Writing like human beings

By Randy Koch

Sometimes my composition students write in a language I don't understand. It's not Spanish or Spanglish, Tex-Mex or Tejano, or even some strange teenage slang. It's a sort of English, but it doesn't sound like Andrea or Chelsea, Xavier or Miguel, or anybody else in class. In fact, sometimes I feel like I'm reading a text from a foreign country when I find things like “before the final performance, zero tolerance was dominant within me,” or “by adding similar verbal communication the producer only indicated correlation with hostility,” or “drawings and word choice engrossed me in reading it in aside from my responsibility.” I think I'm a reasonably intelligent reader, but when I find myself rereading parts and scratching my head, I wonder if I'm easily distracted or just dense. All I know is that I recognize their words, but I don't know what they mean.

I suspect students, like the rest of us, have seen the writing of well-educated people in insurance policies, investment company prospectuses, legal documents, and academic journals. It's the sort of stuff that comes from people with advanced degrees and letters after their names, so we assume they know what they're doing and that we should do likewise. While I generally avoid this the kind of gibberish, I knew I wouldn't have to search far for an example. I rummaged in my desk, found some papers from HUD, and plodded through them. Of course, I soon ran into this: “Borrower covenants that Borrower is lawfully seised of the estate hereby conveyed and has the right to grant and convey the Property.” It went on for several painful paragraphs, line after torturous line about “the right to reinstate after acceleration” and “the non-existence of a default,” so much jargon that had it rhymed I would have expected a jabberwock to leap from the page.

Being a bit of a masochist, I also picked up The Journal of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and tried to read an article by Keith Miller, part of which said this: “Other superlative antebellum and postbellum orators . . . complicated the jeremiad by explaining racial and gender exploitation as inseparably intertwined” (205). I can't help but wonder if he actually talks like this. Does he compliment his wife's cooking by saying, “Saccharinity, that poulard was trinitrotoluene,” instead of “Honey, that chicken was dynamite”? Writers of convoluted, abstract, impersonal writing, particularly academics, are often criticized -- and rightly so -- because they don't sound like real people and they don't seem to write for real people. In fact, while I sorted through the verbiage, my attention promptly slipped, wandering beyond the window to the parking lot where two boys threw a small white football back and forth under a bright blue sky.

Writers sometimes resort to unnatural diction and convoluted syntax for several reasons. Students and some academics are probably concerned that if they don't speak what they think is the accepted language, they won't be taken seriously in professional conversations or allowed into whatever “club” they're trying to gain entrance to -- the University or Wall Street or their local law firm. Large minds, they believe, use large words and address large, abstract issues while small words and simple sentences are for people with small minds, those who have no business on the inside. Others discover that the distance and anonymity of the page gives them the freedom to use fancy, impersonal words in order to construct a superior persona, one who has few or no faults -- no bad hair cut; no impatience with small children; no rusted-out, 1983 Honda sitting in the driveway. They get caught up in their own elaborate vocabulary and the illusion of the intellectual power suggested by their ability to string together big words regardless of what, if any, meaning they actually convey to the reader. The siren song of their own voices drags them into deeper and more treacherous waters and drowns out any thought of people, particularly those for whom they're writing.

Still others think that if their writing makes sense to them, it must also make sense to the reader. If it doesn't, the fault must lie with the reader, not the writer. However, readers are rarely our own fawning mothers who adore and praise whatever we do. They are, instead, human and, as a result, sometimes impatient, of a different mind, and unwilling to do the writer's work. They expect to get something -- information, entertainment, enlightenment -- from the writing, and they expect the writer to make it all clear. The harder readers have to work, the sooner they'll quit and go back to People magazine or The Young and the Restless or arena football. But I suspect that most people produce awkward, incomprehensible, over-written work not because they're lonely or vain or ignorant, but because in the midst of sifting through ideas and using words -- the only tools we have to convey those ideas -- they forget that they and those for whom they write are human beings.

Good writers never forget the human element. They use simple, straightforward, direct language and choose words for their clarity and unaffectedness, not because they're sesquipedalian or incognizable, meretricious or Gongoresque. We can all tell when a writer is putting on airs, when the only measures used to select words from a thesaurus are a mirror and a ruler. While we need not be men and women of as few words as Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars, we also know that Drs. Frazier and Niles Crane wouldn't have reached the end of their first verbose sentence before being gunned down out of impatience by the man with no name. We should choose our words with humility, with an ear for grace, and out of respect for the idea and the reader.

Good writers create logical, chronological, coherent sentences, not convoluted mazes that even Theseus with a ball of thread couldn't find his way out of. They don't race ahead and leave the reader to follow as best he can, stumbling through the dark, ever fearful that the rough, winding trail of the writer's sentence will suddenly leave him staggering on the edge of some precipice, arms flailing and hands grasping for something solid to hang on to. And they don't push unwilling readers along from behind like a child terrified of the whistling drill in the dentist's office. A good writer walks with readers on the same path, sees what they see, and, with one hand gently on their back and the other pointing the way, guides the reader along the most direct route, avoiding the brambles and fog and chasms of overwriting.

Good writers focus on people -- figuratively or literally, directly or indirectly. They use similes like birders use binoculars and lepidopterists use looking glasses. They use metaphors that lead readers across the border into a different country. They describe the daughter's new voice after the tonsillectomy and the father's graying cowlick. They reveal what we have in common, the mutual experiences and dreams and symbols, what Carl Jung called “the collective unconscious,” that connect the hypothetical to the human, the language to life, the writer to the reader.

As writers, we shouldn't leave readers stranded or abandoned, like victims raging at the incomprehensibility of God and asking the big question: What does it all mean? We should do for one another what we demand of God -- say in no uncertain terms what's on our minds and what we mean. In the 1970s movie Little Big Man, Old Lodge Skins tells Dustin Hoffman's Little Big Man that “the human beings . . . believe everything is alive, not only man and animals, but also water, earth, stone. . . . But the white man -- they believe everything is dead -- stone, earth, animals, and people, even their own people.” Good writers sound like human beings, and if their words breathe with life, their meaning will be alive for the reader, and readers will be reminded that they, too, are human beings.

(Randy Koch teaches English and directs the Writing Center at Texas A&M International University.)