One characteristic of good writing is naturalness. We write well when we’re honest, and when we’re honest, we want to be understood in the voice that is our own. Like our speaking voice, our written voice has a pace and measure which represent, somewhat miraculously, who we are being at the moment; and when we are open and at ease, we have no interest—indeed, we know it is not in our interest—in being obscure or vague.
When we’re honest and natural, in other words, we don’t write like this: I want to utilize my learned skills while obtaining new skills through experience in an office environment. To say that this is not honest is not to make a personal moral judgment; that would involve knowledge of the writer’s intention, and it is right to presume that he (or she) is trying to present his best side in what we may surmise is a response on an employment questionnaire. In the craft of language, however, honesty means something closer to integrity, in the same way we might speak of the integrity, or soundness, of a piece of wood or of a material structure of some sort: is it really what it appears to be for the purpose intended? That sentence is not honest because it does not truly represent what the writer wants to say; it represents what the writer believes he is supposed to say.
The forces that bear down on us to constrain this kind of language are legion, too complicated ever for us to discover the one reason so many of us find it difficult to write clearly and naturally. What we can do for ourselves, however, is first recognize the peculiar tone of such words and phrases when we meet this kind of language, and we can do this with a very simple question: would I speak to someone like that face to face? Most of us would not, because in a personal exchange, we cannot hide (or at least it is more difficult to hide) behind the distance and indirection which the printed word can so easily create. Indeed, we have a term for such insincere, high-flown language when we hear it spoken: we call it an affectation. That noun derives from the verb affect, meaning to have an influence over; language or a personality that is affected has been influenced by something at the expense of its natural honesty.
But what is the textual evidence for such an estimate of that sentence? We can cite first the verb utilize, which we may turn to in certain circumstances to suggest a novel and profitable use of something (utilizing property tax revenue to pay for public entertainment), but which we should strenuously avoid when we simply mean use. Doing so here will bring the tone down from the clouds and into the human community, where one person speaks frankly with another. And likewise with the participle obtaining. If we apply the same test of face-to-face conversation, which would we be likelier to say: you know, I obtained new skills at that job, or you know, I learned new skills at that job. The former, if we wished to posture, the latter if we wished to speak openly without pretense. And then there is the phrase learned skills, the integrity of which we can test with another simple question: how could one ever utilize skills which were not learned? The writer impairs the logic in an attempt to remain aloft and unique in abstracted heights.
Finally, we must address the two prepositional phrases which conclude the sentence: through experience in an office environment. The nouns experience and environment are both theoretic, meaning that they refer to ideas in the mind, not sensible things in the world. Sensible things, like the sun, which we can see and feel, or a clove of garlic, which we can touch and smell and taste, comprise concrete nouns; ideas, on the other hand, which are things we can only think about, make up what are called abstract nouns, and abstractions are the hiding place of thinkers who need more warm sun—and of all of us when we are not being natural and honest and direct. For what is not an experience? Anything we become aware of constitutes an experience, and so this abstract noun is so general in most contexts as to be unmeaning—not always, we must admit, but almost always outside special circumstances. And so too the noun environment: it is so unlimited in its application that the writer himself must have suspected it was too general, which is why he felt the need to qualify it by adding the noun office as an adjective to help make specific what kind of environment he actually meant. When we find ourselves up high in stratospheric abstractions like this, it is again time to come back down to the good and loamy earth of common speech.
And so why not simply this sentence instead: I would like to use what I have learned, and learn something new as well, while working in an office. Whether that’s the best sentence one could write, we don’t have enough information about the situation to say. But we can say that we said something readily intelligible, and we owe such frank and honest speech both to ourselves and to one another in whatever serious community we live.
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