless I appreciate what professional journalists do (of course). In addition to Fallows’ writing and the Hertsgaard article, I recommend today’s column by Nick Kristof, in which he recounts his experience in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago, when he was the Beijing bureau chief for the Times. Here is a fascinating recent blog post by John Pomfret outlining China’s relationship with North Korea, explaining why it may be that China watches happily as North Korea antagonizes the United States and the West. (H/T to Fallows for recommending it.) And here the Times runs down the stories behind the iconic photos of Tank Man in Tiananmen Square during the protest. (Here too is a follow-up post with a never-before-published picture of the event.) All interesting reads to learn just a little more about the Middle Kingdom in the modern era.
At work today, with the TVs on the cable networks, an MSNBC afternoon anchor said the following as the channel cut to a commercial break: “A dark chapter in China’s history: Tiananmen Square, twenty years later. What do you remember about the event?” This was followed by a call for viewers to send in their recollections of the protest and the massacre. The line was completely in character for cable news, and had I been barely less attentive I would have missed it. But I heard it, and it struck me. This simplification was just one example out of hundreds I must have heard on TV today. Yet it perfectly encapsulated a source of sadness in me: Here was “coverage” of a truly fascinating historical event that–by the choice of the “journalist”–removed all the elements that could have educated, enlightened viewers. Instead, we were given a vague allusion (“dark chapter”) and encouraged to be egocentric, to share our memories of the event, as if they were, are somehow relevant, as if they mean anything at all. Nothing before or after that teaser gave viewers any better understanding of what happened in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago, or what has come since. For that, one would have had to look elsewhere, far away. Cable news is pitiful, but the 2009 media landscape includes more media offering the same antisubstance. I’m saddened that so little attention is given to the most interesting parts of the news, which also happen to be the most valuable to know. And I’m fearful of a media that is ever receding into a universe of headlines.
Update 6/14/09: How many of my friends will go to China? With one high school friend recently back, another is leaving for Beijing in two days. And a friend from college will be there all of next year, taking a year away from Yale to study Chinese more in China. He’s a tremendously talented guy, as can be seen in this video of him speaking Chinese, playing cello, and beatboxing:
Did I say this was a ‘family blog’?
May 3rd, 2009 § 2 Comments
Check out the beautiful irony of this op-ed piece in The Times. The author argues that the Supreme Court and the F.C.C. should get over their prudishness and stop, as it were, giving a shit about certain common “fleeting expletives.”
LAST Tuesday, the Supreme Court upheld the Federal Communications Commission’s crackdown on the use of dirty words on the airwaves.
That the justices managed to do this without actually uttering either of the words at issue — one refers to a sexual act, the other to a bodily function — exemplifies both the court’s tact and its lack of connection with contemporary English usage
Take a guess as to which words the case dealt with. And notice please that the author, bound by the superior standards of the paper in which he writes, must himself leave unnamed the words he chides the Supreme Court for avoiding. He tries to work around the limitation, but the charade gets a little ridiculous:
Writing for the majority last week, Justice Antonin Scalia stated that it was “entirely rational” for the F.C.C. to conclude, as it did, that one particular curse “invariably invokes a coarse sexual image.”
Does it? The evidence is mixed. Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary and the author of a book on swearing, described the F.C.C.’s argument as “rubbish.” Although the word in question originally referred to a sexual act, Mr. Sheidlower argued, it has now taken on an independent “emotional” sense. The nonsexual use of the word can be seen in countless contemporary examples, as when Vice President Dick Cheney used it in 2004 to recommend that Senator Patrick Leahy do something that is, strictly speaking, anatomically impossible.
Nowhere does the column mention that The Times, by its own rules barring any usages of certain especially foul words, is forced to be as tactful and disconnected from contemporary English usage as the author claims the Supreme Court is. By author or editor’s choice (I guess the latter), an opportunity for light self-criticism was missed, and silly affectations (“strictly speaking, anatomically impossible”) are forced into the piece.
Such blind adherence to verbal cleanliness hurts a newspaper’s coverage when its stories are specifically about unspeakable words that have made news. An article in the American Journalism Review late last year examined newspapers’ policies regarding news-making profanity, encouraging papers toward more revealing coverage and explaining the power in printing the unprintable.
Count me a supporter of the crude, the dirty, the vulgar. Not in life, at least not to excess, but when obscenity is the story, it’s got to be in the story. The Times and other “family papers” following excessively prude standards do their readers a disservice by protecting the delicate minds of hypothetical young readers.
For my part, I was proud to beat the censor (who was, I should note, my higher-up at the paper, not a government agency or a court) a few times this year in my role as newspaper editor. I didn’t write the offending words, but when they popped up in appropriate places, I did my best to get them in the paper. Once was a slip-up: Challenged by the boss, I agreed to change the offending word, but I forgot, so it appeared in print, granting me a little undeserved pride. (In the Times‘ cutesy style, the word refers technically to the excrement of male cows.) Earlier in the year I got the word “asshole” into a column six times. The piece, on “section assholes,” would have been a barely readable farce without the simple and widely used term that served as the subject. That was a battle I didn’t have to fight too hard to win, but in which I’m still grateful to have succeeded.
And this whole business about publications being family-oriented? Screw that.
Mike Jones for alderman
April 20th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Last week the YDN endorsed Mike Jones, a sophomore, for the Democratic nomination for Ward 1 alderman, the seat for the Yale-dominated district in the New Haven Board of Aldermen. While I shouldn’t explain my specific role in the endorsement decision or writing because of necessary confidentiality, I organized the endorsement process and played an active role in making our paper’s endorsement happen.
So, although Minh Tran, one of the candidates defeated, is a friend of mine and although I have great admiration for Katie Harrison, the other candidate defeated, I took pride in the fact that the vote on Friday aligned nearly with the strength of support I felt the endorsement gave each candidate. No one can know how much the endorsement mattered, but I’m proud that the vote indicated some may have followed its arguments to the polls.
You won’t hear this again
March 11th, 2009 § 1 Comment
I consider this a family blog, so don’t expect me to editorialize so bluntly again. But, and I’ll say this very slowly: This. Is. Fucked. Up.
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Feminists of the world sit down before you read this. The Vatican newspaper says that perhaps the washing machine did more to liberate women in the 20th century than the pill or the right to work.
The submission was made in a lengthy article titled “The Washing Machine and the Liberation of Women – Put in the Detergent, Close the Lid and Relax.”
…
“What in the 20th century did more to liberate Western women?,” asks the article, which was written by a woman.
“The debate is heated. Some say the pill, some say abortion rights and some the right to work outside the home. Some, however, dare to go further: the washing machine,” it says.
There’s sad, and then there’s—
March 8th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
This week I read two stories I had trouble processing, both out of Zimbabwe. First, President Mugabe threw himself a $250,000 birthday party featuring a 187-pound cake while thousands of his countrymen continue to die each month. (Though the Times has the details, the CS Monitor points out the painful absurdity of the event.) Then, a few days later, Prime Minister Tsvangirai, Mugabe’s longtime opponent, loses his wife of three decades in a car wreck in which he was also hurt.
My favorite story of 2008; my story in 2009?
January 6th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Since September, when Somali pirates hijacked a massive Ukrainian cargo ship, Western media sources have told the greatest tales a kid could hear. Played out in newsprint the old-fashioned way, with updates released slowly, over days and weeks, the stories have brought us pirates in skiffs and trawlers taking on grand tankers, cargo ships, and even passenger cruisers, events impossible to imagine from thousands of miles away and in life on land. No good guys and bad guys in these, for how could you root against the dozen rag-clad rebels who took down the giant in their waters? Forget that they’re criminals; they’ve got everything heroes have. And if you believe them, they’re fighting for justice. In a New York Times article from September 30, 2008, Jeffrey Gettleman wrote about the pirates who had seized the Ukrainian ship, and shared what they want. Check out, too, how this one was reported:
“We just saw a big ship,” the pirates’ spokesman, Sugule Ali, said in a telephone interview. “So we stopped it.”
The pirates quickly learned, though, that their booty was an estimated $30 million worth of heavy weaponry, heading for Kenya or Sudan, depending on whom you ask.
In a 45-minute interview, Mr. Sugule spoke on everything from what the pirates wanted (“just money”) to why they were doing this (“to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters”) to what they had to eat on board (rice, meat, bread, spaghetti, “you know, normal human-being food”).
He said that so far, in the eyes of the world, the pirates had been misunderstood. “We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits,” he said. “We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard.”
The pirates who answered the phone call on Tuesday morning said they were speaking by satellite phone from the bridge of the Faina, the Ukrainian cargo ship that was hijacked about 200 miles off the coast of Somalia on Thursday. Several pirates talked but said that only Mr. Sugule was authorized to be quoted. Mr. Sugule acknowledged that they were now surrounded by American warships, but he did not sound afraid. “You only die once,” Mr. Sugule said.
What a gig, huh? For the reporters, I mean. Gettleman or one of the others (likely Ibrahim, who contributed reporting from Mogadishu and is probably Somali) gets to call up pirates, and chats with the head honcho for forty-five minutes, during which time they have an earnest, intimate, and humorous conversation. Here’s how the article ends:
Mr. Sugule said his men were treating the crew members well. (The pirates would not let the crew members speak on the phone, saying it was against their rules.) “Killing is not in our plans,” he said. “We only want money so we can protect ourselves from hunger.”
When asked why the pirates needed $20 million to protect themselves from hunger, Mr. Sugule laughed and said, “Because we have a lot of men.”
It doesn’t get better than that, but it did continue through the fall. In mid-November another huge ship was seized in the same waters, this time off the coast of Kenya, and another bunch of pirates found themselves with $100 million worth of crude Saudi Arabian oil. These two pirated ships were only a couple of the several dozen ships that pirates held at year end. Of course, modern piracy didn’t start in 2008. In fact, Atlantic writer William Langewiesche wrote a book in 2005, The Outlaw Sea, about piracy and the general lawlessness of the ocean, which I recommend for background on all of this. Piracy and general chaos at sea are nothing new, Langewiesche explains, but they may be worsening trends. Here’s a teaser, from page 46:
[R]oughly two-thirds of [global piracy is] concentrated in just one region — the area of the South China Sea, including the waters of Indonesia and the Philippines. The problem, in other words, would seem finite. Gazing at a map from the confines of land, one might think that with some sea and air patrols, and maybe the “expanded authority” to perform intercepts at sea, order could be imposed. But that authority already exists, and those patrols are being run, and the numbers have only wavered, and order has not come.
I may have a chance to go briefly to East Africa myself this summer. If I do, I’m calling up Jeffrey Gettleman and asking him how to do his job. I want this story. I want to write about pirates. Who knows if I’ll get anything good out of it (I probably won’t), but I want to chase.
Update 1/9/09: The Saudi oil tanker was just released for $3 million.
Update 1/12/09: Here’s a cool map of recent pirate attacks off the East African coast, from this (funny) article in The Economist.
Popularity Contest ’08
January 1st, 2009 § Leave a Comment
I should have posted this a couple months ago, when it came out, but I only found the link today. It’s a piece I wrote for The Sydney Globalist, a sister chapter of my own Yale Globalist under Global21. Christine Ernst, the editor in chief of the Sydney chapter, approached our our chapter, the only in the United States, to contribute something about the American election for their November issue, and I volunteered to write the piece. Apologies for the awkward sentences in the beginning; I’m not sure how I wrote those. I’m not to blame, however, for the funky punctuation: that’s the fault of Australian English. The piece is online here. Below is an excerpt:
When McCain’s campaign manager declared that the election was not “about issues”, he was trying to craft a reality that suited his campaign: one in which he believed they had an advantage, rather than one in which he knew they were dreadfully behind. So while McCain attempted to drive the discussion away from policy, Barack Obama – holding the winning cards, if he ever got to play them – attempted to keep voters focused on the things they claimed mattered to them. Meanwhile, someone had to decide what, in fact, the election was “about”.
Skateboarders are Great Americans (and other reflections on current media)
December 30th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
1.
Thanks to the Times, we learn that skateboarders in California are newly responsible for some great civic contributions. This winter they’ve been cleaning out the abandoned swimming pools of foreclosed houses, refusing to add graffiti or trash while they’re trespassing, and they even only skate for short periods during the day to avoid disturbing neighbors. How considerate!
But here’s the real story, revealed in the third paragraph:
Across the nation, the ultimate symbol of suburban success has become one more reminder of the economic meltdown, with builders going under, pools going to seed and skaters finding a surplus of deserted pools in which to perfect their acrobatic aerials.
Unfortunately for thrill-seeking readers, most of the article is about that stuff, or actually even more boring stuff. We learn about pool builders in Phoenix and fines for homeowners who leave standing water in their pools — things related neither to skateboarding nor the economic meltdown, as if people are reading the article because they just love pools.
The article’s kind of cool overall, and it’s helped out by some choice quotes – “God bless Greenspan,” the post [on skateandannoy.com] read, “patron saint of pool skatin’.” — but it drifts from the good stuff. It should focus on the skateboarders, both because they’re the most fun part of the article and because simply recording the color of their hobby right now will tell the economic story most vividly. Strengths and weaknesses aside, this article also highlights the inherent limitations of print journalism and written storytelling. This isn’t a story to be written; although the article is accompanied by a slide show, we need to see action and panoramas. We need video: we need to see the skateboarders moving, not just through pools but among them, hitting pool after pool and wandering newly abandoned neighborhoods. Let’s see those foreclosed homes, not just read about them. New media, where are you?
2.
The Post tells us that Virginia Senator Jim Webb is set to introduce legislation to “reform” our prison system. As a citizen long interested in the subject, and as a current employee (sort of — well, not really, but more on this later) of the correctional system of the State of Connecticut, I’m personally invested in this topic. Too bad for interested readers, the article doesn’t hint at how Webb envisions this reform, or even whether he’s gotten that far. What we get instead is that Webb thinks we have too many people in prison (as everyone agrees) and quote after quote from people skeptical to critical of his forthcoming effort, rebutted only by assertions of Webb’s fortitude and maverickyness. Get ready for a showdown! But don’t hold your breath for meaningful reform. If there’s any on the way, this article won’t help shed light on it.
3.
Popular sportswriting often approaches oxymoron territory: it’s writing only in the technical sense of involving letters, words, and sentences in a single language. The “writers” for MLB.com and its daughter sites devoted to the individual teams are as guilty as any others of this butchery. But I was positively struck by this lede in an article today:
Whatever interest the Mets might have had in diminished center fielder Andruw Jones had a rather short shelf life.
The “rather” could have gone, but the sentence is informative, descriptive, and even poignant. It evokes some humanity deeper than that commonly found in front offices. Just from this sentence, I feel for Jones and even the Mets, though I don’t know why. I could be alone on this.
4.
Yeah, I always saw the Fall of Bush this way. Cool to know I agree with him and his people on something. Plus those are some sweet quotes. Props to Vanity Fair.
5.
This is now a week old, and, like Josh Marshall, I’m hesitant to cite Tom Friedman positively in the blogosphere, but give credit where credit’s due. Or at least acknowledge that which you dig. And I dig this recent column. I think Friedman’s right on the money. Don’t expect me to say that again soon.
