Style: Windy and Pretentious Language

Doubling

"necessary and imperative"
"crucial and important"
"provocative and stimulating"
"tasks and obstacles"

You will find examples of doubling in government documents, political speeches, movie reviews, and all forms of writing in which the writer is inflating ideas. Look for these redundancies when you check your rough draft, bracket them, and condense two weak words into one strong one, or pick the strongest of the two.

Abstractions

We cannot make a useful language without abstract words, because these words help make sense of relationships, qualities, and values (all three of these nouns are abstract words). Used vaguely or too often, however, they dilute meaning:

It is my considered opinion that the focus, scope, and purpose of the developmental model be clearly delineated in order to guide and facilitate the implementation of central administrative concepts.

All the nouns and verbs in this dazzling sentence derive from Latin. Without specific words, the sentence evaporates and the reader drops into a doze.

Here is an example of what The New Yorker calls "The Bureaucratic Mind at Work":

(Stamp on an environmental-impact statement issued by the Anchorage, Alaska, Department of Community Planning)
DRAFT: Proposed Possible Preliminary Outline of Suggested Alternative Consideration for a Conceivable Tentative Recommendation

Bad writing does not happen because the writer uses abstractions, however, but because the writer does not know how to use them. Here is a writer who does know, and who uses abstractions, balanced with specific words, to show that large ideas can be at home in the mind:

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we do.
(Henry Thoreau, Walden)

Clichés

Donald Hall, in his Writing Well, calls cliches "little cinder blocks of crushed and reprocessed experience." They often keep writers from engaging either with their ideas or with their audiences. When writers (or politicians, journalists, administrators, or public speakers) become bored, detached, or defensive, they often hide behind a cinder block wall.

The commencement speech often erects such a cinder-block wall - the last hurdle students must leap before liberation:

It gives me great hope to gaze out on the sea of upturned faces each shining with the bright light of the future, the promise that today is the first day of the rest of your life. For it is truly the young people of this great nation who must carry the torch for future generations and build the stepping-stones to a new heaven and earth. And that reminds me of a story I heard once...

These clichés tell us that the speaker is not interested in his audience. He is merely adding one block to another; when he has got enough of them he will stop, nod to the relieved applause, collect his fee, and go home.

To detect clichés in your own writing, you must first listen to yourself reading your words aloud. Underline all the words that sound too familiar, and ask what you mean to say. Asking what you mean may cause you problems, but it will begin the process of critical listening that good writers develop as a habit.

No rule exists for measuring the life left in a cliché. As S. J. Perelman says, "One man's Mede is another man's Persian." When in doubt, invent your own metaphor. Inventing may make you struggle, but at least it will keep you awake.

Jargon

Jargon is the in-language of special groups or professions. Sometimes in-language is necessary. Try talking to a computer expert without using glitch, software, chip, floppy disk, and retrieval. Sometimes jargon is fun to use, especially when you're aware of the literal meaning hiding in the figurative one:

I walked into the room where a lot of laid-back people were grooving on some low-key records.

No novelist or essayist can afford to ignore the jargon peculiar to his characters. Joan Didion needs jargon in "Slouching Toward Bethelehem," her essay on the '60s California counterculture:

Max and Sharon and Tom and Barbara get pretty high on hash, and everyone dances a little and we do some liquid projections and set up a strobe and take turns getting a high on that.

But Didion comes out of her funk when she wants to criticize the same counterculture later in the essay:

We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum.

When you use words without choosing them, the literal meaning often runs smack into the figurative one, as in another passage from Didion:

I ask Gerry what work she does. "Basically I'm a poet," she says, "but I had my guitar stolen right after I arrived and that kind of hung up my thing."

This well-known parody mocks the jargon of educators:

What If An Educator Had Written The Lord's Prayer?

Our Father-figure who resides in the upper-echelon domain,
May Thy title always be structured to elicit a favorable response.
Reward us today, bread-wise,
And minimize our unfavorable self-concept, resulting from credit overextension,
As we will strive to practice reciprocal procedures.
And channel us, not into temptation-inducing areas,
But provide us with security from situations not conducive to moral enrichment.
For Thine is the position of maximum achievement in the power structure,
Not to mention the prestige-attainment factor that never terminates.
Amen.

(Tom Dodge, in English Journal, January, 1971)

Mixed Metaphors

Metaphor, according to Aristotle, means "figure of transport." Used wisely, metaphor carries us to another world existing alongside this one, and helps us see new likenesses. Here is Teresa Torres Cardenas, a Chicana woman, speaking in Robert and Jane Hallowell Coles's Women of Crisis II:

If you have a lot of money you can make people be nice to you. They want some of your money. They'll put sugar in your ears; they'll say what you want to hear.

Here "sugar in your ears" suggests the "sweet nothings" people say to Teresa, but the metaphor also hints at something more sinister: stopping up the ears in order to rob the pockets.

When writers forget either the literal meaning of the figure of transport, or fail to see where they are transporting the reader, they often write mixed metaphors:

The superior silo-busting rocket capability will knock their strategy right out of the ballpark.

The gaps in their political thinking make a smokescreen as long as your arm.

Another kind of mixed metaphor occurs when writers waver between literal and abstract meanings:

The situation calls forth many obstacles. (creates, perhaps, but calls forth?)

The dialogue will clear the way toward a new relationship. (dialogues may clear the air, but not the way)

If you have laughed or winced at any of these verbal blunders, you've recognized that language makes meaning happen. Meaning doesn't just reside in separate words as in so many closed boxes. Knowing this fact can make you respond to words with more curiosity and pleasure.

   Passive Voice
   Intransitive Verbs
   Too Many Little Words
   Adverbitis
   Hitchhikers, Babblers, and Jaw-Flappers
   Windy and Pretentious Language
   Balance and Consistency