Joseph Epstein on Stanley Fish and writing

Courtesy LongReads, a link to a review of Stanley Fish's How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One that doubles as a reflection of how difficult it is to teach people how to write.

Epstein's article is well worth reading until he gets to the part where he actually has to review Fish's book. As for that part, which is slightly more than half the article, all I can say is, I wanted to appreciate it. I like snarkiness as much as the next cynic. However, I thought it uncharitable to go on at such length about a book whose mission was doomed from the start.

Heaven knows, there's room in this world for writing guides designed to teach people to write clearly. In addition, I'd pay for somebody who could force would-be citizen journalists of all stripes to read one or more such guides. (Dear Akit: I love what you're trying to do, but your garbled writing sabotages your effort, and not incidentally drives me bonkers!)

Fish's book, though, doesn't fall into the category of simple writing guide. From what I can tell, Fish set himself the more ambitious task of teaching the reader how to write well by analyzing good and bad sentences.

So what's the difference between writing clearly and writing well?

Writing clearly is a subtask of writing well. Writing well, though, requires more. What's the "more"? Ah, that's where the flaw lurks that dooms efforts like Fish's. It's a matter of style, and as Epstein himself admits at the very beginning of his review:

After thirty years of teaching a university course in something called advanced prose style, my accumulated wisdom on the subject, inspissated into a single thought, is that writing cannot be taught, though it can be learned—and that, friends, is the sound of one hand clapping.

Everyone needs to learn to write clearly. Writing at its heart is about communication, and if you aren't writing clearly you aren't communicating clearly. You're failing at Job 1 of writing! Why do you bother to write if not to be understood by others?

Yes, I'd prefer to read a mail message that was written well than to read one merely written clearly. If it's a matter of needing to know the new design parameters for the project I'm working on, however, by all means break your ideas down until they form the simplest and least creative of sentences, so long as I can understand you.

Writing well, though, requires that you develop your own voice. Like Epstein, I know of no easy way to do that except by reading authors who use the language well (who they are depends on your taste) and paying attention to the tricks they employ.

Oh, and to learn to write well, you also need to write. The hoary cliché about needing to write a hundred thousand words of tripe before one can approach writing well is all too true. You have a lot of bad habits and trite ideas to work out of your system. I know: I'm still purging myself. (Just look at this blog. Little of it reflects genuinely deep thought on my part, which is why the process is taking so long.)

So without ill will to Stanley Fish or other (presumably well-intentioned) would-be writing mentors, you'll never learn to write well by reading their books. If you look around, you can probably find a guide to using the language properly, that is, a guide to writing clearly. Settle for that as your first goal. Only after you've mastered clarity can you move on to the (largely self-guided) task of finding your voice and style. Somewhere along the way, you'll discover you're writing well.