Good Writers Throw Fastballs– more against cliche in online writing
In the comments to my last post, my friend Joseph Carrabis (a much more dilligent blogger than me) mentions that at a recent academic conference some colleagues speculated that because there is so much more writing these days the general quality of the writing would go up.
Beyond fallacious reasoning, this is an dangerous thing to say for several reasons:
- It mistakes quantity for quality, never a good idea, suggesting that sheer repetitive practice will make you a better writer
- It doesn’t understand that writers who don’t think about writing lean on cliche
- It misunderstands user behavior in the face of infinite media
I’ll get to number 3 shortly, but it’s the thing that takes this post (if I’m writing it well) from more editorial fussing about writing to something that might be useful to the vast population of online writers, professional and avocational.
Quantity vs. quality: Any athlete will tell you that if you train a muscle the wrong way the muscle will get stronger but won’t make your game any better. That’s writing, particularly online. If you write a lot but don’t think much about how or what you’re writing, then the cliches will leap to your fingers — bypassing the mind like the untaken road on a roundabout — with greater frequency and you will wind up saying less and less.
Cliches as beachballs: Using a cliche in your writing is like tossing a beachball: it requires no particular skill or coordination either to send or receive, and precision is absent. Beach ball thoughts are big and filled with stale air, and they don’t communicate much. Often, when a colorful metaphor — e.g., “I just threw up a little bit in my mouth” — is first encountered it has an eye-widening newness, but the second time a reader sees it the eyes squint just a little.
Cliches empower automated response, not thought. The French theorist Michel de Certeau talked (I’m paraphrasing here) about how after a while we don’t think of Martin Luther King when we drive down Martin Luther King Blvd. How many of us think about Alexander Hamilton’s strange personal life and career when we trade a ten-spot for a double latte and a muffin at the local coffee shop? Memorial becomes cliche and moves to the back of the mind’s room. Victor Shklovsky, a Russian literary critic, talked about seeing versus recognizing, arguing that art enables us to see things anew that we had become habituated to recognizing. Beach ball thoughts are exercises in recognition.
Good writers throw fastballs.
Great writers throw knives like a blindfolded circus performer.
Media behavior: Somewhere around 2005, and I hope to see updated numbers on this soon, our friends at Nielsen Media Research disclosed that the average American has 96.4 TV channels available but only watches 15.4. Correlate that with the decline in market share of big network TV shows — the #5 show today has lost around five and a half million viewers compared to a decade ago — and it’s clear that people are consolidating and specializing their media choices in the face of overwhelming choice and defining themselves as certain kinds of viewers in a desperate pre-emptive filtering.
The internet with its infinite variety of blogs spikes this behavior pattern up by orders of magnitude.
Breaking through with your message amidst all the chatter chatter is harder than ever, no matter what kind of message you have. Most communicators respond to this by turning up the volume to yell: just think about how aggressive commercials are, or how brain-damaged the general IQ of political rhetoric has become. Online, here be pop-ups, floating creative and ad units that inflate without asking.
In this environment, good writers and speakers will prosper. The power of voice — the ability to communicate your thoughts in clear, precise, muscular prose with an evocative and controlled use of metaphor — does come with practice, but it’s a thoughtful and strategic pratice rather than simple repetition.
One of my favorite quotes about writing comes from Mark Twain: “The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter– it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
One Response to “Good Writers Throw Fastballs– more against cliche in online writing”
1 Joseph Carrabis 23 December 2006 @ 4:51 pm
Hello again,
I agree and disagree with you, Brad. Everything you’ve written here is true. I also know that one thing I’ve always held true is that any writing I do will help me improve the writing I want to do. You, as my editor at IMedia, are an example of this and you, as my editor, can nullify everything I write here. For example, our discussion of “that versus which” at the IMedia Summit was enlightening to me.
I don’t think writing in and of itself is going to help people improve their writing. I think writing, studying the masters (Twain, Bradbury, Stevens, and we both know the lists), honing your skills with a willing and sensitive teacher (a nod to you), is what causes one to improve. I learn more about how to write well by studying how editors have edited my writing. But before any of that can happen, I have to write. – Joseph