I received a nugget of constructive criticism from a dear friend last night regarding my writing. They told me my penchant for using words like penchant was a problem. I was told I needed to recognize the vocabulary and attention span limitations of the average reader of the English language and adjust my vocabulary usage and word choices accordingly.
My first response to this was to bristle indignantly. Mentally I thought, "I have a vocabulary and I'm not afraid to use it." I also thought, "If you don't understand the word, get a dictionary." This was followed by much more self-righteous posturing and vainglorious moon howling on the subject entirely within the confines of my cranium.
Truthfully, I recoil from this piece of critique, for its not the first time its been imparted, like a vampire from a cross. In part this is due to my love for the English language and all its words. I love words like menagerie, fecund, and penchant. At least to me, they speak louder and more clearly than other comparable words like cage, fertile , and choice. The latter words seem flat, small, and bereft of meaning.
Consider these two sentences...
Bob's fertile imagination isolated him in a cage of his own making limiting his choices.
or
Bob's fecund imagination was a menagerie of isolation that limited him due to his penchant for opting for it.
The second sentence with its different word choices and slightly different structure speaks more clearly and doesn't require two or more sentences to reach the same content and depth of meaning.
On some level though I understand the thrust of the critique. There are some author's whose works are unreachable for the average reader today. Even I struggle reading Hawthorne, Dickens, and Shakespeare at times. The works of these three author's are giant achievements in literature. For most readers though, their encounters with these works are far from consensual, which leaves a more bitter aftertaste than would otherwise be the case. The experience coloring their future reading for pleasure options to their own detriment.
I think it takes the average reader being confronted with a form of writing that invites them, challenges them to seek something better. I think it takes the reader confronting something that they want to consume, but requires significant improvement in their reading skills and vocabulary to master for things to change. I feel this way, because it happened to me. I encountered several authors whose works were beyond my ability to grasp, but in reading them I wanted to go where the writer already was. This happened for me with Tolkien, and CS Lewis.
Another example that was formative for me was William F Buckley. He was one of my favorite personalities that lived during my lifetime. He was part philosopher, part linguist, part author, and part political theorist. Some laud him as the father of modern conservative thought. In truth for me, I see him as a man out of time. He was a brilliant intellect with full and complete mastery of the English language. Truly, a renaissance man in a modern context if ever there was one.
I loved reading his essays. Though I confess needing to have a dictionary on my lap to unlock a large portion of what he had to say. I savored the experience. I relished it. I consumed his work with reckless abandon. I saw decoding Buckley to be a challenge. Somehow deciphering him became a mission for me. I can only claim to being partially successful. In the age before VCRs and DVRs when he was on television, his rapid fire delivery of truth wrapped in a language that was only partially common parlance, I missed a lot. It was a sensationally delicious experience nonetheless.
This is what I see as the challenge to the modern linguist and writer. The goal is to challenge the average reader away from essays written at a fourth grade level with a length timed to be read in the time it takes for an average bowel evacuation. There are those that contend this challenge is too lofty. They claim that no amount of perspicacity can reach this perch.
I fear they are correct. I fear the gulf to be too wide to bridge. I fear the glitzy garbage the average reader consumes is too attractive to draw them away. The toxic concoction of fetid pabulum too sweet for them to want the challenge of reaching for a more challenging form of our language and literature.
The unlikeliness however of success does not mean we should not try. Most tasks seem insurmountable at the outset. Who would have thought a rag tag band of militia that were poorly equipped, poorly trained, and lacking all discipline could have defeated the greatest land army of its time in the British? Who would have thought the undefeated Emperor of France in Napoleon could have been crushed and driven into exile? Who would have thought the Soviet Empire possible of collapse and subsequently Germany reunified?
Some would say I am engaging in a bit of hyperbole by using those examples. I however do not. I see the task ahead as nothing short of a titanic struggle to rescue the core of the linguistic heritage that has been graciously bequeathed to us by countless proceeding generations. It is an amazing gift we have been given. The price of amazing gifts is an ennobling sense of responsibility and accountability. It requires no less than surpassing conservatorship from us all.
It takes us all to seek better. We need to seek better from what we read and what we write. We need to build a bridge across the gulf that separates us from where we are and where we should be, and where inexorably we should be drawn. So let us begin.
My first response to this was to bristle indignantly. Mentally I thought, "I have a vocabulary and I'm not afraid to use it." I also thought, "If you don't understand the word, get a dictionary." This was followed by much more self-righteous posturing and vainglorious moon howling on the subject entirely within the confines of my cranium.
Truthfully, I recoil from this piece of critique, for its not the first time its been imparted, like a vampire from a cross. In part this is due to my love for the English language and all its words. I love words like menagerie, fecund, and penchant. At least to me, they speak louder and more clearly than other comparable words like cage, fertile , and choice. The latter words seem flat, small, and bereft of meaning.
Consider these two sentences...
Bob's fertile imagination isolated him in a cage of his own making limiting his choices.
or
Bob's fecund imagination was a menagerie of isolation that limited him due to his penchant for opting for it.
The second sentence with its different word choices and slightly different structure speaks more clearly and doesn't require two or more sentences to reach the same content and depth of meaning.
On some level though I understand the thrust of the critique. There are some author's whose works are unreachable for the average reader today. Even I struggle reading Hawthorne, Dickens, and Shakespeare at times. The works of these three author's are giant achievements in literature. For most readers though, their encounters with these works are far from consensual, which leaves a more bitter aftertaste than would otherwise be the case. The experience coloring their future reading for pleasure options to their own detriment.
I think it takes the average reader being confronted with a form of writing that invites them, challenges them to seek something better. I think it takes the reader confronting something that they want to consume, but requires significant improvement in their reading skills and vocabulary to master for things to change. I feel this way, because it happened to me. I encountered several authors whose works were beyond my ability to grasp, but in reading them I wanted to go where the writer already was. This happened for me with Tolkien, and CS Lewis.
Another example that was formative for me was William F Buckley. He was one of my favorite personalities that lived during my lifetime. He was part philosopher, part linguist, part author, and part political theorist. Some laud him as the father of modern conservative thought. In truth for me, I see him as a man out of time. He was a brilliant intellect with full and complete mastery of the English language. Truly, a renaissance man in a modern context if ever there was one.
I loved reading his essays. Though I confess needing to have a dictionary on my lap to unlock a large portion of what he had to say. I savored the experience. I relished it. I consumed his work with reckless abandon. I saw decoding Buckley to be a challenge. Somehow deciphering him became a mission for me. I can only claim to being partially successful. In the age before VCRs and DVRs when he was on television, his rapid fire delivery of truth wrapped in a language that was only partially common parlance, I missed a lot. It was a sensationally delicious experience nonetheless.
This is what I see as the challenge to the modern linguist and writer. The goal is to challenge the average reader away from essays written at a fourth grade level with a length timed to be read in the time it takes for an average bowel evacuation. There are those that contend this challenge is too lofty. They claim that no amount of perspicacity can reach this perch.
I fear they are correct. I fear the gulf to be too wide to bridge. I fear the glitzy garbage the average reader consumes is too attractive to draw them away. The toxic concoction of fetid pabulum too sweet for them to want the challenge of reaching for a more challenging form of our language and literature.
The unlikeliness however of success does not mean we should not try. Most tasks seem insurmountable at the outset. Who would have thought a rag tag band of militia that were poorly equipped, poorly trained, and lacking all discipline could have defeated the greatest land army of its time in the British? Who would have thought the undefeated Emperor of France in Napoleon could have been crushed and driven into exile? Who would have thought the Soviet Empire possible of collapse and subsequently Germany reunified?
Some would say I am engaging in a bit of hyperbole by using those examples. I however do not. I see the task ahead as nothing short of a titanic struggle to rescue the core of the linguistic heritage that has been graciously bequeathed to us by countless proceeding generations. It is an amazing gift we have been given. The price of amazing gifts is an ennobling sense of responsibility and accountability. It requires no less than surpassing conservatorship from us all.
It takes us all to seek better. We need to seek better from what we read and what we write. We need to build a bridge across the gulf that separates us from where we are and where we should be, and where inexorably we should be drawn. So let us begin.
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