2. How not to Use Style

by Steve Rosse

Here’s the most common phrase heard in any Writing 101 class on any campus in America:  “Well, have you read ‘On The Road?’  Jack Kerouac didn’t worry about spelling and punctuation and all that stuff.”

This is a common refrain because “On the Road” is assigned reading in every American high school, while the basic rules of spelling, punctuation, grammar and syntax have not been taught in decades.  These four elements make up what writers used to call “style,” before that word came to mean “uses profanity a lot.”

“The Elements of Style” by Strunk and White used to rest at the elbow of every wanna-be writer in the world.  That’s because it used to be understood that communication was most efficient when everybody in the conversation operated from the same rule book.  If you say “green,” I understand you only because I have a particular color in my head assigned to the word “green,” and that color is exactly the same color you have in your head when you say “green.”  If you have a different color in your head assigned to that word we cannot communicate.

Similarly we must all have the same rules in our heads in regards spelling, grammar, punctuation and syntax.  In English the adjective precedes the noun, so I say, “big table.”  If I were to translate my thought directly into Spanish I would say, “grande mesa.”  But in Spanish the adjective follows the noun, so a native speaker of Spanish would be unclear about my meaning; we would not be communicating.

The English language is a huge, unorganized, illogical, irregular mess.  Knowing all the rules, or even just being able to look up all the rules in Strunk and White, is almost impossible.  So many novice writers simply ignore the rules.  “I believe writing is an organic process,” they say, “I don’t want the rules to come between my readers and my genius.”

Sure, Art is organic.  Sure, we all create from some deep compulsion that resides two layers below our Id.  But if we want other people to understand our writing, and even perhaps to enjoy our writing enough to seek out more of it and maybe even (gasp!) pay for it, we need to follow enough of the rules enough of the time for our readers to keep up.

“Shakespeare made up his own words,” say the lazy writers.  Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, all famous for not being able to spell or punctuate well.   And that’s why the job of editor exists.  All those famous writers depended on their editors to catch their mistakes.  Unfortunately, in today’s marketplace most of us are sending our work out there into the world directly from our fingertips to the reading public’s eyes.  Certainly at the beginnings of our careers we don’t have professional editors to clean up our manuscripts.

So it’s up to us to make our best efforts at creating clear, readable prose, and that means by paying attention to style: spelling, punctuation, grammar and syntax.  Because when we say “green” we want our readers to see green, and not orange.

Steve Rosse is a former columnist for The Nation newspaper in Bangkok.  His books are available on Amazon.com