The people from the CCGW are here to see you
goodwriting
In response to
my
posting on Safire, Bellow, and which
vs. that, Richard
Hershberger has written with a little rant on the idea (espoused by
Safire, among many others) that only good writers, with good reasons,
have the freedom to violate the "rules" of grammar that bind all the
rest of us. How does someone like Bellow achieve this happy
state, he asks.
Now the truth can be told. Through moles I have planted at
PEN (a "worldwide
association of writers" pledged to "fight for freedom of expression"
through its 141 centers around the world), I have discovered a dark
side of the organization, the misleadlingly blandly named Committee for
the Certification of Good Writing (CCGW), which enforces the separation
of the few who are truly free from the many who are enslaved to the
rules of grammar.
But first, Hershberger's heartfelt questions:
I am always amused by the admonishment
that we should not model our writing off the best writers. Apparently
the rest of us are only permitted to strive for mediocrity. And
how, I wonder, did someone like Bellow achieve this happy state of
freedom from arbitrary rules? Was he a great writer from the
first time he put pen to paper, or did he become great at some point in
his career? If the latter, did he formerly carefully observe the
arbitrary rules? If not, the surely his writing was substandard,
not even rising to the level of mediocrity the rest of us strive
for. How then did such a poor writer achieve greatness? And
does his earlier writing benefit retroactively from his greatness
dispensation? If he did formerly observe the rules, when did he
start not observing them? How did he know he was now great enough
to do this? What is the notification process in these matters?
All of this, it turns out, is managed by the CCGW, through operatives
more shadowy even than those of the
MacArthur
Foundation. (My moles suggest that once MacArthur figures out
how to plug its security leaks, the two organizations will merge.
It's a natural pairing.) These operatives scan through trillions
of words of text, of all sorts, every month, to find those that score
high on each of two measures: the Writing Excellence, or WE score, a
measure of creative thought and rhetorical excellence; and the
Grammatical Purity, or GP score, a measure of adherence to the rules
put forward in in-house style manuals, lists of dos and don'ts in
grammar, and secondary school textbooks.
The vastness of this enterprise is incredible. The eyes of the
CCGW see (and judge) all: elementary school essays and stories, Post-It
notes, e-mail, zines, little poetry magazines, college writing samples,
doctoral dissertations, porn stories, television and movie scripts,
assembly instructions, technical manuals, pulp fiction, serious novels,
political blogs, biographies, livejournals, letters to politicians,
interoffice memos, tabloid newspapers, and of course
The Guardian,
The Economist,
The New York Times,
The New Yorker and their
counterparts in other languages. And much much more. There
is no hiding from the CCGW. You can toe the line in your articles
in
Harper's, but if you split
infinitives or use restrictive
which
in newsgroups, your GP score is going to take a nosedive. Your
submissions to
Poetry
magazine might be models of grace and clarity, but if your letters to
your agent are muddy and have clunky transitions, it's bad news for
your WE score. This is a harsh world, folks, and only a very few
float to the top.
Those who do are tapped for the Good Writer Certificate, which is not
an actual piece of paper with things written on it (that could fall
into the wrong hands, you know), but an oral oath, administered in a
most solemn private ceremony by two members of the CCGW. The
lucky writer is granted lifetime freedom from the rules, but must not
refer in any way to the certificate, on pain of having both hands
amputated and the larynx ripped out. (One of my moles had to
write notes to me with a pencil held between her teeth, and the other
communicated by blinking his eyes in Morse code.)
Saul Bellow apparently showed extraordinary promise early in life, and
was tapped while still in high school. As he tells it (without
reference to the certificate, of course):
At school, we, the sons and daughters
of European immigrants, were taught to write grammatically.
Knowing the rules filled you with pride. I deeply felt the
constraints of "correct" English. It wasn't always easy, but we
kept at it conscientiously, and in my twenties I published two decently
written books.
(" "I Got a Scheme!": The words of Saul Bellow", The New Yorker, 4/25/05, p. 76)
The man was Free at 17, and then blazed on, writing according to what
sounded right to him. Lucky bastard. Well, he put in his
time.
Now: the dark side of the dark side. What happens to those who
are high on WE but low on GP? Those who risk writing well while
breaking the rules without permission?
Again, you are visited by two CCGW operatives. They are dressed
all in black, including black ski masks that reveal only their dark,
steely eyes. (Note the genre-appropriate "steely". I know
how to sling this stuff.) They explain, in expressionless voices,
what awaits those who exhibit "prematurely free grammar": the retracted
royalty checks, the canceled book tours, the devastating reviews by
famous people writing in prominent places, the accusations that you
have been molesting children of your own sex, and on and on.
Their weapons are many, all fearsome.
Reader, I know this. They came to me. I took their words to
heart.
I vowed to cut my WE score in half, so as to stay clear of the CCGW's
notice. I stuck to awkwardly technical academic writing, hastily
scribbled postings to newsgroups, mailing lists, and blogs, poetry only
my friends would publish, and fiction that only my friends would even
read. This has served me well for a lifetime of writing. I
have managed to make a decent living while flouting the rules of
grammar, without being ground to dust under the heel of the CCGW.
Learn from my story. It's Bellow's way, or mine.
[Awkward academic that I am, I can't resist an actual observation about
grammar and usage proscriptions. Rodney Huddleston noted in
e-mail to me yesterday that "as far as I'm aware, prescriptivists don't
actually say
which in
restrictives is incorrect: it is, rather, a matter of
that being
(much) preferable." This is in fact true of what I think of as
the "high end" of the modern advice literature on grammar and usage,
from H. W. Fowler through Bryan Garner; they warn you about possible
problems (not always realistically, I must add), rather than issuing
blanket prohibitions. Meanwhile, the low end -- the in-house
style manuals, lists of dos and don'ts for writers, and secondary
school textbooks that I mentioned above -- tends strongly towards Just
Saying No. The idea seems to be that it's easier for people if
they don't have to use their judgment, but can rely on simple, clear
rules. Oh, this is where we came in.]
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at May 7, 2005 07:54 PM