Starting with What Matters, Part 2: James Baldwin

In "The Negro Child—His Self-Image" delivered as a talk to teachers on October 16, 1963, and published in The Saturday Review on December 21, 1963, James Baldwin, crafted this 88-word sentence toward the end of his 3,632-word essay:

Now if I were a teacher in this school, or any Negro school, and I was dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a few hours of every day and would then return to their homes and to the streets, children who have an apprehension of their future which with every hour grows grimmer and darker, I would try to teach them—I would try to make them know—that those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded, are criminal. 

As background, Baldwin was talking to teachers at the invitation of their school. The premise of his unusual appeal was that no sooner do children develop a conscience that they find themselves at war with a backward society. He was challenging not only the very foundation of education but the moral and political imperative that we all must confront.

Let's start with the base clause of the sample: I would try to teach them that those streets, those houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded, are criminal.

Baldwin suspends his subject, I, for 59 words. In doing so, he violates what most writing teachers would say is a hallmark of good writing: getting to the point by starting with the subject and verb. But in doing so, he proclaims how practically complex yet spiritually pure his point is. The words preceding the base clause sets the stage for the teacher's moral obligation: 

Now if I were a teacher in this school, or any Negro school, and I was dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a few hours of every day and would then return to their homes and to the streets, children who have an apprehension of their future which with every hour grows grimmer and darker ...

By this point in his speech/essay, Baldwin has already established his credibility as a sage of the cultural mores of his time. Starting the sentence with "Now if I were a teacher in this school, or any Negro school" comes at a propitious moment. The additional clause "and I was dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a few hours of every day" is far from redundant; he is punctuating the educational dilemma in which teachers find themselves. And by concluding the long left branch preceding the base clause with "children who have an apprehension of their future which with every hour grows grimmer and darker," Baldwin emphasizes the heart of the problem and pivots to his appeal.

James Baldwin wrote many powerful, dramatic sentences like this one in his essays. You can find them is his Collected Essays and The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings.

Starting with What Matters, Part 1: Oliver Sacks

This and the next several WORDS ON THE LINE posts cover a key tip on writing to the point, namely, starting with what matters most to your reader. Throughout the series, I refer to actual sentences from respected writers who skillfully illustrate ways that we can emphasize the most important point. In each case, I take a sentence out of the context of the sentences preceding and following it, so I encourage you to read the entire work, not only to understand why the authors chose to write their sentence as published but to reap the pleasure of capturing their creatively rendered content and style.

The sentence below comes from the essay "Darwin and the Meaning of Flowers" by Oliver Sacks in his posthumously published essay collection, The River of Consciousness:

Natural beauty, for Darwin, was not just aesthetic, it always reflected function and adaptation at work.

So much is happening in this 16-word sentence. Let's start with the obvious comma splice, a sentence that many English teachers would not tolerate. Sacks could have written a "correct" sentence by placing a period or a comma after aesthetic, but he wanted to move us along quickly, trusting that we would know he wanted only a slight pause and not a full stop. Great writers like Sacks take such linguistic liberties to nuance their prose.

A second point: Sacks separates the subject (beauty) and verb (was not) with a short, mid-branch, for Darwin. He could have written, For Darwin, natural beauty was not ..., but great writers know how and when to mix up their syntax for variety to keep the reader engaged.

Next, notice Sacks's subtle downplaying aesthetic, used as an adjective, in contrast with the nouns function and adaptation. In making aesthetic a mere descriptor of natural beauty as opposed to a more prominent concept, he brings to the fore the two parallel nouns that follow with even more force than he would have by simply writing was not just.

But what about getting to the point? The answer is simple: Sacks chooses to get to the point indirectly, creating greater surprise for the reader. As you might surmise from the title of the article, Sacks took on the dual challenge of describing Darwin's contribution to a radically new worldview of botany while explaining that flowers adapt to their environment in ways as profound as humans do. Such intellectual discoveries for the reader demand from the writer an uncommon style.

A weak substitute for Sacks's beautiful sentence runs 14 words, more concise than the 16-word original, yet nowhere near as imaginative or captivating, not even close to asserting the point that he wants to make.

Darwin saw natural beauty as aesthetic, but also as function and adaptation at work. 

You might think there's no way that Sacks put so much thought into each sentence and its limitless alternatives. If he had, he'd never finish writing one essay, let alone the many volumes he composed in his remarkable life. But ask jazz legend Sonny Rollins if he thinks about every stunning saxophone solo he plays, or three-point wonder Steph Curry if he deliberates before making a perfect shot from 24 feet out. Their likely answer would be that they're programmed, after thousands of hours of practice, to just do it. The same is true for Sacks. 

Writing Is a Process

The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), one of the guardians of the English language, has argued for years that writing is a process as well as a product. The product is what we write, the white paper, proposal, report, procedure, email, speech, essay, story, play, or poem that informs, persuades, guides, or entertains our readers. The process is how we write, the steps we take to move words, sentences, and paragraphs from our brains to the screen or paper. 

In its position statement Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of Writing, the NCTE claims that everyone has the capacity to write and to become better writers. An effective use of the writing process enables students to achieve multiple benefits:

• Break writer's block.
• Eliminate procrastination.
• Reduce writing-related stress.
• Generate creative ideas.
• Organize content logically.
• Draft messages quickly.
• Revise, edit, and proofread efficiently. 
• Improve their productivity.

Upcoming Webinars

Clients ask me nearly every day, "When is your next webinar?" So I've decided to list just a few of my public upcoming webinars with their descriptive registration links:

• January 16: Writing with Confidence, Consideration, and Class for the American Management Association
• February 1: How to Write a Darn Good Email for the American Management Association
• February 9: Masterful Time Management for Bank Webinars

I am also presenting many nonpublic webinars for private clients. If your business is interested, please reach me at Phil@PhilVassallo.com.

Make Every Word Matter

Work-related documents requires concision; we should remove verbiage. This truism is easier said than done if one loves classical literature. I dare not change John Donne's final lines from his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, XVII (1624). The repetition of tolls is, well, poetic:

Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. 

I harbor no ill feeling toward Charles Dickens's opening of A Tale of Two Cities (1859), which paints a picture of discord and chaos through its repetition:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.

And I dare not argue about the repetition in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech (1963). In the final 5 minutes of that legendary address at the Lincoln Memorial, King uses dream 10 times, followed by a paragraph about faith 3 times, followed by freedom 9 times, and ending with free 3 times. The repetition is what makes his speech as memorable as the spirituals and anthems he borrows from.

But business and technical writers rarely need such repetition. Here is an example of adding useless words: 

The company is currently monitoring the situation in order to work out a solution. (14 words)

The present continuous tense, is monitoring, eliminates the need for currently. The prepositional phrase, in order, is unnecessary since a clearer, though weak, infinitive phrase, to work out, follows it. That infinitive phrase is weak, and it is followed by a noun phrase, a solution, when a verb phrase, to resolve it, would have been stronger. A rewrite would look like this:

The company is monitoring the situation for resolution (8 words).

This 42% reduction in word count is not as rare as you might think. We tend to read business messages just to get information, not to assess the writer's style. But the next time you run through a boring, ambiguous message, don't be surprised if the writer didn't edit out verbiage. Writers should take a second look at their emails and reports before pressing send to make sure that every word matters so their readers get the point. 

The New Number 1 Question About Email

Consider whether email is the best way to reply. This is the most frequent comment I hear from the CEO level of organizations where I conduct training. Corporate presidents typically tell me to make sure I admonish their staff not to use email as a way of "assigning blame" and "avoiding responsibility," or as "a weapon of mass destruction." They say, "Tell them to get off their butts and develop relationships with people by walking down the hallway or picking up the phone."

While I mentioned this point in an earlier WORDS ON THE LINE post, I reiterate it because it is the most frequently asked question in my many webinars on email. Using alternatives to email at key times is not only the more considerate choice, it is also the more time efficient one.

Tense Tricks, Part 4: Useless Appendages

The present continuous, or present progressive, tense indicates an action or state that is happening now:

She is working hard. (action)

She is being diligent. (state)

Since the continuous action or state is obvious to us, we never need to write, "She is going to go to work." I often hear people speak like this, which may not be a problem in the context of a conversation. But I occasionally see people write the sentence, which is excessive at best and ambiguous at worst, especially since it confuses the present continuous with the future continuous tense. So we have two choices in such a case:

• If we mean a present continuous action, we can write, "She is going to work." 
• If we mean a future continuous action, we can write, "She will be going to work."