Purpose, Passion, and Politics: The Craft of Writing

The other day, I overheard a conversation between two professors when one cheekily quipped that he had set the next exam paper using ChatGPT. Obviously shocked, the other professor asked, “Why?” Our gallant hero coolly replied, “Well, tit for tat.”

It seems that with an increase in the number of generative text services, there has been a proportional decrease in the creativity and imagination of people. And I fear that the problem will only aggravate overtime. GPTs will continue to narrow down the gap between expertise and acquired affluence.

But what about the craft of writing? What makes the likes of Joyce, Thoreau, and Hemingway? Recently, The Economist covered books for budding writers and some of them are quite thought-provoking. In this post, I intend to note a thing or two about the craft of words.

THE PURPOSE

Generally, the main goal of writing is communication. This might seem obvious but it demands a number of considerations that the writer must take into account. The most important question to ask is, “What is the writer trying to communicate?” The writer cannot go far if they are confused about what to say.

“If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.”

~Abraham Lincoln

Therefore, the writer must think deeply about the ideas they want to introduce, reorder them in a sound structure such that the ideas flow logically and an uninitiated reader can easily follow the chain of reasoning. Note that this job demands the writer to be empathic besides being a master of wordcraft.

The writer must constantly ask themselves: “What do I want to say?” and once they have found the answer ask whether they have said it. And then slash their words to remove clutter and confusion.

THE PASSION

The craft of writing is independent of the contents of the piece. This means that the words, the sentence structure, flow, rhythm, even the relative sonority of the words must be chosen in a way that the readers find themselves reading a piece that they have no interest in. And that can be achieved only by the passion and spirit that the writer imbues in their article. As William Zinsser writes,

…two of the most important qualities…humanity and warmth. Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next…

~William Zinsser, On Writing Well, 6th ed.

The writer must be in constant search for this warmth in their articles, one not of guile or forced gimmicks but genuine and humane. And remain aware that even the tiniest slip will be first noticed by their readers.

After all, it doesn’t matter if a string of words aims to decipher the writings of Proust or chronicle a weekend trip to Digha, what matters is the curiosity and emotion that reflects through the piece. No doubt, such stringent demands for the poor writer are met by mastery of the language and a clarity of thoughts, as noted above.

THE POLITICS

Distracting myself from the individual, let me talk about the state of writing in general. It is a known fact that redundancy has become a hallmark of so-called official communication. By deliberately cluttering communication, not only do people pollute the purpose of language but leverage the complexity to artificially create an information asymmetry. Perhaps, no one is to be blamed more than modern corporations and centralised governance mechanisms - systems that are incentivized to keep the masses in the dark about what’s really going on. Zinsser discusses this at length in his book, which I recommend to anyone aspiring to write better. I will quote the following examples from his book verbatim.

When the Digital Equipment Corporation eliminated 3,000 jobs its statement didn’t mention layoffs; those were “involuntary methodologies.” When an Air Force missile crashed, it “impacted with the ground prematurely.” When General Motors had a plant shutdown, that was a “volume-related production-schedule adjustment.” Companies that go belly-up have “a negative cash-flow position.”

So, the next time you come across a sentence too difficult to understand, remember that you are being fooled. Sadly, the government has a tendency to inflate “good deeds” and sound important and obfuscate “bad deeds” and still sound important. For example, an invasion is called a “reinforced protective reaction strike”. Or take this absolute gem of an extract from Gen. Alexander Haig’s address, as President Reagan’s Secretary of State, said, “We must push this to a lower decibel of public fixation. I don’t think there’s much of a learning curve to be achieved in this area of content.” which, if you squint hard enough, means, “leave it to me because you’re dumb.” George Orwell, in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” writes,

“political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible…Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”

~George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946

For a select few, writing has always been a venture infested with ulterior motives. Some want to write to appear respectable in society by using long and tiring words that sound “elegant”. Some write for political favouritism or simply to clobber the mind of restless souls who are too careless to uncover the stratagem themselves. The cunning writer also has a good knowledge of psychology. Human beings are arrested by their own mental inertia - a fact exploited by government and marketing teams where they give options to “opt-out” and opt everyone in by default. No freedom of any kind was encroached yet the job was done. The clever writer pollutes his thoughts with convoluted phrases and sophisticated words so as to signal that they know what they are doing. The learned are more likely to fall into this trap as follows, “I consider myself a well-read person. I am reading this person and I don’t seem to understand half the things they are saying. Therefore, they must be more well-read than me.” Mission accomplished.

THE PROFESSION

Dentists say, “Are you experiencing any pain?” instead of just asking, “Does it hurt?”

By using such colourful sentence construction, the dentist not only establishes themself as a person of letter but also manages to distract the patient from imminent pain by anesthetising against their wit.

One last example before I stop quoting Zinsser (these are just too fun not to quote),

“In the unlikely possibility that the air-craft should experience such an eventuality,” she begins — a phrase so oxygen-depriving in itself that we are prepared for any disaster.

ART & CRAFT

I am yet to complete Zinsser’s book and truth be told, that seems unlikely¹. But the ideas that I have come across will surely guide me for a long way and I hope some of these stick with you too!

Any article should leave the reader with exactly one provocative thought and no more and definitely not less. And yet, writing is not a technical job but an art. There is no blueprint to stick to. Only certain rules that, as Orwell notes, should be “[broken] sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”

FOOTNOTES

1: I have grown more picky (reckless?) with my reading, cherry-picking what I want to read and brutally ignoring what I don’t.