Style
Communication is not exactly the MTA’s forte. Between their signature garbled announcements (what’s the next stop?) to the impossibility of communicating across the vast gulf between the MTA booth worker and the puzzled tourist yelling helplessly at the glass, when they do communicate something (anything!) well, it’s cause for some serious celebration. Even the notoriously goofy advertisements on the trains (Dr. Zizmore joke, anyone?) serve as continual reminders of botched opportunities to reach the diverse train-riding audience while making substantial revenue– how many times have you seen empty ad space on our broken-down subway cars?
To make matters worse, the MTA has also been slightly slow on the uptake when it comes to wielding technology to the best of their advantage, which is why it’s perhaps no surprise that their latest stab—the new digital screens in some updated subway cars—already seem to be malfunctioning perfectly (according to my own admittedly informal survey of new train cars, that is).
And which is also why it’s interesting that something so simple manages to communicate so much: the train lines & representative letters themselves have incredible expressive power for many New Yawkers. Initially, when someone forwarded me the recent article in the Observer about the perceived changing desirability of certain train lines, I had to let out a small groan; anyone who’s interested in the brand-ification of NY neighborhoods has seen and been frustrated by this kind of article before– a few random quotes from random folks strung together to try to create a coherent snapshot of a neighborhood in supposedly wild flux.
The biggest problem I see with most of these articles is that their discussion of New York history seems to cover on average about three years, give or take a few months. As some irate comments to the article noted, New Yorkers who can recall when the Q wasn’t the Q or the R wasn’t the R look upon this obsession with particular train lines with bemusement. I grew up listening to my parents refer to subway lines by their old-school avenues, which I always found odd-sounding: “Did you take the IRT there?” “Doesn’t the 7th Avenue line stop there?” (Whaaa?) The Observer article engages in its own short-sighted historicism, looking all the way back to the roaring ‘00s to declare the Q the new L; eh?
I wonder if coveting a Chosen Train Line with static, starry-eyed love serves to cut down on the level of advocacy for better and more functioning trains across the board, or if it instead creates a neighbor more rooted in and concerned about where they live. The urge to want a transportation arrangement that is convenient, safe, and reliable is natural, but there seems to be something else at play here. What is it about the process of attributing status to certain subway letters/lines that feels like another lame fetish of the me-me-me-and-also-me generation?
I’ve sat through numerous student presentations (often by international students) who are shocked to discover upon arriving that our subway system looks like the old, neglected bohemoth that it is. A comparative analysis of the Hong Kong subway system, say, or the St. Petersburg subway, versus ours, is an embarrassing enterprise to be sure. I have the impulse to be protective of our train stations, to defend the long history that has made them what they are, and yet there’s something in the logic of these presentations that I can’t argue with. I sat in a shiny new Q car the other day, and couldn’t stop staring up at the broken screen above me that was promising that 34th Street would be the next stop– after we had already past 34th Street twenty minutes before and were hurtling towards Coney Island. Indeed, the MTA has given the very fabulous Q very fabulous new train cars and yet still can’t figure out where we’re headed.
I am currently teaching a writing course, and a day after explaining compound sentences, and minutes after preparing a lecture on eliminating wordiness, I picked up Philip Roth’s A Plot Against America and came across the following mammoth and dazzling sentence.
“Elizabeth, New Jersey, when my mother was being raised there in a flat over her father’s grocery store, was an industrial port a quarter the size of Newark, dominated by the Irish working class and their politicians and the tightly knit parish life that revolved around the town’s many churches, and though I never heard her complain of having been pointedly ill-treated in Elizabeth as a girl, it was not until she married and moved to Newark’s new Jewish neighborhood that she discovered the confidence that led her to become first a PTA “grade mother,” then a PTA vice president in charge of establishing a Kindergarten Mothers’ Club, and finally the PTA president, who, after attending a conference in Trenton on infantile paralysis, proposed an annual March of Dimes dance on January 30 – President Roosevelt’s birthday – that was accepted by most schools.”
While this sentence is not a-typical for Roth, it certainly is for the most of us. It’s important to note that it does not break any grammatical rules (it isn’t even a run-on), and that even my overly-sensitive grammar check didn’t have a problem with it.
I shared it with my students to illustrate that run-on doesn’t necessarily mean long, and to point to the fact that wordiness is not simply about the amount of words, but the meaning of the words: Roth has no redundancies here.
Peter O’Toole, on Fresh Air, telling Terry Gross about shooting the dangerous scene pictured above for Lawrence of Arabia.
I love how O’Toole takes her question and turns it into a narrative, reveling in the details, painting a picture, and ending with a bang. As is often the case, Gross asks a follow-up question that leads to a coda by O’Toole that sums up not only the moment and the story, but also his entire approach to life.
Editor’s note: in advance of this weekend’s U.S. Open, this is the second in a series of posts exploring the metaphorical relationship between golf and writing.
One of the enduring paradoxes of golf as played by amateurs is the huge and hugely disproportionate emphasis placed on the drive. That’s the first shot on a hole, hit off a tee instead of from the grass, with the biggest, longest club in the bag. It is a powerful feeling, and often looks great too, when you smack a ball way, way down the fairway just where you wanted it, bringing a sense of satisfaction that must somehow be tied up with the primal urge to demonstrate one’s physical prowess to other would-be alpha males. Of course, most drives, even ones that go far, do not go far in the right direction. And when the monster-drive-that-almost-was ends up in the woods or in three-inch long grass, you’ve hurt yourself far more with your strong-man indulgences than if you’d have sacrificed distance for accuracy. These indisputable facts, however, seem to have approximately zero effect on the minds of most amateur golfers. As I write there are thousands of (mostly) men wasting $200-300 on drivers whose heads (the part that hits the ball) are almost exactly the same size (at 460 cm3) as a pint glass.
In the end, golf is a game of less-than-inches. About half of the normal hacker’s shots will actually take place on or around the green (the short grass where the hole is) when the ball is probably less than twenty yards from the cup. And thus the timeless phrase, “Drive for show, putt for dough.” (A variant I think I actually prefer was suggested to me by Tom: “It’s not how you drive, it’s how you arrive.”) When you need to hit the ball just 20 yards (a chip) or roll it just 10 feet (a putt) what happens is not only more difficult, but much more important than the drive. Only dedicated practice can yield even occasional success when faced with greenside subtleties. Many times I have played golf with old men – really old, not middle aged – who just tap the ball down each fairway while my pals and I are wailing away from the tee and then trudging into the woods in search of an uncooperative ball (which we will then of course try to hit as hard as possible from under a rock, giving in again to the Siren song of the heroic). At the end of the round, we find that the eighty-year-old has shot his age while we’ve stumbled into the unsatisfactory upper-nineties. The difference is that we have cool clubs and he has a good swing. We have a giant dictionary and updated thesaurus on our desk, if you will, but he knows how to write.
The point is: do sweat the small stuff – which brings me to writing. Mark Twain addressed this point when he said something like “The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” I still (cringingly) remember writing “poems” in middle school classes and figuring that the more multi-syllabic adjectives I could shove into the description of something the better. Good poetry must mean using superficially intense, longish words right? This was not unlike equating your golf prowess with your expensive, grotesquely large driver: an attempted shortcut that usually yields really embarrassing results. To get good at using metaphor a never-ending, effort. To craft a truly clear and useful sentence can ultimately take hours. Whether at its more basic levels (making sure you have an antecedent for a pronoun, subject-verb agreement) or in the mysterious and elusive quest for a meritorious style, what matters is not the flashy phrasing but the effective communication of your worthwhile perceptions, ideally in a way that effects or informs your reader in salutary ways. A golf shot starts with envisioning exactly how and where you intend the ball to fly or roll. A piece of writing begins with envisioning what information you want to convey. The good shot and the good essay are thus both instances of successful translation, and neither comes easy, and neither can be purchased.
(Another crazy and endearing thing about golf – though not so much like writing – is that the best professionals sometimes make very stupid, very costly mistakes. Read about an infamous instance.
Somebody sometime was told by someone that the use of the passive voice is incorrect. Since that time, writing teachers have taken pen to paper to mark out, to rid the English language of one of its most poetic grammatical constructions: the passive voice.
I’m always surprised by how many writers and teachers of writing vehemently believe that the passive voice is wrong, in the same way that, say, subject-verb agreement errors are wrong.
If you’ve never considered this before, consider it now: style books are political. Moreover, they are personal and biased, based on the writer’s own predilections for language.
If I ruled the universe, students would not use style books to learn to write. They may read them in order to obtain an appreciation, however, of the opinions of other writers. To read about writing is a beautiful thing. What students would use to learn how to write would be great writing. (They would read Tristam Shandy.) Reading great writing is what teaches great writing.
And great writing is full of the passive voice; it breaks all the rules prescribed by handbooks on style.
