Good writing
June 21st, 2007, 10:19 am · Post a Comment · posted by fsherman
I love good writing.
Not just the pleasure of reading a good story well-told, but I like reading something and realizing it’s actually written well: The word choice, the tone, the metaphors, the pacing and rhythm can all make something more interesting to read, just as clunky, awkward phrasing and delivery can make even a good piece bad.
This is just as true when writing about issues or ideas, which is why Martin Luther King’s speeches (and some of JFK’s) are still powerful to read 40 years later. Not just the ideas they express, but the way they’re expressed.
Three examples (though not from Kennedy or King in this case)
•Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison on the fight against slavery:
“I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hand of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate— I will not excuse —I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.
With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost.”
•HL Mencken on then-President Warren G. Harding:
“He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of tosh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”
•And Frederick Douglass on fighting for justice:
“If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation…want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters…. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
