Writers Who Write Well

[AGBF]

This morning I was watching MSNBC and I heard the substitute host read an except from a column, today's column in "The Washington Post", by George F. Will. I was breath taken by the beauty of the writing. Not only was his vocabulary great, making me think that I had not used words like the ones he used in many years, but the analogies he made were creative and thoughtful. I realized that I have been reading too many books written by authors with inferior vocabularies and, probably, inferior minds. I never hear or read really good speech or writing anymore.

I am going to post excerpts of his column here. I do not deny that his political message has great meaning to me, but so does his writing. I used to read a lot of English writers who wrote in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I now read contemporary American, British, and Australian authors. The writing is very different. The vocabulary used now is far less rich.

I invite you to post examples of authors whom you feel use language well!

George F. Will's column excerpted below.

"America’s child president had a play date with a KGB alumnus, who surely enjoyed providing day care. It was a useful, because illuminating, event: Now we shall see how many Republicans retain a capacity for embarrassment.

...​

In Helsinki, the president who bandies the phrase “America First” put himself first, as always, and America last, behind President Vladimir Putin’s regime.

...​

What, precisely, did President Trump say about the diametrically opposed statements by U.S. intelligence agencies (and the Senate Intelligence Committee) and by Putin concerning Russia and the 2016 U.S. elections? Precision is not part of Trump’s repertoire: He speaks English as though it is a second language that he learned from someone who learned English last week. So, it is usually difficult to sift meanings from Trump’s word salads. But in Helsinki he was, for him, crystal clear about feeling no allegiance to the intelligence institutions that work at his direction and under leaders he chose.

Speaking of Republicans incapable of blushing — those with the peculiar strength that comes from being incapable of embarrassment — consider Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), who for years enjoyed derivative gravitas from his association with Sen. John McCain (Ariz.). Graham tweeted about Helsinki: “Missed opportunity by President Trump to firmly hold Russia accountable for 2016 meddling and deliver a strong warning regarding future elections.” A “missed opportunity” by a man who had not acknowledged the meddling?

Contrast Graham’s mush with this on Monday from McCain, still vinegary: “Today’s press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.” Or this from Arizona’s other senator, Jeff Flake (R): “I never thought I would see the day when our American president would stand on the stage with the Russian President and place blame on the United States for Russian aggression.” Blame America only.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and others might believe that they must stay in their positions lest there be no adult supervision of the Oval playpen. This is a serious worry, but so is this: Can those people do their jobs for someone who has neither respect nor loyalty for them?

Like the purloined letter in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story with that title, collusion with Russia is hiding in plain sight. We shall learn from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation whether in 2016 there was collusion with Russia by members of the Trump campaign. The world, however, saw in Helsinki something more grave — ongoing collusion between Trump, now in power, and Russia. The collusion is in what Trump says (refusing to back the United States’ intelligence agencies) and in what evidently went unsaid (such as: You ought to stop disrupting Ukraine, downing civilian airliners, attempting to assassinate people abroad using poisons, and so on, and on).


Americans elected a president who — this is a safe surmise — knew that he had more to fear from making his tax returns public than from keeping them secret. The most innocent inference is that for decades he has depended on an American weakness, susceptibility to the tacky charisma of wealth, which would evaporate when his tax returns revealed that he has always lied about his wealth, too. A more ominous explanation might be that his redundantly demonstrated incompetence as a businessman tumbled him into unsavory financial dependencies on Russians. A still more sinister explanation might be that the Russians have something else, something worse, to keep him compliant.

The explanation is in doubt; what needs to be explained — his compliance — is not. Granted, Trump has a weak man’s banal fascination with strong men whose disdain for him is evidently unimaginable to him. And, yes, he only perfunctorily pretends to have priorities beyond personal aggrandizement. But just as astronomers inferred, from anomalies in the orbits of the planet Uranus, the existence of Neptune before actually seeing it, Mueller might infer, and then find, still-hidden sources of the behavior of this sad, embarrassing wreck of a man."

 

[LightBright]

I’ve felt this way my whole life. Modern fiction and most non-fiction seems flat to me. Three magical writers come to mind for the time being. Joan Didion, her non-fiction. John Cheever. Gustave Flaubert.

 

[lyra]

I've tried branching off into other genres due to disappointment in contemporary fiction. I will always read anything by Alice Hoffman, because her prose style flows beautifully regardless of the subject matter. I can't think of another writer I seek out. I allow myself to be disappointed and read anyway. Deb, you're absolutely right about this piece. Beautifully written and hitting all targets.

 

[lambskin]

Anthony Bourdain's (RIP) nonfiction works.

 

[arkieb1]

Having been forced to read Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales" the original version written in Ye Olde English at University - Literature 101, I can honestly say I find anything with rich thoughtful prose or a really compelling storyline worth reading. I enjoy Australian literature and a bit of well written Aussie and US poetry. Having said that a lot of "popular" literature these days is complete and utter tripe.

 

[lyra]

My standards have sunk so low. It's hard to find escapism in a book when you're thinking "the editor should have caught that" or "wth does this sentence even mean". I actually want to circle things, lol. But to be honest, my own grammar went down the drain terribly in the last 10 years. I can't think of the right words or phrasing sometimes. It's part of my autoimmune disease, so I hope everyone can forgive that.

 

[Calliecake]

@lyra I love reading your posts. Your heart comes thru in all of them and they are genuine. In today’s Instagram and Facebook world it is so refreshing to see honesty. Life isn’t always pretty, easy or uncomplicated.
Often times people who seem to have perfect lives, don’t even come close no matter what they try to portray.

@AGBF Great article. Thank you for posting this article.

 

[JPie]

Having been forced to read Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales" the original version written in Ye Olde English at University - Literature 101, I can honestly say I find anything with rich thoughtful prose or a really compelling storyline worth reading. I enjoy Australian literature and a bit of well written Aussie and US poetry. Having said that a lot of "popular" literature these days is complete and utter tripe.

I love Canterbury Tales! In college I had to memorize the first paragraph and recite it in its original Middle English pronunciation.

My standards have sunk so low. It's hard to find escapism in a book when you're thinking "the editor should have caught that" or "wth does this sentence even mean". I actually want to circle things, lol. But to be honest, my own grammar went down the drain terribly in the last 10 years. I can't think of the right words or phrasing sometimes. It's part of my autoimmune disease, so I hope everyone can forgive that.

I find it impossible to read the news these days without coming across multiple typos. Are we all in a grammatical downward spiral?

 

[Gussie]

I love Canterbury Tales! In college I had to memorize the first paragraph and recite it in its original Middle English pronunciation.



I find it impossible to read the news these days without coming across multiple typos. Are we all in a grammatical downward spiral?

I think it's a product of the urgency to publish, especially news. If stories aren't out quickly enough, then people move on to the next drama. This is a direct result of 24 hour news and the Internet. There's just not enough time to focus on the prose or to even correct all the mistakes. Add the fact that grammar is not really taught much anymore. My three kids don't even know what a sentence diagram is!

 

[JPie]

I think it's a product of the urgency to publish, especially news. If stories aren't out quickly enough, then people move on to the next drama. This is a direct result of 24 hour news and the Internet. There's just not enough time to focus on the prose or to even correct all the mistakes. Add the fact that grammar is not really taught much anymore. My three kids don't even know what a sentence diagram is!

They don’t teach kids sentence diagrams anymore? What is this world coming to?! (I’m only half kidding.)

 

[arkieb1]

They don’t teach kids sentence diagrams anymore? What is this world coming to?! (I’m only half kidding.)

I'm still good friends with a senior university professor and he laments the fact that students these days cannot construct a proper sentence, let alone a proper paragraph. Things like texting, social media, the fast paced digital age children live in, and restructuring the way basic things like spelling, grammar and sentence construction are now taught in schools have a lot to answer for.

 

[lyra]

I still attempt to do full spelling and proper grammar on texts. My phone often has other ideas, and instead sends out an interpretation of what I might have typed. I'm glad my kids missed the big switch to digital social media. They use it lightly, but it wasn't there for elementary or high school. In college they used it to set up study groups. If I have grandchildren some day, and my daughters do agree with this, it will be screenless! They will read books and be outside. /rant off tangent as usual

 

[ksinger]

I'm still good friends with a senior university professor and he laments the fact that students these days cannot construct a proper sentence, let alone a proper paragraph. Things like texting, social media, the fast paced digital age children live in, and restructuring the way basic things like spelling, grammar and sentence construction are now taught in schools have a lot to answer for.

I thought my husband was going to blow a gasket when I read him your post. This is one of his most massive pet peeves. He was not happy with the English department AT ALL, especially when they were demanding that he correct grammar and spelling when his history kids were required to write essays. The English teachers in his view, were falling down on what was their job, not his - which was to teach and assess history knowledge. It also galled him that they did not teach any other essay format than the one they use. History essay writing is very different, and typically done on the spot, and he had to teach that before they could even begin. In history essays (ala the College Board standards, actually. Or what they were - now even the College Board is reducing the emphasis on and rigor of the writing portion) There are no weeks of thinking or correcting, you just have to be able to drag it all up and write. Anyway, he flat out refused to do it - and said so publicly. He scans the essays for "did they get it", not for every period or comma. If he has approximately 120 students a year and spends a minimum of 2 minutes per essay - scanning for content only, that's 4 hours for one essay. Now add 5 more minutes for spelling and grammar - which he admits to not knowing to the level of an English teacher (kind of like he assumes they don't know history like he does?) - and you have 14 hours. And none of that can be done during the school day, so you get the idea. He offered to give his kids' essays to them though, and let them do it. Yeah, he is instantly pissed off every time he thinks about it.

And Arkie, he's interested in what the restructuring of basic things like spelling, grammar and sentence construction actually looks like. What was it like before and how is it different now and why it changed.

As for college professors and their whinging, well, they need to own up to the dumbing down to which they themselves have contributed mightily. I can't speak for your neck of the planet, but over here, colleges - even top tier privates - have things like grade inflation. Most are now letting in kids based on test scores on tests that have also lost rigor over the years. Those same colleges are making a ton of money teaching the remedial classes for the students they tut tut and hand-wring about. So if colleges' screening is inadequate and they're letting in unqualified students, whose fault is that?

One of my husband's most instructive tales comes from one of his in services, I don't recall the details of what it was but that's not important. What is, is that a college history prof who was there was complaining that the high schools were giving short shrift to women in history (his area of expertise). Apparently one teacher had had quite enough and stood up and demanded that the prof show them where in the state pass standards was "women's history". His reply was, "What do you mean, standards...?" He had never heard of those and did not know that public schools had to toe a line. Colleges are held to no standards - not that each one does not devise themselves. Not in admissions, not in grading, and not in what is taught. So my sympathy for the woes of the college profs who point fingers at the public school teachers without understanding what the lower schools deal with, or by taking a good hard look in the mirror and admitting they are also contributing to the problem, is pretty much nil.

I will point out for the umpteenth time that schools don't drive society as much as reflect it, and are very responsive to what society deems important at any given time. We don't teach a lot of things (penmanship?) anymore because society has decided they aren't as important as something new that has become an screamingly urgent priority (computer literacy/empathy/finance/sex ed/etc, etc). And I'll just ask what I always ask when people think the schools are not doing something they should be: since the school day is finite and will remain so, which subject or area are you willing to give up to get the thing you want taught now, or emphasized again?

 

[arkieb1]

@ ksinger - I've done both, been an English/History teacher years 7 to 12 and a History academic. I see both sides of the arguments but we have a different system in Australia. The best universities here don't dumb anything down and they don't run special classes for people that fail to keep up. Our education system has been restructured a few times, old fashioned ways of teaching like penmanship as you point out and even learning spelling and maths by repeating it over and over or learning ways to remember these things have been replaced by methods of calculating or working things out. I, for example, was forced to learn times tables by rote learning, which is completely out of fashion. My son when he was smaller did things like 8 x 10 = 80 - (2 x 8 =16) so 80 - 16 = 64 therefore 8 x 8 = 64. Which I always thought was a rather convoluted way to learn maths. As he has gotten older he has simply learnt what most of the times tables are by recalling the answers, and when he forgets he goes back to working them out just like that.

Curiously enough it was a senior university history professor that was making the call that students are becoming what he describes as less literate in their writing. Classroom history teachers here years 7 to 12 are generally expected to correct things like spelling and grammar, as are most other subject areas outside of English.

 

[ksinger]

@ ksinger - I've done both, been an English/History teacher years 7 to 12 and a History academic. I see both sides of the arguments but we have a different system in Australia. The best universities here don't dumb anything down and they don't run special classes for people that fail to keep up. Our education system has been restructured a few times, old fashioned ways of teaching like penmanship as you point out and even learning spelling and maths by repeating it over and over or learning ways to remember these things have been replaced by methods of calculating or working things out. I, for example, was forced to learn times tables by rote learning, which is completely out of fashion. My son when he was smaller did things like 8 x 10 = 80 - (2 x 8 =16) so 80 - 16 = 64 therefore 8 x 8 = 64. Which I always thought was a rather convoluted way to learn maths. As he has gotten older he has simply learnt what most of the times tables are by recalling the answers, and when he forgets he goes back to working them out just like that.

Curiously enough it was a senior university history professor that was making the call that students are becoming what he describes as less literate in their writing. Classroom history teachers here years 7 to 12 are generally expected to correct things like spelling and grammar, as are most other subject areas outside of English.

I suspect your public schools are much more homogeneous across Australia than they are here. Schools here are all about "local control" with all that entails. They are unevenly funded even within states, and our state legislatures mandate quite a few things. Bottom line? The overabundance of fingers in the educational pie, and underfunding, has resulted in fewer teachers overall, fewer career teachers, and increasing demands on the ones who are left. The fact that some things get shorted because of pure desperation and lack of time, should really not be surprising.

I would also point out that many of the kids - about 20% around here - even at a high school level are ESL. They often enter our school system illiterate not just in English but also in their native tongue, some quite late. Teaching them reading/writing is a very heavy lift. A good portion of kids still come to my husband's classes damn near illiterate, certainly not reading at grade level - meaning they really shouldn't even be in his class, but what with pressures from admin and parents to make pass rates, holding kids back is tantamount to slamming yourself in the head with a brick if you're a teacher. Surely you can see why he feels a bit put out at having to correct English when so many of them come in still unable to really function in the language - and it's not just the ESL kids, sadly.

It's a mess everywhere, quite frankly. But again, education is but one piece in an interlocking puzzle of societal factors that include all the things you mentioned above, plus the massive change in how our economics is structured, which has arguably put the largest demands on education. When almost everyone must be ready for higher education, which they now must have to simply live, when that was never the case before, you will see the limits of education in much more stark relief.

 

[lyra]

I don't have any answers. My eldest daughter is a great writer and an avid reader. She always gets top marks on college essays partly because she went to university first, and had to do 2 years of rigorous grammar classes. But it's sad that her college professors can single her out so easily and be shocked at her aptitude for writing so well. Why are the standards so generally low? Rhetorically speaking of course. She heads back to college this fall to further her education because it's impossible to get and keep jobs here without having a lot of flexibility. She's been told by professors that they'd like to see her publish text books, lol.

 

[AGBF]

I find it impossible to read the news these days without coming across multiple typos. Are we all in a grammatical downward spiral?

In another thread I posted that I correct authors' grammar in my head as I read because I am afraid that if I do not, I will become accustomed to the incorrect usage. When I read "like" and it should be "as" I try to correct the sentence. I also redo sentences with split infinitives. Another Pricescope member responded that he does the same thing; he said that is "like picking up trash".

I am enjoying the discussion!

Deb/AGBF

 

[Dancing Fire]

What is grammar?

 

[AGBF]

What is grammar?

Well...here is one example of it, dear DF. (I know you are only poking fun at me, so I will not give you a comprehensive answer.) Here is the Oxford Comma.



Deb

 

[Heirloomjewls]

This morning I was watching MSNBC and I heard the substitute host read an except from a column, today's column in "The Washington Post", by George F. Will. I was breath taken by the beauty of the writing. Not only was his vocabulary great, making me think that I had not used words like the ones he used in many years, but the analogies he made were creative and thoughtful. I realized that I have been reading too many books written by authors with inferior vocabularies and, probably, inferior minds. I never hear or read really good speech or writing anymore.

I am going to post excerpts of his column here. I do not deny that his political message has great meaning to me, but so does his writing. I used to read a lot of English writers who wrote in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I now read contemporary American, British, and Australian authors. The writing is very different. The vocabulary used now is far less rich.

I invite you to post examples of authors whom you feel use language well!

George F. Will's column excerpted below.

"America’s child president had a play date with a KGB alumnus, who surely enjoyed providing day care. It was a useful, because illuminating, event: Now we shall see how many Republicans retain a capacity for embarrassment.

...​

In Helsinki, the president who bandies the phrase “America First” put himself first, as always, and America last, behind President Vladimir Putin’s regime.

...​

What, precisely, did President Trump say about the diametrically opposed statements by U.S. intelligence agencies (and the Senate Intelligence Committee) and by Putin concerning Russia and the 2016 U.S. elections? Precision is not part of Trump’s repertoire: He speaks English as though it is a second language that he learned from someone who learned English last week. So, it is usually difficult to sift meanings from Trump’s word salads. But in Helsinki he was, for him, crystal clear about feeling no allegiance to the intelligence institutions that work at his direction and under leaders he chose.

Speaking of Republicans incapable of blushing — those with the peculiar strength that comes from being incapable of embarrassment — consider Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), who for years enjoyed derivative gravitas from his association with Sen. John McCain (Ariz.). Graham tweeted about Helsinki: “Missed opportunity by President Trump to firmly hold Russia accountable for 2016 meddling and deliver a strong warning regarding future elections.” A “missed opportunity” by a man who had not acknowledged the meddling?

Contrast Graham’s mush with this on Monday from McCain, still vinegary: “Today’s press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.” Or this from Arizona’s other senator, Jeff Flake (R): “I never thought I would see the day when our American president would stand on the stage with the Russian President and place blame on the United States for Russian aggression.” Blame America only.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and others might believe that they must stay in their positions lest there be no adult supervision of the Oval playpen. This is a serious worry, but so is this: Can those people do their jobs for someone who has neither respect nor loyalty for them?

Like the purloined letter in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story with that title, collusion with Russia is hiding in plain sight. We shall learn from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation whether in 2016 there was collusion with Russia by members of the Trump campaign. The world, however, saw in Helsinki something more grave — ongoing collusion between Trump, now in power, and Russia. The collusion is in what Trump says (refusing to back the United States’ intelligence agencies) and in what evidently went unsaid (such as: You ought to stop disrupting Ukraine, downing civilian airliners, attempting to assassinate people abroad using poisons, and so on, and on).


Americans elected a president who — this is a safe surmise — knew that he had more to fear from making his tax returns public than from keeping them secret. The most innocent inference is that for decades he has depended on an American weakness, susceptibility to the tacky charisma of wealth, which would evaporate when his tax returns revealed that he has always lied about his wealth, too. A more ominous explanation might be that his redundantly demonstrated incompetence as a businessman tumbled him into unsavory financial dependencies on Russians. A still more sinister explanation might be that the Russians have something else, something worse, to keep him compliant.

The explanation is in doubt; what needs to be explained — his compliance — is not. Granted, Trump has a weak man’s banal fascination with strong men whose disdain for him is evidently unimaginable to him. And, yes, he only perfunctorily pretends to have priorities beyond personal aggrandizement. But just as astronomers inferred, from anomalies in the orbits of the planet Uranus, the existence of Neptune before actually seeing it, Mueller might infer, and then find, still-hidden sources of the behavior of this sad, embarrassing wreck of a man."

Hi, I agree wholeheartedly, however I have gotten tired of being called a word Nazi because of tirelessly correcting almost every pundit on TV. Even worse, my son has been chided for using “big words”, and that was in LAW SCHOOL!!!!! I’m afraid the days of good grammar and superior vocabulary are over.

 

[TooPatient]

I required "A" read books during school breaks. I selected a pile for her to choose several from. Her friends' parents thought I was "mean" for making her read a minimum of 30 minutes per day five times per week. One woman found out we had her in private tutoring for 45 minutes per day also (with days off to enjoy time with friends/family) and you would have thought we were torturing her from the reaction.

I think society is playing a big part in the decline of the language.

 

[JPie]

Well...here is one example of it, dear DF. (I know you are only poking fun at me, so I will not give you a comprehensive answer.) Here is the Oxford Comma.



Deb

This reminds me of a recent lawsuit. A dairy company in Maine had to pay its workers $5 million in overtime because a sentence in state law didn’t use the Oxford comma: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/us/oxford-comma-maine.amp.html

 

[AGBF]

Hi, I agree wholeheartedly, however I have gotten tired of being called a word Nazi because of tirelessly correcting almost every pundit on TV. Even worse, my son has been chided for using “big words”, and that was in LAW SCHOOL!!!!! I’m afraid the days of good grammar and superior vocabulary are over.

I've gotten chided on this forum for referring to history when I post.

 

[AGBF]

I required "A" read books during school breaks. I selected a pile for her to choose several from. Her friends' parents thought I was "mean" for making her read a minimum of 30 minutes per day five times per week. One woman found out we had her in private tutoring for 45 minutes per day also (with days off to enjoy time with friends/family) and you would have thought we were torturing her from the reaction.

I think society is playing a big part in the decline of the language.

I am sure that there are other ways to improve one's vocabulary besides reading, but they are not as readily available as books. If one is capable of reading, it is certainly the surest way to absorb good grammar and gain a good vocabulary. I will rest judgment on whether it is the best way to learn about life. However, in my opinion, reading good books does not harm one's ability to learn about life.

Deb