5.1.25 - A Crashout Email on Writing
For my whole life, instructors have told me to shorten my writing, and have generally advocated for a very terse and tight style to students. Don't use passive voice. Keep sentences short. Avoid semi colons. Avoid embedded clauses. Don't use too many adjectives. For most of my life, I have resisted this advice. Things have mostly turned out (very) well for me. I am published in the real world, I was paid for my writing abilities before law school, and I've been pretty good at legal writing. So I've become increasingly confident in responding to feedback with "yeah no, I don't really agree."
I recently got some feedback on an assignment repeating some of that advice, and with some edits to a piece I truly did not agree with. It wasn't anything insane, and for what it's worth this Professor gave me an A on said assignment. But I was hungry and caffeinated this morning and kind of crashed out in response to the email. I am sharing an excerpt from it here for society's benefit.
I realize this could theoretically doxx me to the instructor I sent this email to. I doubt it, but if it does, yeah this is my little anonymous blog. I write here to stay sane and to "stay human." I don't feel like I'm breaking the law or anything so, yeah.
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I think that the dictat that all professional writing be flat, exclusively use the active voice, avoid multiple embedded clauses and appositives––to be extremely stifling, and to reduce the richness of the everyday writing we encounter. It’s the writing equivalent of architectural modernism/brutalism––strip away all the excess and leave pure “function.”
I know many may counter, “well this is just for a professional, everyday context, there are other areas where a longer writing style may be appropriate.” I would rebut: don’t we all love the charm of old European cities, specifically because everyday, pedestrian installations are thought worthy of ornament and a little extra care? There was a great Ross Douthat piece on this in the Times that I’m remembering. I have many of the same thoughts with respect to writing (and speaking). I think we are better off when even everyday writing has some voice, and even demands a little bit of extra attention.
For this and other reasons, I generally resist efforts to tighten up my writing style until someone makes a paycheck contingent on it. When that day comes––and it has before––I will be perfectly capable of doing it, and can even ask a computer to do it for me. In a world where prose is a commodity, where creating it is becoming too cheap to meter, where I can simply ask ChatGPT (as many of my peers at the University do) to ape the Smart Brevity or any other style, it is more important than ever to practice and retain and expand our voice with all of its rough edges. More than its professional and academic applications, it’s what keeps us human.
I hope that this doesn’t come off as too impish or flippant. But this is just a subject I care deeply about, and I have disagreed with many on this. You can listen to a speech by a President decades back meant for a general audience, read a novel aimed at the working classes from the early 20th century, and a get a sense of just how much expectations of the average person have declined since then with respect to language. This is getting worse and worse every day, and I think we have a duty to counter this trend wherever possible, and to resist the technological and market incentives to change how write––which is really the way we think. I hope you understand my obstinance on this point goes very deep.
Sincerely,
knxnts