June 23rd, 2009
A Tweet Stream is Not an Essay
By Anna Ivey
Every day in my work with applicants, I hear from people who tell me, "Oh, I'm a great writer! You don't have to worry about that part of things." And immediately I know we have a long road ahead of us, because what they usually put in front of me reads like a long stream of tweets.
I find it criminal that many college students who have worked hard and moved mountains to attend good schools have no idea what good writing is. And you shouldn't even have to attend a top school to learn the basics of good writing. It's not your fault. You are not stupid. But you have been allowed to get away with sloppy work. You have been poorly served, and I'd like to take a crack at explaining why that matters.
The best thing that ever happened to me, truly, was when I got a paper back from one of my teachers at the University of Cambridge with the word "facile" scrawled across the bottom. You should be so lucky. The days of getting back a paper covered in red ink -- correcting all your bad punctuation, fixing your verb tenses, changing "which" to "that," and explaining the fourteen different ways in which your syntax and grammar and argument are flawed -- seem, from my viewpoint, to be over.
I'm amazed when I look at students' undergraduate writing samples -- ones they want to submit to graduate school admissions committees, particularly for PhD programs -- and the graded copies don't have a single correction in them. I'm not exaggerating; that's been true for most of the papers I've seen.
Even worse, those educators who hand back unmarked papers haven't just failed to teach you how to write; they have also lied to you. Whether indirectly through unmarked papers and easy As, or directly to your face, they have led you to believe that you're great writers. And that particular fiction sets you up for a lot of disappointment when you've left behind the world of lazy As and have to write something that actually counts and will be read with a critical eye.It's not your fault that some of these teachers have neglected to teach you how to write, but it's also now your responsibility to learn. (Professors themselves are often terrible writers, so perhaps you're actually better off if they haven't tried to teach you how to write. At least you can start with a clean slate.)
Your whole ability to think critically is at stake. In Politics and the English Language -- which anyone who wants to write anything of consequence should read before graduating from college -- Orwell reminds us that sloppy thoughts lead to sloppy writing, and that sloppy writing leads to sloppy thoughts. So bad writing actually makes us stupider: the language "becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." The good news? "[T]he process is reversible."
So before you start writing, think about what it is you want to communicate -- not just with this word or that sentence, but also in this paragraph, and the next one, and in this essay as a whole. You'll have to turn off the tweeting part of your brain and ask yourself how every single word, sentence, and paragraph ties together. Because admissions officers, BigLaw partners, managing directors, and all sorts of people who hold your fate in their hands will be absolutely merciless about your writing.
Good writing does NOT have to be about blind adherence to conventions. Learn the rules, and then break them to great rhetorical effect. Here's a slice from my ever-morphing reading list for good writing (some are how-to books, others are examples of good expository writing, because you'll also have to read to become good writers).
- Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose by Constance Hale
- E.B. White's The Ring of Time (I'm not crazy about his Elements of Style, however -- there are some weird and clunky examples in that one.)
- The Best American Essays 2007, edited by David Foster Wallace
- The Best American Essays of the Century, edited by Joyce Carol Oates
- What is an Academic Paper, from the Dartmouth Writing Series
- Introduction from Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities
- Gilles v. Blanchard, Judge Richard A. Posner, US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
I'll likely add more as I think of them, but please contribute your own in the comments!
Edited to add: On reflection, and after receiving some pointed feedback, I have edited some of my less nuanced statements to make clear that I do not think all teachers neglect their duties to teach good writing, and that I do not think they are all lazy. Throwing around such categorical descriptions is itself, of course, a form of bad writing, so I've made a few changes.
Received via email, with request for anonymity
Received via email, in response to the post, with request for anonymity (fyi -- anyone can post comments anonymously too):
"You may post each of these anecdotes on your site if you want.
1. My wife, a partner at a DC firm, said earlier this week that she is disgusted at how poorly some of her associates write and that it absolutely affects her willingness to give work to them. In other words, even those students who have run the gauntlet and captured good legal jobs are still at risk of having their careers collapse because of their p***-poor writing. It's a constant issue that is forever judged.
2. In another field altogether, I worked as a counsel to a US Senator who required every job finalist, from counsel to phone answerer to mail opener, to pass a writing test or produce genuinely original writing. His reasoning, as he explained to me once, was that "you can't be a clear thinker if you're not a clear writer." I have seen him turn down job applicants with stellar "qualifications" who provided lousy samples in favor of those from "lesser" schools with clearer essays. Anecdotal? Sure. Real? You betcha."
More suggested reading
Received from a reader, via email:
"I have banged this drum before, but near the head chair in my writer's pantheon is Mike Royko, RIP. My current favorites -- whether I agree with them or no -- are Joseph Epstein, Christopher Hitchens, and Dahlia Lithwick. They all consistently and brilliantly pass my acid test: to say something in a way I wish I could have said it.
A propos Royko, I recommend his newspaper eulogy to Mayor Daley (pere). It is a short read, it is nearly perfect, I never tire of it, and it offers something for almost everyone. (The 2006 date is a reprint; the actual date was 1976.) Mucho gusto"
Another suggestion
Hi Anna,
I really enjoyed this article and couldn't agree more. I think I owe what little writing talent I have to reading (a lot), and to my teachers. My college had a semester-long writing course and required every single first year student to take it, regardless of their major (oh, and everyone had to write a senior thesis. EVERYONE). I know I learned a lot about the jump between high school and undergraduate writing from that first year course, and I wish more colleges would consider having a similar requirement. See:
http://www.scrippscollege.edu/academics/department/writing/faq.php
It would be a crime not to suggest David Foster Wallace's 2001 essay about English grammar, usage, and writing -- it is one of the best takes on the subject I've ever read, and it's funny to boot:
(You can access it as a PDF at http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003557 -- scroll down and click on "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the wars over usage.")
From,
Your fellow SNOOT*
*You'll get this once you read DFW's essay! :-)
Amen, sister. A wonderful piece.
I’ve been struggling with this particular problem for over a decade. When I taught legal writing, I tried to teach not just how to craft an appellate brief but how to craft a sentence and a paragraph. I was told by students, faculty, and administrators alike that I was overstepping my bounds and being too hard on my students. I was told that no other writing instructor took off points for poor grammar and proofing mistakes, so I couldn’t either. I couldn’t – and still can’t – imagine why the others weren’t.
Now I'm a full time law professor and I get heinous papers from my students – poorly thought out, poorly constructed, with massive grammar problems and no sign that anyone has edited them at all. Most of the papers I get have a stream of consciousness feel - that the student started writing on page 1 and stopped when they used the last piece of evidence they found in their research, giving no thought to how the argument flowed or how their thesis was developed and proven. They don't go back and rewrite at all. They don't even bother to proofread.
I think the problem starts way, way earlier than college. Students are no longer taught the basics of grammar in elementary school, nor how to diagram a sentence. They are not taught how to write a topic sentence, a five paragraph essay, an introduction, nor a conclusion. They do not understand what the passive voice is, much less why it is to be avoided in most circumstances. They do not understand how to make a subject and verb agree – hell, half the time they can’t identify the subject and the verb. It’s gotten to the point where some of my non-native English speaking students write better than my natives. I believe the problem started when these basic skills were written off as archaic and stifling to the creative impulse.
What bothers me most isn’t that these students don’t know how to write. It’s (a) that they think they do, and (b) that they don’t know how to craft an argument. They are truly flummoxed when I hand back a paper with lots of red (or sometimes green) ink on it, where I’ve corrected their language, criticized their structure, and above all, poked fairly obvious holes in their argument. They don’t understand how to lead a reader, how to create a logical structure, and how to acknowledge weaknesses in their argument and valid counterpoints without destroying their own thesis. I don’t have a mechanism for teaching this to them, other than what I write on their papers – it’s very rare that they bother to come talk to me my comments unless they’re trying to get their grade changed. I'm not going to track them down in the halls to force them to learn something about writing (and I find it hard to imagine it would be well-received if I did). All I can do is point it out in the margins and hope they learn something. And yes, I live in fear of my evaluations every year – I’m known among the students as a hard ass grader, and all I need is a bunch of evals saying I push too hard in class and I might have some issues getting plum teaching assignments or visiting gigs elsewhere.
No one is doing these students any favors by patting them on their heads and telling them they're wonderful when they're not. (Frankly, even if they are.) If they get to college having been told that they're wonderful writers by every elementary and high school teacher, then they're going to look at us like we have three heads when we try to teach them how to write. Not that we should stop trying, but it makes the job a whole lot harder and makes it much more likely that our teaching will fall on deaf ears.
Don't even get me started on personal statements. I was on the admissions committee one year and read some genuinely moving statements. Many of them were well written. But I was amazed at how many were poorly written and, worst of all, poorly edited and proofread. This is you putting your BEST foot forward - if you can't be bothered to check your spelling in your app, why would I want to have you as a student? I can only imagine what I'll have to read in your papers.
As for examples of good writing, I’ll say the long features in Sports Illustrated are some of my favorite examples. I cannot tell you how many times I have gotten sucked into a story about something I didn’t (initially) care about at all, just because I was caught up in an excellent first paragraph. And the way they tell the story keeps me interested until the end. It’s very much the same skill as a personal statement: you’re vying for the attention of someone who has a lot of other stuff to read and doesn’t really care about you and you have to make them want to stay with you based on this glimpse.
Rick Reilly is also a writer I very much enjoy. He wrote the back page at SI for years and excelled at telling a short personal story, albeit about someone else. I don’t think I realized how good he was at it until he left and I’ve been reading the lousy writing that replaced it.
I’ll think of more writing examples. Thanks for the venue to vent.
tough love
I am forever grateful to the professor of comparative literature at Brown University who wrote at the bottom of my twenty-page paper on Henry James: "This is an excellent paper. It begins on page eleven."