Category Archives: pedagogy

How to write in your books (and other texts), part 2.

This morning’s Washington Post devotes an entire page to a marked-up transcript of a recorded conversation featuring Bob Woodward, President Trump, and Kellyanne Conway. Reporter Aaron Blake models critical reading: noting key passages and comparing them both to each other and other information he knows.

Conway: I said you tried talking to everybody? What about when you interviewed, like, other people? They all said yes? That they’d try? BW: Yeah, well, about six or seven people. I tried. And I couldn’t have — you and I spent a whole lunch on it, Kellyanne. And I said, I want to cover the substantive issues in foreign policy and domestic policy. And you said you would get back to me. Nothing. Conway: Yeah. So, I did. I presented it to the people here who make those decisions, but . .. BW: Who are the people? Conway: But anyway, I’ll give you back to the president. And I’m glad to hear that you tried through seven or eight different people. That’s good. You should tell him all the names. [Laughs] Thank you. Trump: But you never called for me. It would’ve been nice, Bob, if you called for me, in my office. I mean, I have a secretary. I have two, three secretaries. If you would’ve called directly — a lot of people are afraid . . . Raj, I hardly have . . . I don’t speak to Raj."

In a particularly good section, Blake examines both internal tensions (Conway’s refusal to answer who denied Woodward’s request for an interview with Trump) and external tensions (Raj Shah’s position as principal deputy press secretary vs. Trump’s statement that “I don’t speak to Raj.”).

Note how Blake chooses a verb that signals the significance of Trump’s statement: “Trump admits Shah is doing that without talking to him.”

Also note how earlier in the transcript, Conway shifts to the passive voice to obscure responsibility: “I put in the request. But you know, they — it was rejected.” Woodward asks, “Who are the people?” in a failed effort to pierce the fog.

[Aaron Blake, “Transcript: Phone Call between President Trump and Journalist Bob Woodward,” Washington Post, September 5, 2018.]

Meanwhile, on Twitter, Bill Hayes has posted several photographs of books annotated by the late Oliver Sacks. Sacks not only flagged key passages; he also recorded his own reactions, turning his reading into an active conversation with the author.

See also, How to write in your books.

Selingo: Employers want college graduates who can write

Jeffrey J. Selingo, “Why Can’t College Graduates Write Coherent Prose?,” Washington Post: Grade Point, August 11, 2017:

Extensive writing is rarely assigned in many college courses because it’s labor-intensive, raising the workload for students and professors. Students don’t understand why they need to write five-page papers, let alone 20 pages, given that many of them won’t write much more than PowerPoint slides, emails, or one-page memos once in the workplace.

But training for any activity in life requires a level of practice that usually exceeds the tasks we will need to handle later on. This time spent on a task is sometimes called the 10,000 hours theory — that it takes roughly that amount of practice to achieve mastery in any field. Not every college graduate needs to be a novelist, but if college students become competent writers who draft clear prose, then they’ll also be able to compose anything on the job, from PowerPoint slides to reports.

Textbook Writers Use Passive Voice to Exonerate Enslavers

Ellen Bresler Rockmore, “How Texas Teaches History,” The New York Times, October 21, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/opinion/how-texas-teaches-history.html.

In the excerpts published by Jezebel, the Texas textbooks employ all the principles of good, strong, clear writing when talking about the “upside” of slavery. But when writing about the brutality of slavery, the writers use all the tricks of obfuscation. You can see all this at play in the following passage from a textbook, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, called Texas United States History:

Some slaves reported that their masters treated them kindly. To protect their investment, some slaveholders provided adequate food and clothing for their slaves. However, severe treatment was very common. Whippings, brandings, and even worse torture were all part of American slavery.

Notice how in the first two sentences, the “slavery wasn’t that bad” sentences, the main subject of each clause is a person: slaves, masters, slaveholders. What those people, especially the slave owners, are doing is clear: They are treating their slaves kindly; they are providing adequate food and clothing. But after those two sentences there is a change, not just in the writers’ outlook on slavery but also in their sentence construction. There are no people in the last two sentences, only nouns. Yes, there is severe treatment, whippings, brandings and torture. And yes, those are all bad things. But where are the slave owners who were actually doing the whipping and branding and torturing? And where are the slaves who were whipped, branded and tortured? They are nowhere to be found in the sentence.

When Police Shoot Civilians, the Passive Voice Is Used

Radley Balko offers examples of the way police departments avoid active verbs, the active voice, and human subjects of sentences “to publicly deflect responsibility for police shootings.”

  • “A deputy-involved shooting occurred.”
  • “The innocent McKay family was inadvertently affected by this enforcement operation.”
  • “The deputy’s gun fired one shot, missing the dog and hitting the child.”

Balko notes that police departments have no trouble writing clearly when they want to assign blame to a suspect: “The suspect produced a semi-automatic handgun and fired numerous times striking the victim in the torso.”

[Balko, Radley. “The Curious Grammar of Police Shootings.” Washington Post, 14 July 2014.]

Bad Writing Kills People

Gretchen Morgenson, “A Vow to End Hollow Nods and Salutes” The New York Times, June 7, 2014:

Another disturbing aspect of the culture at G.M. was the “formal training” the company gave to employees writing about safety issues. A 2008 presentation, for example, warned employees to write “smart.”

What did writing smart mean? Words such as “problem” and “defect” were banned. Employees should instead use softer words — “issue,” “condition” or “matter.” Rather than write about a “defect,” employees should note that the car “does not perform to design.”

Sometimes entire sentences were forbidden, according to the report. “Dangerous … almost caused accident,” was off limits, for example, as was, “This is a safety and security issue. …” Finally, employees were advised not to use phrases such as “tomblike” and “rolling sarcophagus.”

This manipulation of language reminded me of George Orwell’s incisive 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language.” Although the focus of his essay is the bankrupt verbiage favored by politicians, Orwell could just as easily have been describing corporate-speak at G.M.