Grammar for ducks

Whoever donated this particular book to the public library was one of those folks who feel they have to scribble their (important, they believe) thoughts in the book's margins.

Confronted with the subhead Whom is the duck working for? our scribbler felt the need to change it to For whom is the duck working?--adding the comment, "Your grammar sucks."

I tell my students that it's great to know the rules of grammar, but their main objective is to make things easy for their readers. That often means breaking the rules. In fact, I'd say the original subhead is a bit too stuffy. Instead, for a U.S. audience, I'd substitute Who for Whom - or Who's for Who is. Face it (wincing or not), that's become our common, informal usage.

I expect to take some heat for this, but I'll also take comfort from the story told of Winston Churchill when an editor had rewritten one of his sentences to avoid ending it with a preposition. His reply:

"This is the sort of English up with which I will not put."

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[writing][communication] [editing] [communication training]

Not a new problem

If you think blather-speak just turned up yesterday, read the following.

***

I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

"I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."

Here it is in modern English:

"Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."

This is a parody, but not a very gross one.... It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations--race, battle, bread--dissolve into the vague phrases "success or failure in competitive activities." This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing--no one capable of using phrases like "objective considerations of contemporary phenomena"--would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.

Now analyze these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of those words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase ("time and chance") that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English.

***

The passage above is from "Politics and the English Language," published by George Orwell in 1946.

(This comes courtesy of my daughter Shana. Those of you who regularly visit my jargon-bashing blog will find it there as well.)

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[writing][communication] [editing] [communication training]

Getting the numbers right

When talking about the editing process, there's probably something I should have emphasized but didn't: Check all the numbers in your piece of writing--and do it with care.

What brought up this thought was yesterday's Wall Street Journal. All of my students and most readers of this blog know WSJ is one of my two favorite newspapers (the other is Investor's Business Daily). The writing is superb, and errors are rare.

Yet here's a bit from David Wessel's "Capital" column that reports a study on the pay of Harvard graduates. Focus on the numbers (his editors didn't):

Harvard grads who work in finance earn 195% of the pay of those who work elsewhere. That's no typo: Going into finance means making nearly three times as much as your classmates with other careers.

If the 195% figure is correct as written, the finance person would make under two times as much as his classmates. (Think about it. If you earn 100% of what I do, we're paid equal amounts.)

If, however, the "nearly three times as much" is correct, the finance person would have to earn 195% more than the others--or 295% "of the pay of those who work elsewhere.

Catching the Journal in an error like this is, as I said, rare. But, if this sort of thing can get by WSJ writers and editors, you and I should recheck our numbers with a wary eye.

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First and final drafts

Stephen King, in his book On Writing, recalls an early editor's definition of a second draft: "Draft 2=Draft 1 minus 10 percent."

Most of us, when we think about editing, equate it with cutting--but that's not always the case. Consider the following:

1. In editing your piece of writing, you find you've left out something important. You add rather than subtract.

2. You contract to write a book of a certain word-length, only to find your first draft--which tells your complete story--is 10,000 words short. Again, you add.

I experienced the second scenario twice in my writing. The first time (my first science fiction novel), I solved it by adding a 10,000-word subplot. The second time (I needed only 5000 more words) I added a new character whose back story and actions brought the book (my only western) to target.

But King is right. Most editing is cutting. I have to wonder, however, how top-of-mind his editor's advice was as he went through the final draft of the last book in his Dark Tower series.

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