I’m all for raising standards of excellence, in ethics, politics, morals, education. Especially standards of excellence in writing, which is what I attempt to do.
I write fiction and I am always appalled by how little vocabulary people know today, even people who call themselves writers, or are published as writers. The multi-syllabic word is almost beyond most people’s understanding. Shakespeare fused the high Norman French to the vulgar Anglo-Saxon, giving us the basis of modern English, yet it seems we’re expected to write today in Anglo-Saxon monosyllables. Why?
I love words. I love the sound of rhyme and alliteration and use it as a tool in my writing, particularly in passages of ridicule because they always make it sound so much more absurd. Nobody gets it. To do it, I often need to use a thesaurus, of course, or string searches, to find words with appropriate sound as well as the exact meaning. Often the words I find are obsolete. Fine by me. If they’re wonderful words, revive them. Another "writer" told me to put away the thesaurus. That’s pretty damned difficult when you don’t want to use keywords more than once or twice in a novel, and because you want a certain rhythm, plus sonority and precision.
I love making long loopy sentences too, that have an expressive shape like a rolling circle for my road novel or an arc which rises to to the point it seeks to make. People tell me to break them up. Make them punchy for more impact. Sometimes punchy doesn’t have the same sort of impact.
All too many writers today seem content to tell the story in very common and inexact language. A few months back I looked at a book that was promoted on a popular literary agent’s blog. The first page used the word shitty five times. It seemed to be the only adjective the author knew. What did it describe? Everything from the weather to the architecture to the food. And it was published. How? I guess since that is the way people talk, that is what readers expect to read.
I see nothing wrong with standards of excellence. What does bother me sometimes is the people who want to set them. Too often, the objective is more about power than rightness.
via What the Heck Has Happened to Standards? – Letters to the Editor – The Chronicle of Higher Education.
