Change can come one word at a time

By Randy Koch

A friend who teaches in one of the magnet schools in Laredo recently told me that high school English students are taught the importance of "elaboration" when writing essays -- adding language even if it doesn’t do any work for the writer or the writing. "Sometimes we’re just grateful when they say something," she said and sighed. I know the feeling. But I hate what that kind of gratitude results in -- loose writing that conceals an idea like a baggy pair of pants over trim hips and legs or hides them in layer upon layer of language like a homeless man wearing all the clothes he owns even in the heat of a Laredo summer.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m stingy with language because I’ve had to be stingy for so long with other things. When I was growing up, space and money were both tight; my three brothers and I shared two double beds in one large bedroom upstairs and wore hand-me-downs or clothes Mom bought for us at the second-hand store in Sleepy Eye. And even though this was in the late 1960s, we lived in a house without a telephone or running water or carpet or more than one station on the TV until I was in the fourth grade. When my older brother Ken and I were in high school, we spent summers pulling weeds from the neighbors’ soybeans and stacking hay bales for two dollars an hour. Once I graduated from Lamberton High and dropped out of Mankato State College after one year, I worked full-time for the next nine years as a maintenance man at a nursing home and now understand why I was always broke. During that time my income averaged less than $12,400 per year and for three of those years was less than $9,000.

When I was nearly 30, I finally returned to college and worked and borrowed my way through a bachelor’s and a master’s degree before getting a temporary, sometimes part-time teaching position at Rochester Community College in southeastern Minnesota. My income more than doubled, but now I was also a single father with college loans to pay off, so Mary and I lived from quarter to quarter and paycheck to paycheck. During the first year in Rochester, Mary slept on our only bed, and I slept on an air mattress on my bedroom floor. Our large 15’ x 25’ living room was sparsely furnished with a second-hand seven-foot green couch bought at the Trading Post, a rocking chair, two bookcases, and almost nothing on the walls. Mary loved the empty, open sprawl of the carpet for gymnastics but complained about riding in the ugly yellow ’74 Gremlin I nursed through two winters. When the money I had saved while teaching from September to May ran out early in August, we had to buy groceries with a credit card until school started and I had a regular paycheck coming in again. Even after we moved to Laredo, I still felt the need to pinch pennies in order to continue paying off college loans and the credit card that I used to finance the move across the country.

I suppose this sort of history isn’t all that uncommon, but our Spartan existence runs counter to what Americans have been indoctrinated with since birth -- spend, spend, and spend some more. It’s assumed that credit card debt is a part of the American dream, that the "pursuit of happiness" involves buying stuff, lots of it, whether we can pay for it or not. According to The Center for the New American Dream, "approximately 60 million families carry an average credit card debt of $7,000," and that in 1998 the advertising industry spent over $200 billion to promote their products, which means they spent nearly $2,000 on every American household that year. We have been and will continue to be encouraged to buy things that we don’t need even when we can’t afford them. In fact, after September 11, spending by Americans dropped off significantly, but within a few weeks our government was encouraging us to get back to normal, and the normalcy they were referring to included travel and shopping -- in short, spending our money and buying products and services we didn’t really need. Patriotism suddenly and openly became synonymous with shopping.

These days unnecessary things seem necessary, and when that attitude becomes as ingrained as it has in this country, it’s bound to feel normal and natural to young people growing up with it. We spend excessively. We drive excessively large and mobile vehicles; according to the July 2, 2001 issue of Newsweek, SUVs account for one out of every four new vehicles sold, but only 5% of them are ever taken off-road. We are exposed to an excessive number of commercials; the average child sees 20,000-40,000 commercials each year. We eat to excess; according to Federal government statistics, 22.5% of Americans are thirty pounds or more overweight, and 55% of American adults -- that’s 97 million people -- are 20% or more above their ideal body weight. Much of this is because we watch an excessive amount of television; in this country the average child ages 2-11 watches nearly 20 hours per week, and almost half of us admit that we spend too much time in front of the TV.

Excess for Americans has become a habit, so it’s not surprising that it carries over into other things, among them writing. The problem, then, is changing the mind of a writing student who has been repeatedly told that excess is its own reward and shown that it is, in fact, a sign of success.

When I claim that I’m stingy with language, I don’t mean that I don’t have much to say or that I avoid elaboration. This article is sufficient proof of that point. What I mean is that I try to be as efficient with language as I can be, to say as compactly as possible what needs to be said. This is the primary challenge for anyone who writes. Take, for example, a common expression used by sportscasters on either of the local TV stations: "Nixon won by a final score of 53 to 49." Here’s a simple fact dragged out in a bloated sentence. Sure, it’s only ten words, but flabby sentences like this are a big reason that local news broadcasts often lack detail and substance. Notice how redundant the sentence is. First, it’s obvious that "53 to 49" is a score, so telling viewers that this is a "score" is unnecessary. Since "Nixon won," it has to be a "final score." So why not use five words -- Nixon won 53 to 49 -- instead of ten to say the same thing? I’II tell you why: it fills air space, it’s less work, and it gives the impression that the announcer is saying something of value even though he or she could have used the space taken up by those five dead-beat words to say something specific about the game, the players, the high scorer, the coaches’ or fans’ behavior or enthusiasm, or other details that would give viewers a better sense of the event. It’s simply lazy writing or writing that results from the attitude that more words are better than fewer, that excess is success.

Convincing students to cut a bunch of deadwood from a sentence, a paragraph, or an essay is about as difficult as getting them to write something in the first place. "First, you tell us to write 500 words," they say, "and then you want us to cut out 200 of them. Make up your mind." They’re more polite than that, but that’s the gist of their complaint. On the surface they seem to have a point, but what they too often fail to recognize is that not all words are created equal. A society of words is not a democracy, and a good writer is prejudiced, critical, even dictatorial. Anyone who writes needs to understand that some words are less useful than others, and that if they aren’t pulling their weight, we need to deport them.

Take, for instance, this opinion: "I think that it should be illegal to campaign outside of polling places on election day." This overweight sentence demonstrates several simple things writers can watch for as they try to be direct, clear, and concise. First, always beware of the word "that." Sometimes it’s grammatically necessary as in these two sentences: "Be sure you carry out that bag of trash" or "He took the flight that stopped over in Missoula." We need "that" in both sentences, but sometimes it’s not needed. Let’s try our original example without "that"—"I think it should be illegal to campaign. . ." No problem, right? Okay, let’s get rid of it. One down.

Next, don’t label ideas as belonging to you. In our example, the words "I think" identify the source of the opinion "it should be illegal to campaign outside of polling places on election day." If "I think" is excluded, the reader will still understand that the rest of the sentence is an opinion and that it comes from the writer, not from someone else. Students often do this because they’re insecure about speaking their minds and expressing their own opinions and feel the need to qualify whatever they say. Again, eliminating those two words (or many others that function like them -- "I believe," "In my opinion," "I have come to realize," etc.) doesn’t create any confusion, so let’s get rid of them. That’s three words down, and we’re still saying the same thing.

Finally, never start a sentence with the word "it" as in "It should be illegal to campaign outside of polling places on election day." What does the pronoun "it" refer to in this sentence? Well, the thing that should be illegal, which is, of course, the campaigning. Instead of starting with "it," let’s start with the thing that "it" refers to: "Campaigning outside of polling places should be illegal." As you can see, we’ve cut the sentence down from 16 words to eight, and we’ve still said the same thing. This is what I mean by being concise and stingy with language.

But we can also make sentences tighter and more compact in other ways. One of the most common flaws in the work of inexperienced writers results from inattentiveness to verbs. Choosing verbs carelessly produces dull, inactive, and usually flabby sentences. Generally speaking, verbs come in two types: action verbs and helping or linking verbs. The English language has thousands of action verbs but only 23 helping verbs, the most common and problematic of which are forms of the verb "to be" (is, are, was, were, am) and the word "would." Inexperienced writers rely excessively on helping verbs because they can write grammatical sentences with them and do it without much thought or effort. And for many Laredo students or other writers who learned English as a second language, it allows them to avoid the problem of remembering forms of irregular action verbs. For example, consider this sentence: "Juan was shooting pigeons with his dad’s rifle." The complete verb here is "was shooting" ("was" is the helping verb, "shooting" the action verb), but using both of these verbs is unnecessary. Students often attach a helping verb like "was" or "would" to an action verb ending with "-ing" because they don’t know the simple past tense form of the irregular action verb, in this case "shot," or they use it because it gets them one word closer to the 500 words they need for the assignment, or they just don’t think it makes any difference. But it does. Most of the time no details are lost and the essential meaning of the sentence remains the same even if we cut the helping verb and use a simpler form of the action verb, such as "shot" instead of "was shooting." Thus, our sentence becomes "Juan shot pigeons with his dad’s rifle." This sentence says the same thing as the original and does it in one less word.

The same is true for sentences containing "would." Unless you’re speculating or talking about something happening in the future, "would" is illogical and unnecessary. I often see students talking about their own pasts and writing sentences like this: "When I was six years old, Grandma would make the best tamales." Since this is about the simple past, "would" isn’t needed, and the student can simply write, "When I was six years old, Grandma made the best tamales." This, then, is the fourth bit of advice for making sentences more compact: Beware of helping verbs, particularly when they precede "-ing" action verbs.

One last suggestion in this matter of conciseness -- never start a sentence with the word "there." Doing so almost always results in an unnecessary helping or linking verb. Here’s an example: "There were cumbias blasting from the neighbor’s windows." We can say the same thing without "there:" "Cumbias were blasting from the neighbor’s windows." And then we can apply what we just discussed in the previous paragraph and cut the helping verb: "Cumbias blasted from the neighbor’s windows." Again you can see that we can say the same thing, make it more active, and do it in two less words.

More often, however, students don’t include an action verb in sentences that begin with "there" as I did in the previous example; instead, they write something like this -- "There was a raccoon in the yard." Eliminating "there" is easy, and all we have to do is move the verb: "A raccoon was in the yard." However, we can improve the sentence further just by drawing our attention to that most common symptom of weak sentences, the helping or linking verb, in this case "was." This verb provides no action, so the reader doesn’t know if the raccoon is dead or alive, asleep or awake. Replacing the linking verb with a precise action verb adds vital, visual information without adding more language: "A raccoon waddled in the yard." This sentence is considerably better than the one we started with.

Maybe things can work in reverse for a change. Maybe avoiding excess in our writing can also help us avoid excess in our lives. Maybe, just maybe, not only what we say but also how we say things can affect changes beyond the page.

(Randy Koch teaches creative writing and English composition at Laredo Community College, and is editor of LCC’s La Frontera arts journal.)

Local Writers at Work

_ Chris Morgan’s short story "The Same Sun" appeared in the Fall 2001 issue of Concho River Review, published at Angelo State University in San Angelo, TX. You can read the complete story online at www.angelo.edu/dept/english/ CRR/. Click on "Current Issue" for Chris’s story.
_ As a result of her involvement this spring in an online discussion about her book Soy Como Soy y QuÈ with Tony Spanos’s literature students at Weber State University, Raquel Valle SentÌes has been invited to participate in the WSU poetry series in Ogden, Utah, later this year.
_ Jim R. Goetze, Penelope G. Warren, Jose L. Egremy, and Rukmani Viswanath, all LCC faculty members, collaborated on an article titled "Comparisons of Resident Birds of the Paseo Del Indio Nature Trail to Other Public Lands in South Texas." It was recently published as an Occasional Paper by the Museum of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, TX and is available directly from the Museum by requesting ISSN 0149-175X.
_ "A Ride Back in Time on the Tex-Mex Railroad," an article by Bruni resident William A. Layton, appeared in the Spring 2002 issue of South Texas Traveler Magazine.
_ Allen Wiseman and Randy Koch wrote an article called "Observations in the Classroom," which appeared in the Spring 2002 issue of The Quarterly, a National Writing Project publication.
_ Penny Warren’s article "Border Beauties" appears in the May 2002 issue of Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine. Larry Ditto’s gorgeous photographs accompany the six-page article about birding in the LCC/Bravo Bend area, at Lake Casa Blanca, and at Lobo Creek and La Bota Ranches.