The Reasons for Pudder

Steven Hutchens' Avoiding Dysgraphsia and the entertaining discussion it began reminded me of a favorite passage from Sir Ernest Gowers' The Complete Plain Words, a very good book on writing by an English senior civil servant asked by the Department of the Treasury to write something about official English. (It's actually two books combined: Plain Words [1948] and The ABC of Plain Words [1951]).

Gowers is writing about "pudder" (meaning "gobbledygook" and taken by the writer Ivor Brown from Lear's "the god who keep this dreadful pudder o'er our heads") and noting that "It seems to be a morbid condition contracted in early manhood. Children show no signs of it." He gives an example from a ten-year-old's essay:

The bird that I am going to write about is the owl. The owl cannot see at all by day and at night is as blind as a bat.

I do not know much about the owl, so I will go on to the beast which I am going to choose. It is the cow. The cow is a mammal. It has six sides — right, left, an upper and below. At the back it has a tail on which hangs a brush. With this it sends the flies away so that they do not fall into the milk. The head is for the purpose of growing horns and so that the mouth can be somewhere. The horns are to butt with, and the mouth is to moo with. Under the cow hangs the milk. It is arranged for milking. When people milk, the milk comes and there is never an end to the supply. How the cow does it I have not yet realized, but it makes more and more. The cow has a fine sense of smell; one can smell it far away. This is the reason for the fresh air in the country.

The man cow is called an ox. It is not a mammal. The cow does not eat much, but what it eats it eats twice, so that it gets enough. When it is hungry it moos, and when it says nothing it is because its inside is all full up with grass.

The passage is funny by itself but I have another reason to type it out, besides entertaining you. Gowers notes that "The writer has something to say and said it as clearly as he could, and so has unconsciously achieved style." I think this is right and points to an idea no one in the comments on Steve's post seems to have said: people often write badly not because they don't know grammar or haven't read good writers, but because they don't know what they are talking about.

The ten-year-old has got most of his facts wrong, but we know that he has actually looked at a cow and tried his best to describe it, which makes spotting his mistakes easy. Most of, or at least a lot of, the kind of hopelessly bad writing we all bemoan seems to come from people who haven't actually seen the thing they're writing about.

Those of you who teach children can correct me, but in the case of children, the problem seems to me to be increased by the kind of assignments teachers give out. I mean the kind of creative, engaged, explorative, stimulating — I'm afraid I can't remember the jargon, but you'll all know what I'm talking about — assignment that often leaves children frozen with confusion.  Five pages on the causes of the Depression, say, after the kids have read two chapters of a textbook and three handouts, and seen a documentary.

The teacher is just asking, nay begging, for pudder aka gobbledygook. What he (the teacher) generally wants is a regurgitation of the readings, with an answer along the accepted lines, and he will get that from the dullards who do the obvious, the brown-n . . . the apple polishers who do what's wanted, the conceited who do what's obvious and wanted but praise themselves for it, and the ambitious students who know how to play the game to win.

The rest, who naively think they're supposed to say something original, start writing and because they have no real idea what are the causes of the Depression, because they have never thought about historical causation and know almost nothing about the history, economics, politics, or anything else, will start babbling. They sit at their computers, faced with a blank white screen and the need to produce five intelligent pages on the causes of the Depression for Mr. Jones, who, like, knows everything and grades hard and is, like, sooooo demanding, and force themselves to write.

And then there are the students, often the brightest and most serious, who have thought about it just enough to know they don't know anything, and that the experts write very big books on the subject and fight like cats and dogs on the subject. They could write an honest paper, limited to what they know, meaning that they'll say that X says this and Y says that, but then the teacher is likely to grade them badly, with a concerned note explaining that they're supposed to engage the material and — again I've forgotten the jargon, but many of you will have heard it. These too may take refuge in bad writing just to get the A their knowledge and effort deserve.

There are other reasons for adults writing this way, but I wouldn't underestimate the extent to which adults in business and academia are given the same type of assignment, and have an even greater sense than the kids that they're supposed to say something original but can't. So they grope to speak of a subject they do not understand, with predictable results. They have been trained to do this, of course, in sixteen years of schooling, so writing pudder comes naturally.

But that's not the only problem. Since originality can get you in trouble, especially if you're wrong but often even if you're right (and sometimes being original and right can really put your career in the tank), it's best to look original but without saying anything that can be held against you. The possibility of writing confusingly appears to the poor guy as the perfect answer, even if he doesn't put it to himself quite that clearly.

I think that the demand that you say what you have no competence to say explains a lot of bad writing, in children and in adults. It is not the only cause, not by a long shot, but it is a big one.