kelestev

Author: kelestev

  • subtlety is key

    subtlety is key

    “Isn’t love any fun? Marjorie said.

    “No,” Nick said.”

    Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time

    Writing short sentences seems at first like it’s meant for small children. It’s difficult. I myself have the tendency to add embellishments. 

    But nonetheless, “simple sentences offer the most straightforward way to get to the point quickly and clearly” according to Constance Hale in Sin and Syntax. Do you want to be clear or do you want to be graceful?

    This of course depends on the medium in which you are writing. For a blog post (such as this one), perhaps shorter sentences might be more appropriate, especially if the blog is for marketing purposes. In that case, you’re looking to reach a broader audience and trying to get them to understand the product, service, or information you’re sharing. If you’re writing a novel, a longer sentence with lots of flourishes may be more fitting, to fit with the style, length, and tone of the piece. 

    Unless you’re someone like Ernest Hemingway. He is the king of short and sweet sentences in his prose. He gets the point across and keeps it curt. Typically I’m not the biggest fan of him, but writing something like “In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.” hits me right in the feels. The quote used above is also a short and sweet passage, with a lot more meaning than it initially lets on. That’s the beauty of subtlety in writing. 

    Yes, it is wildly important to show, not tell. But the thing more important within that is to be subtle. If you want to show, don’t tell me it “looks like…” That’s not exactly subtle. That’s significantly more obvious than what we’re trying to get at.

    Some people have more of a gift for this idea than others. For me, I write in the exact same manner as how I speak, which is both a blessing and a curse. If you’d like me to describe my cat who has one orange spot above his lip and a Batman helmet, I can, and that’s exactly how I’d describe how he looks if you were speaking to me directly. Yes, he looks like an orange and white cat, but he’s got the purrsonality of an 80-year-old man and a face that constantly looks bored or irritated.

    Still, that’s not as subtle as I could go, but it’s at least slightly more descriptive than just outright telling you what he looks like. To show, not tell does take a bit of practice, even on my part. I cannot confidently say I’ve mastered that art; in fact, I’m far from it. 

    But of course, the “show, don’t tell” method is not for everyone, and if so…

    If you like not my writing, go read something else.

    Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
  • “i’m going to be sick.”

    “i’m going to be sick.”

    Do you ever look at your writing and think, “Wow, this is bad.”? I do. We all do. For most people, that happens during the revising process. For a select few that happens at the end, when they think, “Well, this is it.” For me, it happens as I’m writing my first draft. Which is a blessing and a curse. A blessing because I think it can only get better from here. A curse because I find it difficult to begin because I know it’s going to be bad.

    But I have to start somewhere. 

    Writing is Power author Peter Elbow gives a few notes of advice to avoid that sinking feeling we get when we’re faced with our own work. The first: recognize that those negative feelings you have are there when you feel them. This is a good way to understand patterns at the root of the problem, and it’s a very… therapeutic method. 

    I suggest that instead of just recognizing the problem, add a bit to it by doing something about the problem at the same time. It’s really classical conditioning. Every time you feel yourself becoming nauseous at your work, write another word, another sentence, another paragraph. 

    Just keep writing. 

    The next step Elbow gives to helping yourself overcome nausea is to do a free write in which you let all of your feelings go. This is Elbow basically saying to go outside and scream at the sky to get all those emotions out before they make their sly way onto the page, where they’ll end up eating your writing work. Keeping your emotions separated and contained during the writing process is a great piece of advice, I’ll give him that.

    I’d like to take a slightly different approach. This may be a stretch, but let’s think of the Meisner technique of acting for a moment. While it is a different hemisphere of creating art, its fundamental aspects can still be applied in a way. The Meisner technique has three essential pieces: emotional preparation, repetition, and improvisation. Most people when employing this technique learn their lines in the most robotic way possible, so that when it comes time to rehearse and perform, they have the ability to explore different ways of speaking and different emotions, because they don’t have an already set way of saying your line in your head.

    In the same way, you can write without any emotion involved, robotically, so that when you get to the revising process, you have more room to explore different ways to say one sentence or paragraph. This sort of “unemotional” first draft helps me when I think to just write without stopping.

    Elbow’s last tip is to be prudent. Don’t delete everything in a fit of rage. Don’t go too crazy. This, I wholeheartedly agree with. I’ve spent way too much time writing an entire draft, deleting it, and starting from scratch. That’s inefficient, and not useful to you whatsoever. 

    Focus on the words on the page, not the feelings in your head.

  • on language

    on language

    “Of these two kinds of language, the more noble is the vernacular: first, because it was the language originally used by the human race; second, because the whole world employs it, though with different pronunciations and using different words; and third because it is natural to us, while the other is, in contrast, artificial.”

    Dante – De vulgari Eloquentia

    Language is a wonderful thing. but it also can be a horrible, horrible thing. It complicates lives to an absurd degree, and I’m definitely no stranger to those effects. Sometimes I wish we’d revert back to caveman noises, and sometimes it feels like that’s exactly what’s happening. To view vernacular, plain ol’ spoken English as it is today as something not worthwhile because of its ever-changing nature is to not understand its purpose in the first place.

    In my experience as an English major at a relatively prestigious school, I frequently encounter people who deny vernacular language’s use, and swear to strive to only desire the usage of some hoity-toity form of speech that’s really only seen in some academic research paper written for your collegiate American Government class. You know, like this one. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

    Anyways, honestly, I find this commitment to “higher language” to be a little ridiculous. I know that’s a little sacrilegious coming from an English major, but I truly find the focus on fancy-schmancy language to be quite unrealistic. I can’t deny that I do occasionally want to sound like that, to impress others and make myself feel better-than-thou, but I would also like to, you know, be able to communicate with a wider range of people and feel accessible to the modern ordinary person.

    My slight rejection of fancy speech is not endorsing the “dumbing down” of the language, but it is rather trying to express the value of speaking in a way that reaches a larger number of people. I want to get my ideas in more heads, and that would be significantly more difficult to accomplish if I were like Charles Brockden Brown and used a thesaurus to form every single sentence.

    This accessibility that I strive for can be found through not using such high-falutin’ speech, because not everybody takes a Romantic Literature class and needs to have that skill. While it’s true that everybody needs to take Writing 101 so they can know how to properly write an email, it’s not necessary for them to feel required to be some sort of poet with words. I find the English major, at least in my college, to be viewed as some sort of exclusive book club, i.e. “We’re better than you because we’re more well-read and well-written” when that is simply not the case. Those are good and important traits to have, but they do not make you better than others.

    One time in one of my English classes the professor spent the entire class time basically making fun of a Rupi Kaur poem. While I am not the biggest Rupi Kaur fan as I have not really read much of her work, I think it is completely unfair to deny her status as a poet simply because she does not follow the rules of grammatical English. In fact, she has an FAQ on her website, where she says,

    Within the Gurmukhi script, there are no uppercase or lowercase letters. The letters are treated the same. I enjoy this simplicity. It’s symmetrical and straightforward. I also feel there is a level of equality this visuality brings to the work… It is less about breaking the rules of English (although that’s pretty fun) but more about tying in my own history and heritage within my work.

    Rupi Kaur

    Like come on, professor. Just because the given rules of English created by some dude forever ago aren’t followed doesn’t mean she’s not a poet. Poetry doesn’t have to be perfectly structured, with every minute aspect adding to the overall meaning of the poem. Coleridge has been dead for almost 200 years. Give it a rest, buddy. Besides, she’s referencing a language that’s not English, and some languages have different punctuations and capitalizations, like in French where you only capitalize the first word of the title. Crazy, right. But you, professor, are used to Chaucer, and claim to strive for finding the beauty in all works of literature, but stop looking after 1948. Modern works can be good, you know.

    My apologies for that side rant. I just really did not enjoy that professor. Anyways, I want to be as clear as possible when I write and when I speak. It’s something that’s always bothered me because I have a tendency to be as indirect as possible (my boyfriend can attest to that), completely without meaning to. I think that’s due in part to how I was educated and how I grew up with my parents who are both incredibly intelligent individuals. This tendency to be indirect (and vague and ambiguous) has led me to some problems in my interpersonal relationships, especially recently. I can’t deny that. These struggles in communication have now more than ever forced me to realize how important my words are, and how respecting other in their attempts at communication is also just as valuable.

    I believe that respect is easily the most essential facet of communication, so respecting other people’s word choice comes with that. Besides, English is such a versatile language; there are two or three ways to say literally anything, and I just think that’s neat. This leads me to (unfortunately or fortunately) bring up the whole pronouns thing, and how dumb I think the “It’s grammatically incorrect” argument is. Sorry not sorry. They/them referring to a single person is completely valid. We do it all the time in vernacular speech when referring to an anonymous or unknown person, completely without realizing. But as soon as people have to actively use it to refer to someone, it’s like their brains short-circuit. As Dante said, the vernacular is natural to us, while more eloquent speech is artificial. If you take the stance that you can’t refer to someONE as they because someONE is singular and they is plural, you’re ignoring the presence of vernacular speech and the past who knows how long when you’ve been doing that exact thing.

    “I was talking to Jerry, and they said they were well.”

    That sounds a little off to the untrained ear, yes. Jerry is one person (and the typically male name “Jerry” makes it worse), and the use of “they” implies more than one person. But, times are a-changin’, and one should strive to be inclusive with their language, for at least on the most basic level to be respectful to others. Language is constantly changing and it is literally impossible to try to stop that change. That’s why pronouns like thou, thy, thine, and thee shifted out of use in modern language (and by the way, those words are still defined as modern), and we now use you in place of thou. Words like this will most definitely continue to change and evolve, especially seen with the rise of neo-pronouns. I’m not telling you to just shut up and accept the change; I’m telling you to at least try and understand where it’s coming from and why it’s happening, because it’s not just happening for no reason. If you really want to get anywhere with your messages, whatever they may be, trying to understand and then respect the other is the first step towards achieving that goal. Saying that the other doesn’t deserve respect because they don’t agree with you just means that you probably won’t gain any respect either, so don’t go around expecting it if you’re not going to give it out yourself.

    Definitions of words change literally all the time. For example, let’s look at the word “vulgar”, to tie it back to Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia. Currently, we define the word as “rude or offensive”, but it used to mean “of the common speech”, so we’ve morphed this word to have a more negative connotation, just as we’ve morphed common speech to be of a lesser degree. Common speech should be just as acceptable as academic lingo, or any other style or type of communication, because it is the easiest way for people to communicate and understand each other.

    If you demand others to be respectful of your choices, perhaps religion-wise or politics-wise, you should give a minimum of respecting their choice of what pronoun they want to use. If you deny them that, they have every right to deny your self-proclaimed choice of being referred to as a Christian.

    Anyways, my point is that English is not the only language to exist and also it evolves and you should learn it, respect it, and be aware that it’s changing.