April 26, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Which brings me to another
Which brings me to another question: I get a hell of a lot of email from anti-war, anti-"warblogger" folks who don't like my ideas. The ones that are respectful, I answer privately. The ones that aren't, I junk or make fun of. But there's a common thread on which I wish to comment, which is that almost none of them can write.
Now, I want to say that I don't think that this is because far-leftists can't write -- God knows, the creative writing programs are stuffed with enough of them to disprove that theory. But the ones who can don't, at least to me. The ones who write to me display literary skills ranging from average to breathtakingly bad. Letters display the kind of orthographical and punctuational errors that one is supposed to have left behind by the tenth grade. I am not talking about people who use awkward phrasings, or make the occasional typo; Lord knows I'm on no high moral ground there (and don't think I don't know that I am about to get a stream of emails about every typographical error I make in this piece). I'm talking about paragraphs that have no logical beginning and no ending, but start and stop abruptly and at random, like third world trains. Continuous misspellings of common words that make me go back over and over again to re-read, until I figure out that they have substituted "to" for "too", "its" for "it's", "there" for "their", etc, and thereby inadvertently rendered the sentence almost, but not quite, totally incomprehensible. People who string together sentences with commas for pages at a time, until one begins to fear that their word processor is out of periods and the letter may never stop. People who apparently believe that a semi-colon is to the colon as semi-formal is to formal clothing. People who were apparently not familiarized with the subject-object convention of sentence construction in their formative years and pepper me with a stream of jolting sentence fragments. People who use the wrong word because it sounds something like the right one: tenative for tenacious, palpitate for vascillate, etc. And then there are the people whose essays are technically correct but so dull in their construction that they read like a third-grade essay on "What I did over summer vacation": Adjective-noun-verb. Noun-adjective-adverb. Adjective-noun-verb. It's enough to make one pound the keyboard screaming "don't they have any clauses where you come from?"
I won't even start on the people who think that the sarcastic "Did so! You're a big fat idiot!" verbal play of the high-school debate team is every bit as compelling in a political letter from a 52-year old computer programmer as it was when they triumphantly refuted "Resolved: The Cafeteria Will Serve Lima Beans and Lamb Patties Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays". Because most of my letter writers aren't like that. They're nice people. Serious people. Well-intentioned. But functionally semi-literate.
I don't mean to suggest that the right has some sort of God-given literary talent; there are any number of atrocious conservative, libertarian, and "warblogger" writers. But the anti-war left doesn't seem to have any answer to the near-omniscient topical mastery of a Steven Den Beste, the witty imagery of a James Lileks, the sharp financial insight of Mindles H. Dreck, or the individual talents any of another dozen bloggers I could name. These people can write. And the letters I get from conservatives, even when they're excoriating me (believe it or not, I get more than my share) are invariably well-spelled and rely on logic, not name-calling or "dead babies trump reason" type arguments.
So why can't the kids on the anti-war side, by and large, write?
Well, a compelling possibility is that I'm just not seeing them. Maybe I'm stuck in my little libertarian-right ghetto and I'm not getting the good stuff, just the trolling nutbags. So come on, talented heirs of Marx and Gandhi! Send me your stuff! I want to know where I'm going wrong.
I think that's part of it. But I think another part of it is that we've abandonned educating our children in favor of nurturing their delicate little psyches. Because I've had this argument a couple of times, and the semi-literate conservatives are always sheepish, a little ashamed, of their lack of writing talent. The left-wingers, on the other hand, are proud of it. "It's just a bunch of stupid rules! The important thing is the ideas, and people understand what I say just fine."
Wrong on both counts.
For one thing, rules are not stupid just because they are arbitrary. It does not matter, in some metaphysical sense, whether we drive on the right or the left side of the road; but it matters very much that we all do one or the other, because frankly, I can't afford any more car insurance than I already have. The rules of grammar are of course, somewhat arbitrary, but they are not therefore stupid; they are required for us to communicate with each other. If I say "Therefore house to the up pick go I keys" it matters not that this arrangement may be perfectly intelligible in Yoruba (I have no idea whether it is or not; it's an example); it violates the word-order rules upon which we have agreed in speaking English, and which allow us to sacrifice other complicated grammatical rules necessary to mark words in languages where word order is less rigid than in English. Surprise! The rules of English grammar, by and large, are there because they avoid ambiguity or redundancy. We gloss over these in spoken English because context and body language allow us to convey much of what poor sentence construction does not; moreover, it's real time, so if we build a sentence poorly the first time, and are not understood, we can correct the error. Writing is one shot; if your sentence isn't clear, the reader won't understand what you are saying. You must therefore take much more care to write clear, non-redundant, but unambiguous English -- and that means good grammar. You may think, for example, that the prohibition against splitting infinitives is an example of the power of petty tyrants, but in fact it exists for the very good reason that "to" is not only the infinitive marker in English, but also a preposition, and therefore improper placement can be very confusing.
Poorly constructed sentences, like poor spelling, take away the focus from the ideas and put it on the poor writing. Flawless prose is indeed "all about the ideas"; bad prose is all about the paragraph I had to read four times before I figured out what the writer was trying to say -- and the eight paragraphs I didn't read because I didn't want to bother wading through any more mistakes.
Anti-war people are certainly not the only people prone to this type of thinking. But politically, they are the most likely to embrace it. Witness "whole language" reading.
But enough of political carping -- let's all come together on the bipartisan goal of building a better, more grammatical future for our children. Turn off your spellchecker! Break out the OED! Strunk and White for everyone! Together, we can brave new future into the boldy go!
Posted by Jane Galt at April 26, 2002 4:29 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links