In a recent NYT Op-Ed entitled "Devoid of Content", Stanley Fish argued that "Content is a lure and a delusion, and it should be banished from the [freshman writing] classroom". According to Professor Fish, "Form is the way." If this diagnosis and prescription puzzle you, you should try reading Eric Korn's review in TLS of Neil Belton's novel Schrödinger in Dublin. Consider, for example, the first sentence of the second paragraph:
Bold in speculation, in the problems of everyday life, and especially in political and sexual matters, Schrödinger was muddled, cowardly and self-deluding.
The content is clear, though I had to read the sentence twice to get it. Korn is making a contrast between Schrödinger's style in science, which was clear and bold, and his style in everyday life, which was muddled and cowardly. The syntactic form, however, leads us naturally to a completely different reading, where the domain of Schrödinger's boldness is a conjunction of three prepositional phrases, spanning life, politics and sex as well as the world of the mind. We can use parentheses to sketch the syntax of this reading:
( Bold ( in speculation in the problems of everyday life and especially in political and sexual matters ) ) ( Shrödinger was ( muddled cowardly and self-deluding ) )
On this analysis, "bold in speculation ... and especially in political and sexual matters" is a predicative adjunct modifying the subject of the main clause, which is "Schrödinger". This is a simple and elegant structure, but it makes no sense at all in the context of the Korn's review. To get the intended meaning, we have to assume that the second and third prepositional phrases don't belong to the initial adjective "bold", but instead have been fronted from the conjunction of adjectives at the end of the main clause, "muddled, cowardly and self-deluding".
You can see the intended pattern more simply if we dispense with the conjunctions:
A. Clear in content, Korn's sentence is muddled in form. →
B. Clear in content, in form, Korn's sentence is muddled.
Korn's sentence uses the structure of Version B, which is awkward but perfectly grammatical. I looked around a bit for an admirable (as opposed to merely grammatical) sentence of this structure, and failed. Perhaps some reader will be able to do better. In any case, Korn means his sentence to be construed according to the schema below:
( Bold ( in speculation )
)
( ( in the problems of everyday life
and especially in political and sexual matters
)
( Shrödinger was ( muddled
cowardly
and self-deluding
)
)
)
However, with the added conjunctions, the sentence transcends awkwardness and approaches incoherence. If we replace the content words by their formal (syntactic) categories, we have
ADJECTIVE in X, in Y, and especially in Z, PROPER_NOUN was ADJECTIVE, ADJECTIVE and ADJECTIVE.
No normal reader of English can process this sequence without being tempted to group (in X, in Y, and especially in Z) as a unit, and thereby being led down a formal garden path.
Eric Korn is an accomplished and insightful writer. We can see this from the content of this TLS review, and from the many other pieces by him available on line. His insights are complex and nuanced, and so is his writing. How did he go so far wrong in this sentence?
It's all too easy. Most writers naturally think in terms of the structure of their content, not the structure of their sentences. And content also has form -- see this earlier Language Log post for some discussion. Furthermore, speech has its own structure, independent of discourse structure and sentence structure -- think about the phrase-sized groupings you can hear in skilled doubletalk. In Korn's unfortunate sentence, where the ambiguities are structural, a skilled speaker could easily signal the desired analysis by differences in timing, pitch contour and voice quality.
The writer starts with a meaning plainly in mind, and hears it rendered in inner speech. If the syntax is not congruent with the structures of meaning and sound, well, two out of three ain't bad. The reader, however, faces worse odds. In reading, the meaning is the end of the process, not the beginning, and there is no prosody on the page. If the sequence of written words falls naturally into a syntactic pattern that clashes with the intended meaning, reading goes wrong.
This is how I interpret the view that "content is a lure and a delusion". In fact, the goal is congruence of form and content. For today's freshman composition students, however, just as for Eric Korn and all the rest of us, content too easily displaces form, if formal analysis is never taught or learned.
In the olden days, students learned to harmonize form and content by being drilled in the explicit construal of form-meaning relationships, via the trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric. It helped that this explicit analysis was done in a new language, usually Latin, where the content did not come easily to mind independent of the process of construal.
I'm not sure that requiring composition students to invent a new language is the best route to a modern trivium. Apparently it works well for Professor Fish, a charismatic teacher who may succeed where others would fail. But in any case, something needs to be done.
Posted by Mark Liberman at June 4, 2005 12:54 PM