On Writing Well - William Zinsser 2001

20 The Sound of Your Voice
Part IV Attitudes

I wrote one book about baseball and one about jazz. But it never occurred to me to write one of them in sports English and the other in jazz English. I tried to write them both in the best English I could, in my usual style. Though the books were widely different in subject, I wanted readers to know that they were hearing from the same person. It was my book about baseball and my book about jazz. Other writers would write their book. My commodity as a writer, whatever I’m writing about, is me. And your commodity is you. Don’t alter your voice to fit your subject. Develop one voice that readers will recognize when they hear it on the page, a voice that’s enjoyable not only in its musical line but in its avoidance of sounds that would cheapen its tone: breeziness and condescension and cliches.

Let’s start with breeziness.

There is a kind of writing that sounds so relaxed that you think you hear the author talking to you. E. B. White was probably its best practitioner, though many other masters of the style—James Thurber, V. S. Pritchett, Lewis Thomas—come to mind. I’m partial to it because it’s a style that I’ve always tried to write myself. The common assumption is that the style is effortless. In fact the opposite is true: the effortless style is achieved by strenuous effort and constant refining. The nails of grammar and syntax are in place and the English is as good as the writer can make it.

Here’s how a typical piece by E. B. White begins:

I spent several days and nights in mid-September with an ailing pig and I feel driven to account for this stretch of time, more particularly since the pig died at last, and I lived, and things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting.

The sentence is so folksy that we imagine ourselves sitting on the porch of White’s house in Maine. White is in a rocking chair, puffing on a pipe, and the words just tumble out in his storyteller’s voice. But look at the sentence again. Nothing about it is accidental. It’s a disciplined act of writing. The grammar is formal, the words are plain and precise, and the cadences are those of a poet. That’s the effortless style at its best: a methodical act of composition that disarms us with its generated warmth. The writer sounds confident; he’s not trying to ingratiate himself with the reader.

Inexperienced writers miss this point. They think that all they have to do to achieve a casual effect is to be “just folks”— good old Betty or Bob chatting over the back fence. They want to be a pal to the reader. They’re so eager not to appear formal that they don’t even try to write good English. What they write is the breezy style.

How would a breezy writer handle E. B. Whites vigil with the pig? He might sound like this:

Ever stay up late babysitting for a sick porker? Believe you me, a guy can lose a heckuva lot of shut-eye. I did that gig for three nights back in September and my better half thought I’d lost my marbles. (Just kidding, Pam!) Frankly, the whole deal kind of bummed me out. Because, you see, the pig up and died on me. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t feeling in the pink myself, so I suppose it could have been yours truly and not old Porky who kicked the bucket. And you can bet your bottom dollar Mr. Pig wasn’t going to write a book about it!

There’s no need to labor all the reasons why this stuff is so terrible. Its crude. It’s corny. It’s verbose. It’s contemptuous of the English language. It’s condescending. (I stop reading writers who say “You see.”) But the most pathetic thing about the breezy style is that it’s harder to read than good English. In the writer’s attempt to ease the reader’s journey he has littered the path with obstacles: cheap slang, shoddy sentences, windy philosophizing. E. B. White’s style is much easier to read. He knows that the tools of grammar haven’t survived for so many centuries by chance; they are props the reader needs and subconsciously wants. Nobody ever stopped reading E. B. White or V. S. Pritchett because the writing was too good. But readers will stop reading you if they think you are talking down to them. Nobody wants to be patronized.

Write with respect for the English language at its best—and for readers at their best. If you’re smitten by the urge to try the breezy style, read what you’ve written aloud and see if you like the sound of your voice.

Finding a voice that your readers will enjoy is largely a matter of taste. Saying that isn’t much help—taste is a quality so intangible that it can’t even be defined. But we know it when we meet it. A woman with taste in clothes delights us with her ability to turn herself out in a combination that’s not only stylish and surprising, but exactly right. She knows what works and what doesn’t.

For writers and other creative artists, knowing what not to do is a major component of taste. Two jazz pianists may be equally proficient. The one with taste will put every note to useful Work in telling his or her story; the one without taste will drench us in ripples and other unnecessary ornaments. Painters with taste will trust their eye to tell them what needs to be on the canvas and what doesn’t; a painter without taste will give us a landscape that’s too pretty, or too cluttered, or too gaudy—anyway, too something. A graphic designer with taste knows that less is more: that design is the servant of the written word. A designer without taste will smother the writing in background tints and swirls and decorative frills.

I realize that I’m trying to pin down a matter that’s subjective; one person’s beautiful object is somebody else’s kitsch. Taste can also change from one decade to another—yesterday’s charm is derided today as junk, but it will be back in vogue tomorrow, certified again as charming. So why do I even raise the issue? Just to remind you that it exists. Taste is an invisible current that runs through writing, and you should be aware of it.

Sometimes, in fact, it’s visible. Every art form has a core of verities that survive the fickleness of time. There must be something innately pleasing in the proportions of the Parthenon; Western man continues to let the Greeks of two thousand years ago design his public buildings, as anyone walking around Washington, D.C., soon discovers. The fugues of Bach have a timeless elegance that’s rooted in the timeless laws of mathematics.

Does writing have any such guideposts for us? Not many; writing is the expression of every person’s individuality, and we know what we like when it comes along. Again, however, much can be gained by knowing what to omit. Cliches, for instance. If a writer lives in blissful ignorance that cliches are the kiss of death, if in the final analysis he leaves no stone unturned to use them, we can infer that he lacks an instinct for what gives language its freshness. Faced with a choice between the novel and the banal, he goes unerringly for the banal. His voice is the voice of a hack.

Not that cliches are easy to stamp out. They are everywhere in the air around us, familiar friends just waiting to be helpful, ready to express complex ideas for us in the shorthand form of metaphor. That’s how they became cliches in the first place, and even careful writers use quite a few on their first draft. But after that we are given a chance to clean them out. Cliches are one of the things you should keep listening for when you rewrite and read your successive drafts aloud. Notice how incriminating they sound, convicting you of being satisfied to use the same old chestnuts instead of making an effort to replace them with fresh phrases of your own. Cliches are the enemy of taste.

Extend the point beyond individual cliches to your larger use of language. Again, freshness is crucial. Taste chooses words that have surprise, strength and precision. Non-taste slips into the breezy vernacular of the alumni magazine’s class notes—a world where people in authority are the top brass or the powers that be. What exactly is wrong with “the top brass”? Nothing—and everything. Taste knows that its better to call people in authority what they are: officials, executives, chairmen, presidents, directors, managers. Non-taste reaches for the corny synonym, which has the further disadvantage of being imprecise; exactly which company officers are the top brass? Non-taste uses “umpteenth.” And “zillions.” Non-taste uses “period”: “She said she didn’t want to hear any more about it. Period.”

But finally taste is a mixture of qualities that are beyond analyzing: an ear that can hear the difference between a sentence that limps and a sentence that lilts, an intuition that knows when a casual or a vernacular phrase dropped into a formal sentence will not only sound right but will seem to be the inevitable choice. (E. B. White was a master of that balancing act.) Does this mean that taste can be learned? Yes and no. Perfect taste, like perfect pitch, is a gift from God. But a certain amount can be acquired. The trick is to study writers who have it.

Never hesitate to imitate another writer. Imitation is part of the creative process for anyone learning an art or a craft. Bach and Picasso didn’t spring full-blown as Bach and Picasso; they needed models. This is especially true of writing. Find the best writers in the fields that interest you and read their work aloud. Get their voice and their taste into your ear—their attitude toward language. Don’t worry that by imitating them you’ll lose your own voice and your own identity. Soon enough you will shed those skins and become who you are supposed to become.

By reading other writers you also plug yourself into a longer tradition that enriches you. Sometimes you will tap a vein of eloquence or racial memory that gives your writing a depth it could never attain on its own. Let me illustrate what I mean by a roundabout route.

Ordinarily I don’t read the proclamations issued by state officials to designate important days of the year as important days of the year. But in 1976, when I was teaching at Yale, the governor of Connecticut, Ella Grasso, had the pleasant idea of reissuing the Thanksgiving Proclamation written 40 years earlier by Governor Wilbur Cross, which she called “a masterpiece of eloquence.” I often wonder whether eloquence has vanished from American life, or whether we even still consider it a goal worth striving for. So I studied Governor Cross’s words to see how they had weathered the passage of time, that cruel judge of the rhetoric of earlier generations. I was delighted to find that I agreed with Governor Grasso. It was a piece written by a master:

Time out of mind at this turn of the seasons when the hardy oak leaves rustle in the wind and the frost gives a tang to the air and the dusk falls early and the friendly evenings lengthen under the heel of Orion, it has seemed good to our people to join together in praising the Creator and Preserver, who has brought us by a way that we did not know to the end of another year. In observance of this custom, I appoint Thursday, the 26th of November, as a day of Public Thanksgiving for the blessings that have been our common lot and have placed our beloved state with the favored regions of earth—for all the creature comforts: the yield of the soil that has fed us and the richer yield from labor of every kind that has sustained our lives—and for all those things, as dear as breath to the body, that quicken man’s faith in his manhood, that nourish and strengthen his word and act; for honor held above price; for steadfast courage and zeal in the long, long search after truth; for liberty and for justice freely granted by each to his fellow and so as freely enjoyed; and for the crowning glory and mercy of peace upon our land—that we may humbly take heart of these blessings as we gather once again with solemn and festive rites to keep our Harvest Home.

Governor Grasso added a postscript urging the citizens of Connecticut “to renew their dedication to the spirit of sacrifice and commitment which the Pilgrims invoked during their first harsh winter in the New World,” and I made a mental note to look at Orion that night. I was glad to be reminded that I was living in one of the favored regions of earth. I was also glad to be reminded that peace is not the only crowning glory to be thankful for; so is the English language when it is gracefully used for the public good. The cadences of Jefferson, Lincoln, Churchill, Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson came rolling down to me. (The cadences of Eisenhower, Nixon and Bush did not.)

I posted the Thanksgiving proclamation on a bulletin board for my students to enjoy. From their comments I realized that several of them thought I was being facetious. Knowing my obsession with simplicity, they assumed that I regarded Governor Cross’s message as florid excess.

The incident left me with several questions. Had I sprung Wilbur Cross’s prose on a generation that had never been exposed to nobility of language as a means of addressing the populace? I couldn’t recall a single attempt since John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech in 1961. (Mario Cuomo and Jesse Jackson have partly restored my faith.) This was a generation reared on television, where the picture is valued more than the word—where the word, in fact, is devalued, used as mere chatter, and often misused and mispronounced. It was also a generation reared on music—songs and rhythms meant primarily to be heard and felt. With so much noise in the air, was any American child being trained to listen? Was anyone calling attention to the majesty of a well-constructed sentence?

My other question raised a more subtle mystery: what is the line that separates eloquence from bombast? Why are we exalted by the words of Wilbur Cross and anesthetized by the speeches of most politicians and public officials who ply us with oratorical ruffles and flourishes?

Part of the answer takes us back to taste. A writer with an ear for language will reach for fresh imagery and avoid phrases that are trite. The hack will reach for those very cliches, thinking he will enrich his thoughts with currency that is, as he would put it, tried and true. Another part of the answer lies in simplicity. Writing that will endure tends to consist of words that are short and strong; words that sedate are words of three, four and five syllables, mostly of Latin origin, many of them ending in “ion” and embodying a vague concept. In Wilbur Cross’s Thanksgiving Proclamation there are no four-syllable words and only ten three-syllable words, three of which are proper nouns he was stuck with. Notice how many of the governor’s words are anything but vague: leaves, wind, frost, air, evening, earth, comforts, soil, labor, breath, body, justice, courage, peace, land, rites, home. They are homely words in the best sense—they catch the rhythm of the seasons and the dailiness of life. Also notice that all of them are nouns. After verbs, plain nouns are your strongest tools; they resonate with emotion.

But ultimately eloquence runs on a deeper current. It moves us with what it leaves unsaid, touching off echoes in what we already know from our reading, our religion and our heritage. Eloquence invites us to bring some part of ourselves to the transaction. It was no accident that Lincolns speeches resounded with echoes of the King James Bible; he knew it almost by heart from his boyhood, and he had so soaked himself in its sonorities that his formal English was more Elizabethan than American. The Second Inaugural Address reverberates with Biblical phrases and paraphrases: “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.” The first half of the sentence borrows a metaphor from Genesis, the second half reshapes a famous command in Matthew, and “a just God” is from Isaiah.

If this speech affects me more than any other American document, it’s not only because I know that Lincoln was killed five weeks later, or because I’m moved by all the pain that culminated in his plea for a reconciliation that would have malice toward none and charity for all. It’s also because Lincoln tapped some of Western man’s oldest teachings about slavery, clemency and judgment. His words carried stem overtones for the men and women who heard him in 1865, reared, as he was, on the Bible. But even in the late 1990s it’s hard not to feel a wrath almost too ancient to grasp in Lincoln’s notion that God might will the Civil War to continue “until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three

thousand years ago, so still it must be said ’the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

Wilbur Cross’s Thanksgiving Proclamation also echoes with truths that we know in our bones. To such mysteries as the changing of the seasons and the bounty of the earth we bring strong emotions of our own. Who hasn’t looked with awe at Orion? To such democratic processes as “the long search after truth” and “liberty and justice freely granted” we bring fragments of our own searches after truth, our own grantings and receivings, in a nation where so many human rights have been won and so many still elude us. Governor Cross doesn’t take our time to explain these processes, and I’m grateful to him for that. I hate to think how many cliches a hack orator would marshal to tell us far more—and nourish us far less.

Therefore remember the uses of the past when you tell your story. What moves us in writing that has regional or ethnic roots—Southern writing, African-American writing, Jewish- American writing—is the sound of voices far older than the narrator’s, talking in cadences that are more than ordinarily rich. Toni Morrison, one of the most eloquent of black writers, once said: “I remember the language of the people I grew up with. Language was so important to them. All that power was in it. And grace and metaphor. Some of it was very formal and Biblical, because the habit is that when you have something important to say you go into parable, if you’re from Africa, or you go into another level of language. I wanted to use language that way, because my feeling was that a black novel was not black because I wrote it, or because there were black people in it, or because it was about black things. It was the style. It had a certain style. It was inevitable. I couldn’t describe it, but I could produce it.”

Go with what seems inevitable in your own heritage. Embrace it and it may lead you to eloquence.