Writing Right, Right?

Learning to write – really write – for the first time is kind of like learning to walk: baby steps. And accordingly, the journey isn’t complete without a goodly number of tumbles and falls along the way; after all, if good writing was easy, then good writing wouldn’t be too good. And so, as I look back at my portfolio for the semester, perhaps I shouldn’t be too annoyed by what I see (or don’t see, as the case may be). In fact, looking at where I’ve come, I have every reason to be fully satisfied – in a lot of ways, learning to write is harder than learning to walk; first there was the unlearning of years of teaching of how to write poorly before the whole issue of writing well could even be introduced. So given all that, these baby steps might as well be bounding leaps, or at the least, a semester well spent. It has been a semester that has given me the eyes to see all the things that good writing is not, a semester that has equipped me with the tools mandated for rhetoric, and finally, a semester that has convinced me that anything short of good writing is almost always a clutter of empty, meaningless words. In other words, it has made me utterly ashamed of the way I addressed the problem of writing before.

Reading the George Orwell packet at the conclusion of the semester was almost like a walk down memory lane. I remember writing like that – and trying to write like that – because that’s what people wanted to hear - stupid people, anyway. Like any other difficult task, before you can see the right way to do it, you always have to be able to see the wrong way to do it. And now I know for sure that “the eggs are breethen heavy” really is good writing. I know now that studding a paper with clichés like “trials and tribulations” (The Souls of Black Folk paper) and redundancies like “genuinely seen” (Characterization Paper) aren’t really studding the paper with anything except empty shells. Encapsulated herein is also the stages of revision; through peer editing and self-revision, the contrast between what is good and what is not is clear – which is a good thing, because it is a mite difficult to fix something unless you know not only that it is broken, but how it is broken.

And it is the how that I have finally been forced into considering while writing: the tools of rhetoric. These are the tools of structure, imagery, syntax, diction, tone, et. Al, tools that every good writer uses with subtle grace to produce the final product. And while our middle school teachers were busy teaching us how to “sound mature”, I never gave a second thought to what else I need to be worrying about besides putting words on paper. And that fact is now painfully obvious as I look back on my writing from earlier in the semester, which included invented (almost-creative!) non-structures, meaningless far-from-just-right details and word choices, and a lack of concise imagery, among other things. One of my more humorous non-structures came out of my paper on The Souls of Black Folk: 1) intro 2) overview/almost theme paragraph, 3) almost technique, but not quite paragraph, 4) theme paragraph, and 5) conclusion. I have no idea what I was thinking, and I’m not going to try to figure it out now; I’ll just rest content with the knowledge that I’m now equipped to stop a recurrence of such an event.

All of this knowledge is one thing, but applying it quite another. It’s still infinitely easier to write a lot of meaningless words and pretend like they ought to mean something. But if there is one thing I’ll take away from this semester is that there is no substitute for the power of language; George Orwell describes it ideally as “an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought” (187). The writing of masters like Orwell and the films of the best film-makers like Welles and Kubrick are proof of the power of technique wielded by the thoughtful. In comparison with these, almost everything else pales to an “oh, that’s it?” level. And when the writing is just right like that, it clicks, and it’s so obvious; in a lot of ways, it’s an amazing thing, to know you’ve got the just right detail or word and there’s simply no other way to say it any better. Now that I have at least some ability, I feel, to write like an actual writer, there is no excuse for writing without thinking about every word, every rhetorical element – to do otherwise is a disservice to myself, to the reader, and to the language.

It hasn’t been the easiest of roads, but seeing my final products in comparison to my beginning products, and noticing for myself the not-so-subtle shift in my approach to writing, I think I’ve taken my first few baby steps in stride. There is undoubtedly a long way to go before I’ll be running, but at least now I can recognize the elements of powerful writing, use the elements of powerful writing and understand the power of powerful writing. I’ve seen the best – what to strive for – and I’ve seen the other end, too (many times in my own writing). The beauty, though, is that I think I’m on a one-way road now; since I know what the standards are and how they are achieved, I don’t see how my writing can possibly get any worse. There’s only one way left to go in this journey, and I think I’m well on my way with a backpack full of rhetorical tools to get me there.