Let’s try to wrestle down an idea about writing which is, I’ll admit from the start, a bit slippery. It begins with an assumption so simple that its implications for composing clear prose can escape us: we think about things. When we have an idea, it’s an idea about something. When we speak to someone, we’re speaking about something. When we try to understand what we’re hearing, we’re listening for something. Our mental activity, what is sometimes called our waking consciousness, is transitive; it aims at objects, at things, whether material objects in the world or mental objects in our mind.
Writing is often as much an effort of discovery as it is one of just transcribing the ideas which pass before our mind’s eye. We’re looking for something when we begin to compose, and that’s why an initial draft can often end up vague or crumbly: there’s nothing there to sink one’s teeth into; it has no body, no density. We often succeed in throwing some ingredients into a first draft, but they don’t cohere and take on a certain shape because what’s being written about is not even clear to the writer. It’s all really just exploratory. There might be an interesting, even an unusual and compelling idea there, but the writer has not seen it distinctly enough to say something specific about it. Writing well is more than adumbrating.
We can move from a dissatisfying draft to a redoubtable final revision, though, if we take a moment to inspect the words we’ve put together in a first try. We advance by improving what needs improving, not by deleting the entire document in a fit of pique, nor by (and one can see this all the time) cutting and pasting pieces of this sentence into that one, or blocking and moving entire paragraphs from here to there and back around again, hoping beyond hope that it will all start meaning something. That is to write by assembly, not by organic growth. And even though the pedagogical tradition of writing has enshrined the word mechanics in designating the more superficial matters of orthography and formatting, to properly inspect our early work does mean to analyze it, if not mechanically, then closely.
Here’s an example I have modeled off a description I found online recently for a program of study at a major university: The mission of our department is anchored in the belief that a variety of experiences and vocabularies are deeply essential in order to access an appreciation of other cultures and practices. When we encounter a piece of writing like this, examples of which are legion, the only way to proceed is to call up our conscious, transitive mind and ask what the writer is talking about. I italicize about in order to emphasize the fact that the writer is under an obligation to name something, and more often than not to name only those things which, taken and woven together, advance to a clear conclusion.
This example is a perfectly fine first draft; it is not a polished product fit for public presentation. We reach the latter through the former, though, and so a close inspection of the draft will bring our attention first to the opening ten-word clause. There the writer is speaking about a mission, a department, the action of anchoring, and a belief, all sewn together into a metaphor which is no more effective in the context than simply saying we believe. The first half of the following subordinate clause speaks of variety, experiences, vocabularies as things which are deeply essential, but the nouns are so wildly vague (pluralizing the last two is merely an ill-fated attempt to concretize the singular abstractions) that we are hard-pressed to see in any mental light, however bright, what exactly is so essential. And the second half of this same clause, in order to access an appreciation of other cultures and practices, grandiloquently proclaims that the purpose of the department’s mission is to access the abstraction appreciation of apparently multiple unnamed societies.
What, then, is left after such searching for what the writer is talking about? Merely this: We believe that it is essential to appreciate other cultures. Not much, but it is a start, and all one would have to do now would be to think hard, which means to think specifically, about the meaning of the pronoun it. What is it, what, what, exactly, that is so essential in appreciating other cultures? Which other cultures? And what does to appreciate something mean precisely in this context? When the writer can answer those determinate questions, the way will be open to something we readers will be able to think about. And then we’ll all be on our way together toward a mutual understanding of some degree, on which civilization (and that word, certainly now, is not too grand) depends.
***