On Writing Well
On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition
The two most important books that influenced me on writing are Strunk & White’s classic The Elements of Style and William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. I have also been influenced by reading wonderful prose stylists like Bertrand Russell and Will Durant. Finally I was heavily influenced by a graduate school mentor William Charron, who forced me to rewrite my master’s thesis about ten times. I sometimes think he overdid it–seeking perfection in one’s writing causes paralysis–but he taught me the invaluable lesson of rewriting, which is the single best secret to good writing that I know of.
Unfortunately the time constraints of researching and writing a daily blog make this impossible. I certainly reread my posts and make quick changes before publication, but I don’t have the time for the ten or twenty rewrites that would be necessary for really good prose. So it’s a tradeoff. I sometimes substitute quantity for quality, but I think there is value in not overanalyzing a topic too. Stream of consciousness writing, being less constrained than obsessive rewriting, is also more revelatory of one’s true feelings.
Recently I read the interview about writing with psychologist Steven Pinker at edge.org. Pinker reasons that writing is a psychological phenomenon, “a way that one mind can cause ideas to happen in another mind,.” But writing is “cognitively unnatural,” according to Pinker. Until the last few millennia, for almost the entire time there have been modern human beings, no one wrote anything. In fact it is an odd way to communicate. You don’t see your audience, you don’t know who they are or what they know, and they don’t ask you questions. It is so different from face to face conversation.
Pinker thinks we write to draw another’s attention to something. “When you write … you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world that’s interesting, and that you’re directing the attention of your reader to that thing.” This may seem obvious but consider how much writing is done to impress, like academic writing, or to protect oneself, like legal jargon. So while we write for ourselves–to learn and understand–we surely write for our audience too. Not to impress them, perform for them, protect ourselves, or shove dogma down their throat–but to see new things with them. To point out things that both the writer and the reader may have missed.
Leaving a small part of myself after I am gone–a legacy if you will of the best of me–motivates my writing. It’s not as good as real immortality, and I may still get a cryonics policy, but it is something. To leave a small part of yourself in this electronic cloud. To leave a soft whisper in the air.
