A plea for real writing
A plea for real writing
A plea for real writing
Like some clattering old train approaching from a distant horizon, the examination season pulls into town this week. Somewhere near the front is English Lit and then, a bit further back (after half term, in fact), it’s English.
Yep: another exam season is upon us. And whilst people like me - grizzled veterans of nearly thirty years’ teaching English - have seen them come and go, we understand that for most students stress levels are high. Exams matter.
Once again, I’ve been running some extra sessions with students who are aspiring for an A* grade in English. I’m not doing anything about set texts or the fat wad of poems they need to know. In my experience, lots of time is already spent on these in lessons.
Instead, I tend to focus on the core Englishy bits - the skills needed in reading and responding to non-fiction texts and, in particular, in being able to write well. (Materials from my revision sessions this year and the past are on my website).
The prized A* is sometimes whispered about in almost mystical terms, as something to aspire to but which can’t quite be described in anything other than opaque terms like ‘sophisticated’, ‘assured’ and ‘delight’.
Examination boards (or at least AQA) reinforce the ethereal quality of the A* English grade by posting grade criteria for A but not for A*:
Candidates’ writing shows confident, assured control of a range of forms and styles appropriate to task and purpose. Texts engage and hold the reader’s interest through logical argument, persuasive force or creative delight. Linguistic and structural features are used skilfully to sequence texts and achieve coherence. A wide range of accurate sentence structures ensures clarity; choices of vocabulary, punctuation and spelling are ambitious, imaginative and correct.
The implication, presumably, is you have to do more of this or do it really really really well if you are to snatch that elusive and much sought-after trophy of English excellence, the A*.
What I notice is that too many students seem to think that A* writing means using bigger words and longer sentences, that somehow complicatedness equals quality.
A few years back a student wrote a descriptive essay for me that began something like this:
The golden orb beat down from amid the azure wilderness.
When I asked her what she meant, she rolled her eyes at my lack of understanding and said: ‘The sun was shining’.
I see the same tendency to overwrite in the early pieces of descriptive writing students complete for me each year as practice pieces. Sentences like these were written in response to the question ‘Describe a time you felt afraid’:
‘Trepidation encapsulates my thoughts’ (rather than, say, ‘I felt terrified’)
‘Fear, terror and a plethora of adrenaline etched itself across my ten year old face‘
‘The musty, slightly fetid air clung like a chain-mail cob-web, interlacing its enchanting tendrils, weaving its magic, until it shrouded the inner tent.’
So I’d like to make a plea for ‘real writing’ rather than the kind of tangled, labyrinthine descriptions that would only ever appear in novels and autobiographies that no one would ever want to read.
After all, we know that the tasks that are set in English exams are frequently banal and laughably inauthentic. Here’s an example. This week we practised one from a past paper which gave this task:
Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper describing a favourite place you know and explaining why others would like it.
I can’t imagine any local newspaper requesting or publishing a letter on a subject like this. It’s the phoney stuff of test questions, like those Maths problems in which two trains are heading towards each other at different speeds.
These questions are a figment of the mechanistic mind of an examiner who presumably needs students to show that they can describe and explain.
Thus we get a writing task that bears little relation to the kind of writing most of us do in the real world.
Let’s accept that. But it doesn’t mean that our written style needs to be similarly bizarre.
So here are my thoughts on what really good ‘real’ writing does, some of the essential ingredients in an assured and effective style:
1 Real writing grabs our attention from the outset.
The best writers often surprise us. They may deliberately confuse us. They tantalise us. That may mean that instead of using a statement they use a question:
What was I doing here?
Or the may use a pronoun (‘it’ / ‘they’) that makes us wonder what or who is being described:
This was it. This was definitely the place they had told me about.
Or they may begin with a fragment of dialogue:
‘Don’t go in there,’ whispered a voice behind me: ‘you have no idea what you’ll find’.
What these three examples have in common is that they grab our attention without resorting to big words for the sake of using big words. They exude a kind of confidence, a voice, a self-belief in what they are saying.
2 Real writing is sensuous and precise.
‘Sensuous’ means the writer deploys the senses to help us see, hear, smell, feel and taste what is being described. Writing will features colours and textures and metaphors to bring the subject alive:
The surface of the pond was a dark and uninviting green. The water seemed to be clogged with sinister weeds. Did they really expect me to swim in here? I reminded myself that this was Kent in July: there really couldn’t be any lurking crocodiles underneath, could there?
‘Precise’ means more than just accurate. If you are aiming for A*, we must assume that you will spell and use punctuation with a very high level of accuracy. That’s taken as read.
Precision means more than that, though: it means choosing just the right word for the context. In the example above I wrote:
The water seemed to be clogged with sinister weeds.
I could have written:
The water was full of nasty weeds.
In my opinion, the phrase ‘seemed to be’ makes it more mysterious, more tentative. It hints at the narrator’s uncertainty. The word ‘clogged’ is more precise than ‘full of’: it makes the scene more visual. It has an air of being uncontrolled, dangerous, perhaps. And ‘sinister’ is much more interesting than ‘nasty’, partly because we often use sinister about people: the adjective allows me to imply that the weeds themselves have a kind of intention. In personifying them I emphasise their menace.
If all of that makes some sense - if you can follow my explanation and understand the choices that I was making as a writer, and if you have been noticing throughout how I am using words and punctuation to give precision to my explanations - then you’re someone who has A* potential.
Sensuousness and precision: they are two essential ingredients in real writing.
3 Real writing has variety
The best writing will contain short and longer sentences. It will have statements and, perhaps, questions. In some contexts it may have bullet points and summaries. It will have a rhythm that makes it interesting to read, with punctuation that assists the reader in understanding its meaning:
Swimming had never been my thing. Pools were bad enough; outdoor ponds were the stuff of my darkest nightmares. This one looked like the set of some creaky old science fiction show - say ‘Dr Who’ circa 1976. I really didn’t want to stick a toe in there, let alone go for the full scale swim that all the others were urging. They were in trunks and jumping noisily into water that looked like a kind of decomposed tapioca. I didn’t want to go in. I didn’t want to go in at all.
4 Real writers self-regulate
As they write, confident writers know of their own danger words. When they get to the word ‘it’s’ they pause in case they really mean ‘its’ (they probably tests which they need by saying ‘it is’ in their head and seeing if it makes sense). They do the same with other synonyms, such as ‘their/there/they’re’, and they will have a personal list of words that they struggle to spell accurately, pausing to make sure they get it right (words like ‘separate’, ‘necessary’, ‘skilful’).
Even the most assured writers have what I call ‘danger words’ - the vocabulary which slips into our individual mental blind-spot.
I used to struggle with ‘necessary’, but now I use a silly mnemonic (memory device): ‘never eat chips eat sausage sandwiches and raspberry yoghurt’. I spell ‘government’ by saying it aloud in my head as ‘goverN + ment’. I did a double-take when writing that last sentence when I paused to think whether to write ‘allowed’ or ‘aloud’. I know that we are all judged by our ability to spell and I aim to self-regulate, pausing at those words that I now know cause me difficulties.
Self-regulation has another aspect too: the best writers frequently reject the first word that comes into their mind. If they have already used a word (like ‘used’) they will seek / hunt down / reach for / deploy a different word.
Confident writers will consciously avoid cliches, those bits of language gummed together by someone else. So in writing about a place that scares me I will reject a phrase like ‘I felt sick in my stomach’ and perhaps write ‘a sense of sickness rose inside me’, which is more active, more vivid, and personifies the feeling. I would reject initial ideas like ‘wall of fear / blind panic / sense of unease / heart-stopping fear’ and suchlike: as far as possible I want my writing to be my writing, not someone else’s words.
That’s what I mean by self-regulation. It essentially means that you’re paying attention not only to what you say but also, endlessly and obsessively, to how you say it.
5 Real writing arises from real reading
This is my most important piece of advice. You’ll only write really well if you read really well. By ‘really well’ I mean read a lot, read voraciously. You should read obsessively and with fascination, noting how writers in different genres convey their ideas. You’ll be alert to the choice of vocabulary; you’ll notice their command of punctuation; you’ll see their tactics for grabbing and holding our interest. And in the process you’ll get ideas which could make you a better writer.
As an example - halfway through writing this blog - I sat in the sun and read a bit more of the book I’m currently enjoying - Juliet Nicolson’s The Perfect Summer. It’s an account of England in the long stifling summer of 1911. I read this paragraph describing an unexpected summer storm:
As the race-goers left the Epsom stands the sun was just visible through the veils of clouds, a shimmering ball of hot metal. Early that evening the stable lads taking the horses for a final gallop on the Downs heard a distant rumble, and as dusk began to settle there was a stupendous crash, followed by lightning which landed in flat white patches, irradiating rooms with a ‘ghastly illumination’. Hailstones the size of sovereigns began to fall, and rain hissed and whipped against the windowpanes. Forty-five cars travelling back to London had to be abandoned between Epsom and Sutton. Four horses were killed by lightning that evening and seventeen people died, including a stable lad in a van at the course, two policemen, and Mrs Hester, a gravedigger’s wife, who had slipped out to the village churchyard to take her husband a cup of tea as he worked.
That, I’d say, is real writing - vivid, precise, sensuous, varied, self-assured and rich in detail. Yes, that’s definitely real writing.
This time last year I made some suggestions of what would-be A* students might read to prepare for the polemical /argumentative task (‘write an article ... / write a speech ...’) and those recommendations are still here.
Meanwhile that clanking old examination train gets closer.
If you’re serious about an A*, then you need to get real reading and real writing into your daily habits and, from there, into your bloodstream. It’s not difficult, but it does need some time, some practice, and a level of self-criticism, as you drive yourself to read better and write better.
The reward of an A* will certainly make it feel worth all the hard work.
My very best wishes for the forthcoming exams.
Geoff Barton
Suffolk
Sunday 12 May
13:40
Sunday, 12 May 2013