grammar

Wordsmithing

I love words. What’s not to love? There appears to be a never-ending supply of them. If you Google “How many words are in the English language?”, you get answers like this one: “There is no single sensible answer to this question. It’s impossible to count the number of words in a language, because it’s so hard to decide what actually counts as a word.” (oxforddictionaries.com)

Good writers have an almost cosmic-size vocabulary.  Mine’s pretty limited in comparison, especially going by some of the words I’ve been noting down in a couple of books I’ve read recently; words I either loved the beauty of – the way they form in the mouth, or the sound they make – or had never seen before and had to look up the meaning of. Here’s a selection of recent ones: sophistry, alembics, capricious, palpebra, crepitation, eidolon, astrakhan, lachrymose.

But the difference between a good writer and a great writer is not the size of their vocabulary, it’s the way they use words.

Great writers bring words together, extra-ordinary and very ordinary, in ways that enlighten our minds, imagination and our hearts. They create new worlds, challenge us to think differently about our existing one, or simply make us discover parts of ourselves buried deep under layers of years, routine or mass media messages.

They understand the power of grammar.  The subtle, but no less impactful, way it alters meaning or sets the dynamic, tone or pace of a message.

They wield metaphor, alliteration, onomatopoeia and other literary devices taught in high school English like a maestro guides a symphony orchestra.

In W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, for example, the conversations Philip Carey has with the drunk poet Cronshaw are a case in point.  They are the very essence of the book, even the name of the book reflects them.  Maugham is clever, his writing smooth, weaving simple words to guide the reader through complex ideas of philosophy, faith, dogma and politics.  He’s also funny, “You’re not a bad fellow, but you won’t drink.  Sobriety disturbs conversation“.

It’s why I love great books and advocate, in my small way, for a world where we celebrate intelligent writers and voracious readers rather than tolerate dumbed-down, lazy, mediocre writing.

But don’t mistake it for wordsmithing.

I was thanked for wordsmithing a proposal for one of my teams at work recently.  While well-intentioned, this really bothered me.  Wordsmithing carries with it an implication you’re just superficially micromanaging some words. That’s not what I had done.  The author’s ideas were completely buried in awful syntax, dreadful presentation and complete ignorance of grammar. I did not play with some wording, I rescued his ideas, pulling them out of quicksand. His ideas deserved to be rescued.

Francis Bacon once said “knowledge is power”.  It’s seductive in its simplicity and apparent self-evident nature.  But I’ve always thought it was hogwash.

Acquiring knowledge and doing nothing with it is intellectually anaemic. The use of knowledge is power. Until then it is no more powerful than ignorance.

It’s the same with words.  On their own they are nothing more than letters on a page.  But an idea well articulated can be the most powerful thing on the planet.  So here’s to a world where words are combined with intelligence and grace presenting ideas that make our minds leap and hearts soar.

You can judge a book by its cover

I love books.  They are an important part of my life.  And I hate bad books … may be a little more passionately than the average person perhaps. And I reckon I’ve stumbled on to a great way of easily avoiding really crap books.

Around 5-10 years ago I started to notice that certain books attracted me time and time again.  I found myself being drawn to these books like iron filings to a magnet or my son to mischief, or whatever other metaphor you might choose to use.  I’ve tried to break the habit to avoid the risk of reading some clone of a book I had read previously, but I just can’t help myself; and it has absolutely nothing to do with the story, genre, author, book reviews or recommendations.

I have come to realise that a sure fire way of choosing a great book is to choose it purely by the cover (or the title).

I know it’s superficial, but I am absolutely convinced I’m right.  Perhaps I am superficial but all you have to do is go into one of the big chain book stores (if there is still one near you) or online to see the range of covers available and you will start to get the idea – Jackie Collins vs. Haruki Murakami; Stephen King vs. Peter Carey; or Mills & Boon vs. Penguin Classics.

Obviously a lot of marketing effort goes into making sure books attract people to buy them … but it has to be more than that.  The conclusion I have come to is that the cover of the book is a reflection of how much the publisher(s) has fallen in love with the story – they have gone out of their way to make sure the design is as high quality as the story; the story deserves a cover where just as much effort has gone into getting it right as went into getting the story right.  They care enough to pay a real designer or artist, rather than a marketer, to use the story as inspiration for the creation of a unique work of art; a visualisation of the story in images rather than words.

The title of a book is just as good a guide, and a great title often goes hand-in-hand with a a great cover, which I hypothesise goes hand in hand with a great book.  How could you not buy Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (Torday), The Man Who Was Thursday (Chesterton), A Confederacy of Dunces (Toole), Tuesdays with Morrie (Albom), The Devil and Miss Prym (Coelho), A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (Lewycka), The Idiot (Dostoyevsky), A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In (Magnus Mills), Legend of a Suicide (Vann), From the Mouth of the Whale (Sjón), A Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Murakmi).  A real mix of genres, themes and eras, but all spine-tingling great books.

In fact the inspiration for the name of this blog is my favourite book title of all time, But Soft: We Are Observed by Hilaire Belloc. In five simple words it conveys so many layers of meaning, even if, by today’s standards, the phrasing is a little anachronistic (it was written in 1928). It’s almost atmospheric; I can’t say it without whispering it: imagining myself in a dark room of a quiet house, my pulse starting to race in the realisation I may have been discovered. And when was the last time you saw punctuation in the title of a book? The only other one I have on my bookshelf is They Shoot Horses Don’t They? by Horace McCoy.  The use of the colon shows just how powerful grammatical devices can be.  It forces the reader to think about the title, to look ahead, wondering why we have to be careful or quiet, who “we” is and who has observed us. It lays down a challenge to a prospective reader – I dare you to not pick me up and start reading. I love it.

So have a think about how you buy books and next time you’re in a book shop, or more likely, scanning Book Depository or Amazon, don’t fight your intuition, be superficial and let the cover or the title choose you.