Postlude to the Morning of an Editor

My friend and editor David Mills is a contradiction of the old saw, “Them what can’t do, teach,” for he can both write wonderfully well, and teaches others the skill. He has often noted that many of his charges, mostly graduate students, come to him with little exposure to or training in the art. It is typically assumed to have been picked up elsewhere--so they have been left to thrash about, and often founder, among the rocks and shoals of the compositional sea.  Thirty-five year old professionals, he tells us, often have only the barest acquaintance with “our friend, Mr. Thesis Statement,” or knowledge of his powers.

Having just spent the better part of an hour trying to make sense of one of the aforementioned thrashings-about (Touchstone receives a fair number of them), attempting to determine (1) what the author is trying to say, (2) whether he has actually said it, and (3) what all this could possibly have to do with our enterprise here, I am inspired to make the following observations of my own:

People like David did not make up Mr. Thesis Statement merely to entertain themselves or belabor their hapless students. That gentleman represents, and is the governing part of, the logical body that every worthy composition is. For the same reason that we do not expect people wandering about with their heads under their arms or feet protruding from their skulls to supplement our comprehension of the  transcendentals, we do not expect essays that are composed of ill-joined members to serve our understanding. We reasonably expect a coherent body descending from a head from which every part devolves so as to increase rather than defeat our comprehension of the whole. The train of thought put forward should be a well-articulated amplification of the idea it has begun with. This is true whether the piece is a paragraph, a section, a chapter, an article, or an entire dissertation. “A spectre is haunting Europe” is not merely an artful observation, but the seed of something. So is “Call me Ishmael,” and “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” 

There seems to be a continuum upon which writers fall that goes from the apparently hopeless to the naturally talented—the latter being those who seem to write well with little apparent effort. While even these can profit from criticism and good editing, most of us who try to write fall somewhere in between, in the place where good writing is the result of effort, practice, and paying close attention to those who can help us do better. 

If I were to identify what I think is the most frequent mistake of the writers of bad writing we receive, I would say that it is the same that most of us have with speaking: we express ourselves without first thinking clearly and carefully—and with brutal self-criticism--about what we are going to say and how we are going to say it. We have the impression that our minds are pregnant with valuable thoughts that really must be heard without recalling that unless exercise the labor and discipline necessary to put them in a form that can be understood by others, as thoughts-to-be-shared they remain sterile. This is why writing is an art--a rhetorical art--and a process that, while it depends on good thinking, should be thought of as another thing entirely. For while good thinking depends on the internal coherence of the thought itself, good writing, like good speaking, is the art of word-use and knowing the mind of one’s audience.

Much of the writing we accept here is that of mature writers, which is to say, of people made complex by age, knowledge, and experience, who are taking pains to write as simply as they can. If I may say it—and I don’t wish to embarrass here, but don’t think I can avoid it--much of what we reject is that of simpler people who have bitten off more than they can chew and are trying to be “complex”—often trying to make a big point on a field they don’t understand sufficiently well. (When we are criticized by such people it is frequently along the lines of, “you don’t appreciate the complexity of the matter”—an almost infallible mark of a person, usually young, who has encountered the “manifold,” but does not understand yet how it must be handled in the discipline of writers who know it far better than he does. If he perseveres, he will eventually understand that one cannot articulate the world in a single huff.) We have gladly accepted writing by the very young. Bethany Torode gave us a full feature when she was nineteen. But she wrote exceedingly well of something that she knew about. We could ask no more of the oldest head among us.