
Writing English as a Second Language - jamesbritt
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/writing-english-as-a-second-language/
======
grellas
I agree with and like William Zinsser on many points, and I believe he has
helped countless budding authors and language learners over the years to
develop good writing skills. I know I read his books years ago and profited
from them (I will never forget a funny introduction to _On Writing Well_ ,
where he highlighted the point that good writing skills can only be developed
through persistent, hard work over a long period by featuring a conversion
between an author and a brain surgeon - who did writing "on the side" - in
which the author chimed in that he too planned to do some brain surgery "on
the side").

That said, English is a rich, beautiful, and varied language and we should be
careful not to box ourselves in with arbitrary rules that limit our style. Mr.
Zinsser's admonition not to use or over-use Latin-origin words does just that
and is therefore too arbitrary to be productive.

Take the word "productive," which I just used. At its root is the Latin _duco,
ducere, duxi, ductus,_ generally meaning "to lead." So we get, in English, a
rich range of words such as duke, duct, deduce, reduce, induce, introduce,
produce, and all their variants (deductive, inductive, productive, etc.), all
useful words in the right context.

Now there are countless words like this in English, and I don't think it is
meaningful to try to sort them out from words having an Anglo-Saxon lineage
and others thought to have punchier qualities. After all, well over half of
English vocabulary derives from Latin and it seems self-defeating to limit
yourself to less than half of the words available to you in choosing ways to
express yourself.

Yes, do avoid writing in a bloated or hopelessly abstract style. Use punchy
verbs to liven things up as occasion allows. But don't waste your time trying
to sort words out by their etymological origin because words derived from
Latin are not "the enemy" and, even if some of them are stilted, many or even
most are not.

If I may suggest my own rule: do not mechanically apply arbitrary rules on
word choice but rather choose your words to suit the context, following your
instincts for what sounds right for your intended reader.

~~~
pvg
_Use punchy verbs to liven things up as occasion allows_

Neither Zinsser, nor Orwell (who wrote the famous essay with similar advice)
say the use of such words is to be 'punchy'. I don't know where you and the
angry commenter I replied to get that from. It's not advice meant to be make
your prose 'punchy' but clearer and better. 'Punchy' is, frankly, dismissive.

Latin words are, of course, unavoidable and necessary in English. They're
hardly all bad. Many often sound more 'formal' and important and are thus
overused, though. The advice offered is really a call for vigilance and care -
it's easy to slip into the overly-ornate style. It's particularly relevant to
the foreign students Zinsser was addressing.

No style rules are immutable and absolute. But the guidelines offered by
Orwell and echoed by Zinsser and many others form an important baseline. It's
not supposed to be a narrow rail of a style you should never stray from.
You're better off learning it well, though, before you do.

~~~
grellas
As I recall, the warning about overuse of Latin derives from Fowler and goes
through Strunk and White (might be mistaken about the latter), where I think
the contrast is drawn with words that are described as being more "vivid."

I stand corrected on having used "punchy" in a way that appears dismissive. I
am in complete agreement with the rest of your analysis as well, including
with your admiration of Mr. Zinsser. Believe me, I spent years trying to
master style, and I highly value the guidelines put forth by Mr. Zinsser and
others to assist in that process. As long as they are not treated as rigid
rules, they are most salutary (or is it healthful) for our learning.

 _Gratias tibi ago._

~~~
pvg
Ah you're right, it's in Fowler and in fact, in the earlier (first edition
1906) _The King's English_. Fittingly, for something that evolved into a
classic, it touches on almost all the points discussed in this thread, in one
paragraph and a footnote:

<http://www.bartleby.com/116/101.html#5>

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petewarden
I'm a big fan of this style, and I recommend Orwell's "Politics and the
English Language" as the canonical take on it. He would have a field day with
"Enhanced Interrogation Techniques"!

<http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm>

There is a tradeoff here though. Shakespeare's language was elaborate and
complex but still powerful. He loved rummaging through the back of the
vocabulary cupboard to find just the right word.

~~~
nfnaaron
Orwell's and Shakespeare's style are both to be emulated, in the appropriate
contexts.

~~~
pvg
Orwell's, more likely than Shakespeare's. The context 'Iambic pentameter blank
verse play in Early Modern English' simply doesn't come up that often.
Although there is the rare exception -

<http://www.runleiarun.com/lebowski/>

~~~
iuguy
That is incredible. My weekend is now officially over.

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patrickgzill
Quibble: he should have mentioned Joseph Conrad (or another writer like him),
whose first language was not English.

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bjoernw
As a German learning to write in English I had to constantly remind myself to
keep my sentences short :)

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Not to mention your words. English doesn't have nearly as ... robust a
mechanism for generating compound words as German.

~~~
access_denied
“Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are
going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his
verb in his mouth.” (Mark Twain) (I am German btw)

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dkarl
I share his stylistic preferences, but Zinsser is a prick. (How's that for
simple and forceful?) He's a prick suffering from a bad case of déformation
professionnelle. (Ha! That isn't even English!) To further express my disdain
for his advice, I have made my response extremely long.

Consider his first example:

 _“Dear member: The board of governors has spent the past year considering
proactive efforts that will continue to professionalize the club and to
introduce efficiencies that we will be implementing throughout 2009.” That
means they’re going to try to make the club run better._

His translation is incomplete. "Better" isn't a synonym for "more
professionally and efficiently." "Better" could mean all kinds of things.
Perhaps it would be plainer to say they're trying to cut down on waste and
sloppiness, but that may not be accurate either. Waste and sloppiness are
relative to a person's awareness and capabilities. Perhaps raising their their
awareness and capabilities to the point where they recognized waste and
sloppiness in their operation was part of the process. That would be rather
complicated to explain, but if they refer to "waste and sloppiness" then the
reader is likely to get the impression that the waste and sloppiness have long
been evident.

He also didn't communicate the time frame: they've spent a year discussing
what to do, and now they're going to spend a year (or whatever remains of
2009) doing it. Whatever. He doesn't care. Their version communicates that
they've done a lot of careful work to plan the improvements; he prefers a
version that implies they don't know what they're doing. How easy it is to be
concise when you want your readers to lose confidence in you.

Could he really write what they wanted to say more concisely? Probably so.
There are some obvious improvements to make. But he refuses to try or even to
offer any useful advice, because he doesn't give a shit about what they wanted
to say, or what they were trying to accomplish by sending the letter. He has
contempt for the task they are faced with. Contempt for what they do and what
they're trying to say.

It's the same story with the next example:

 _“As I walk around the Academy,” she writes, “and see so many gifted students
interacting with accomplished, dedicated adults” [that means boys and girls
talking to teachers] and consider the opportunities for learning that such
interpersonal exchanges will yield…” Interpersonal exchanges! Pure garbage.
Her letter is meant to assure us alumni that the school is in good hands. I’m
not assured._

She conjures an image and interprets the image. He would strip out the
interpretation and leave only the concrete image of students talking to
teachers. Why? Her interpretation is a sentimental, idealistic sales pitch.
"Pure garbage." Well, yes, but it's her _job_ to provide a sentimental and
idealistic sales pitch. He has contempt for her writing because he has
contempt for her job.

Perhaps he could do a better job in these situations, but he obviously isn't
interested. In neither case does he suggest a useful alternative. Instead, he
suggests they should use language that is utterly inadequate for their
purpose, and then presumably start looking for a less distasteful profession.

 _The words derived from Latin are the enemy—they will strangle and suffocate
everything you write.... Those nouns express a vague concept or an abstract
idea, not a specific action that we can picture—somebody doing something._

Pity anyone who needs to communicate concepts and abstract ideas and who isn't
free to use fiction or anecdote to do so. Clearly their writing skills are
inferior to such people as

 _Joan Didion, who grew up in California and wrote brilliant magazine pieces
about its trashy lifestyle in the 1960s. No anthropologist caught it better._

Should we really declare one approach to a subject "better" because it results
in punchier prose? I enjoy simple, readable writing as much as anybody, and
outside my own field I read it almost exclusively, but I wouldn't want to live
in a world where all the anthropologists, economists, historians, doctors,
lawyers, and bureaucrats gave up words such as _communication, conversion,
reconciliation, enhancement,_ and _verification_. I'd hate to read a
shareholder report written in concrete images. (Perhaps each segment of a pie
chart would be labeled with a vivid, engaging anecdote?)

All those nasty Latin words have "infected" our language because they're
useful. "Approximation" cannot be used interchangeably with the nice, robust
Anglo-Saxon "guess." (Or "stab" -- so much more vivid!) "Communicate" cannot
be used interchangeably with "say," since often what is communicated is
exactly the opposite of what is said.

 _You’ll be interviewing the men and women who are trying to solve those
problems—school principals, social workers, health-care workers, hospital
officials, criminal justice officials, union officials, church officials,
police officers, judges, clerks in city and state agencies—and when you ask
them a question, they will answer you in nouns: Latin noun clusters that are
the working vocabulary of their field. They’ll talk about “facilitation
intervention” and “affordable housing” and “minimum-density zoning,” and you
will dutifully copy those phrases down and write a sentence that says: “A
major immigrant concern is the affordable housing situation.” But I can’t
picture the affordable housing situation. Who exactly are those immigrants?
Where do they live? What kind of housing is affordable? To whom? As readers,
we want to be able to picture specific people like ourselves, in a specific
part of the city, doing things we might also do. We want a sentence that says
something like “New Dominican families on Tremont Avenue in the Bronx can’t
pay the rent that landlords ask.” I can picture that; we’ve all had trouble
paying the landlord._

Now he's just being lazy. He laments that people talk using "the working
vocabulary of their field." Why shouldn't they? It's _his_ job as a writer to
produce the working vocabulary of _his_ field, which is punchy writing that
keeps readers engaged. Doesn't he realize how frustrated _other_ people must
be with his insistence on dealing in nothing but vivid concrete images, not to
mention his disdain for people who, because they face different tasks, must
resort to different tools? Does he realize how frustrating it must be to talk
to a writer who claims to be interested in the affordable housing situation
but has no interest in the concepts and legal tools being used to address it,
because they don't fit his professional mindset?

And that's why I say he suffers from déformation professionnelle. He judges
everyone's prose as if they wrote for the same reasons he does. He says he
wants to help people write, but he really just wants to make people write to a
certain standard, the standard appropriate to one particular kind of writing,
regardless of why and for whom they actually write. If they try to adapt their
style to their actual circumstances, they cannot expect any help from him,
only contempt.

~~~
godDLL
The russian language has a special term set aside for this kind of round-about
linguistic constructionism – "fish language". It's like the English
"legalese", but with no relation to lawyers specifically.

The idea is that a fishes mouth opens and closes all the time, but all that
comes out is air-bubbles.

I'm with master George Carlin on this one, "simple, direct language" is
appropriate everywhere there isn't a justified need for domain-specific
terminology to be used.

~~~
vlisivka
> The russian language has a special term set aside for this kind of round-
> about linguistic constructionism – "fish language". It's like the English
> "legalese", but with no relation to lawyers specifically.

You talking about "Канцелярит" (kantceliaryt?). "Канцелярия" means "office".
Suffix "ит" here means language or disease. So "канцелярит" means "official
language/disease". See
[http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%86%D0%B5%...](http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%86%D0%B5%D0%BB%D1%8F%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%82)
<http://zhivoeslovo.ru/content/view/85/143/>

"Fish" (рыба) - is template or form: you need just to fill gaps between
prewritten sentences. It looks like "fish bones".

~~~
godDLL
Нет, я про "рыбий язык". "Канцелярит" мне что-то из иврита уже навевает,
наверное, все же.

(No.)

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atesting
after her first example i'm wondering if i should read the rest of the
article:

""" Here’s a typical sentence: “Prior to the implementation of the financial
enhancement.” That means “Before we fixed our money problems.” """

"fixed", "money" and "problems" are -- afaik -- what she calls latin words...

oooops!

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ashishbharthi
"Don’t say currently if you can say now." Nice read.

~~~
frossie
_"Don’t say currently if you can say now."_

Hmm.

To me, the most interesting thing about English is that there is a lot of
additional meaning invested in what seems to be a choice of synonymous words.

"I am not currently married" conveys to me "I am not married but I will/want
to be".

"I am not married now" means "I am not married but I used to be".

No?

[Disclaimer: English is not my first language, though by now I have the
greatest fluency in it]

~~~
lmkg
You are correct, there are cases where "currently" carries a shade of meaning
over "now." The author is not saying never to use "currently." He's saying
that in cases where either are ok, use "now." English diction can give some
very dense and precise meanings (try reading Poe!), but often people use the
longer word simply because it's more ornamental rather than because of its
specific connotations. This tends to hurt more than help, as many of his
examples show.

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albertcardona
Great read. As a multilingual speaker, I had quite some chuckles. And then
there are pearls like these:

"Now I think it’s lovely that such a decorative language as Arabic exists. I
wish I could walk around New York and hear people talking in proverbs."

"It no longer rains in America; your TV weatherman will tell that you we’re
experiencing a precipitation probability situation."

"Remember: how you write is how you define yourself to people who meet you
only through your writing. If your writing is pretentious, that’s how you’ll
be perceived. The reader has no choice."

