The Lapidary Craft

“I’ve worked for newspapers that have unwisely cut back on sub-editing,” writes Fraser Nelson, the editor of The Spectator, in a tribute to what the English call a sub-editor, in particular his magazine’s own sub-editor, Peter Robins. The sub-editor is the one who fixes the prose and, as Nelson puts it, “saving the writer from himself.” It’s a position we call by several names, from executive to assistant to copy editor.

The good sub-editor does what some might call “over-editing.” But there’s a reason for this care, as seen by what happens when no one does it. 

It seems to work, at first, because there is no immediate cliff-edge drop in quality. But the rot accumulates. Errors creep in that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier. Sloppy writing goes unchecked, flabby ideas go unchallenged. And even then, the newspapers don’t suffer immediate penalty – readers who have been with the same title for years put up with a lot, before giving up on it.

But when they do, the reputation for quality is hard to win back. The management respond to falling revenues with even more cuts, which send even more readers into despair. This is what I call the cycle of doom.

This is certainly true, but Nelson misses a big problem, which is that the drop in quality may actually help the magazine in the short run – and maybe in the medium run too. The problems with the writer’s argument is that the badness of a lot of badly written, or badly argued or evidenced, articles isn’t obvious on the first reading, which is all most magazine and newspaper articles will ever get.

In fact, the problems make the articles work for the magazine. The problems that good editing would have fixed — the thundering definitive-sounding conclusion that doesn’t follow from the argument, say — will make those who agree with it cheer and those who don’t snarl, and both cases make the article one that gets lots of readers and creates lots of discussion. Which is, of course, the way the value of an article is most easily measured. The problems themselves gives its critics an easy and inviting way to respond to the article, and their reaction gives its advocates an easy and inviting target, and the resulting discussion makes it look better than it is.

In the long run, Nelson says, and he’s probably right, or at least I hope he’s right,

Having good sub editors – nay, great sub editors – is essential for any publication that takes good writing seriously. And not for nostalgic reasons, but for reasons of hard-headed capitalism: money follows quality. . . . I’m not saying that there will be as many sub editors around in 50 years time. But I am saying that the newspapers and magazines who will be around in 50 years time will have bloody good sub editors.

A fourth item in the string beginning with Lapidary, Obscure, and Unusual, provided by my friend Judy Warner (no, not that Judith Warner): An article in the “Bonds” section of the Wall Street Journal titled Big Words Are Fading, But Many People Still Love Them. (And apparently now behind the paywall. Sorry.)

The writer makes the points made in the previous entries, but provides some amusing stories about the use of words apparently called “vocabulary words.” Like this story about a young man apparently not gifted with perception:

But big words — the words that others perceive to be obscure or “fancy” — have also caused him trouble. In college, he bought his girlfriend the hair-straightening iron she had been hinting about for Christmas and told her, “I thought it was perfect for you, given your fastidious nature when it comes to your appearance.”

Mr. Bonneman says she threw the gift on the couch, snapped, “Well, aren’t you smart?” and stormed out of the room. Then she broke up with him.

“She claimed it had largely been due to my constant use of big words, which made her feel stupid,” says the 28-year-old, who is chief executive of a Miami digital-design agency.

Several years later, Mr. Bonneman says, he received some advice from a colleague before an interview for an IT job. “Don’t use any words that are more than three syllables long — you don’t want the hiring manager to think you are smarter.”

Mr. Bonneman dismissed the advice and during the interview dropped “esoteric,” “penultimate,” “non sequitur,” “didactic” and “circumlocute” on the interviewer.

“Using ‘vocabulary words’ feels much more natural to me than trying to force the use of shorter words in their stead,” he says. He didn’t get the job.

I wouldn’t have thought of “fastidious” as a big word. Here’s an example of the translation one sometimes has to do when writing or speaking:

When speaking with clients, jury members and even other attorneys, Mr. Bahrawy says he limits himself to a vocabulary appropriate for someone with a fifth-grade education. He stays away from “vicissitudes” and instead refers to “the changes that occur in your life.”

Here’s something from an interview with Tom Wolfe from the January/February American Spectator, which will be of more interest to those of you interested in reporting. The headings are mine.

HOW TO FRAME A STORY

I started writing the same sort of pieces for Esquire. Its editor, Harold Hayes, wanted a piece done on Muhammad Ali, and Ali wanted to be paid for it. . . .

When I joined him on Monday, to every question I asked him, I would get an answer that I had read in the clippings beforehand. I was trying to ask him questions where he was bound to have some new material, but I couldn’t get anywhere. But I could be with him all day. So the whole story ended up being about the people he ran into and the incidents that would come up. . . .

Most of his hangers-on had nothing to do with boxing. One night we went to a nightclub. There must have been a dozen people at a big table and everybody was ordering drinks and every kind of food. When the waiter brought the desserts, Ali got up and stretched, said it was a little stuffy in the restaurant, and left. I was pretty quick to get out too. That was the kind of thing that that story was full of. Ali just didn’t want to pay the bill.

WRITING THE STORY

I was very influenced by Jimmy Breslin and Gay Talese. They had been using this technique in which you turn an article into a scene and use a lot of dialogue, often dialogue that had nothing to do with the heart of the story. . . .

Breslin would do things such as cover a trial in Newark, New Jersey of some mobster. Most trials would start around 9:30. But he would get there at eight because he wanted to see the defendant coming through the door. So here is this mobster type and he had his retinue with him and they are all kind of joking around, with the defendant hitting the arm of one of his friends right below the deltoid where it hurts like hell to be hit, with the other friends saying, “he is always hitting Ralphie on the arm.” Anyway, Breslin would put all of this dialogue into the story. And then you get into the trial and the guy loses the verdict and suddenly he is not lively anymore. It was all like a scene. Breslin and Talese would go from scene to scene to scene rather than having these boring narrative interludes, with that terrible second paragraph, “Jeff was actually born in Carson City . . . .” Every time I would read stories with paragraph likes that I would think, “Oh God, we have to go through this again.”

THE NEW JOURNALISM

I began to honestly believe that this New Journalism was far more exciting in a literary sense than fiction was. And you could make that case because talented young novelists were all going to these MFA programs and being told, “write about what you know,” which is brilliant advice for your first novel but it makes them helpless on their second novel. It was Emerson who said every person in the world has a great autobiography in them if only they can remember the details that made them different from other people. But Emerson didn’t say you could write two that way.

THE WORDS YOU USE

I used to go through the dictionary looking for unusual but nontechnical words. At one time I thought the greatest word was jejune and I would throw it into every piece, because something about it appealed to me.

CONTENT V. TALENT

I started out like most young writers, thinking that great writing consists of 95 percent of your talent and 5 percent your content. But you have to write about something and pretty soon I had those figures really turned around. It was more like 75 percent content and 25 percent ability.

In his response to some thoughts on academic writing I’d sent him, my friend and former colleague at Touchstone Steven Hutchens added a note about how he writes.

Your suggestion about writing out in one sentence what you want to say is a good exercise, but the method I generally use is different, only because over the years I have found it matches the way I think: What I want to write, long or short, usually comes to me in an instant, connected with an experience or incident or idea, but in a thought that does not yet contain words.  It is a Word before words.

I write down the experience, incident, or idea as artfully as I can, and follow through to the conclusion, crafting the words to follow the supervenient idea as I write, and letting them lead me in somewhat the same way fiction writers allow their characters, once animated, to develop on their own.  Since the conclusion is contained in the original wordless idea, I will know when I come to it and am finished writing the piece.  Then I will go back to fill and polish, smoothing over rough spots, all flaws the result of pushing ahead to finish before the muse departs.

I tend to write this way myself but I can’t claim that what I want to write comes to me in an instant. I often begin with a story I’ve read or an experience or idea of my own, and know I’ve intuited something the story illustrates, but finding out what I’d intuited often takes a lot of work. And the work can frustrate and annoy me, because it’s like digging a trench through clay and rock.

Sometimes after much work I realize that I don’t actually have anything to say about the story I want to tell. Being able to tell the stories and let them carry their own meaning was one of the pleasures of writing the “While We’re At It” section of First Things, but few other places let you do this. Most publications expect you to say something.

A second item continuing the discussion in Lapidary and Obscure. Another friend, Robert Young, Donne scholar and editor of Modern Age, responded to my comments on Buckley’s use of obscure words. He said:

I am probably a bit more indulgent with unusual diction than you, because I think that there is a useful educational function in expanding the lexicon of the “average” reader and keeping words in circulation that otherwise may die.  This of course must be done with tact and moderation, and the “long” or unusual word must actually add meaning and be used correctly and with real purpose.  “Societal,” when “social” will do, seems merely pompous to me.

And then there are all those words and expressions that are simply abused by the quarter-educated.  Have you noticed, for example, how often “begs the question” is used when the writer really means “raises the question,” with no awareness of the phrase’s actual designation of an invalid argument?  The local paper here actually had a passage in the sports section about the trade of a professional athlete that “begs the rhetorical question . . . !”

Buckley’s “lapidary,” on the other hand —- as you point out — was exactly the right word in its context.  Very often, I think, he was also just being arch — a part of his persona — as when he deployed that appalling phrase from Voegelin, “immanentizing the eschaton.”

Once Robert had pointed it out, I saw the need to keep more complex and interesting sentences in use, as well as keeping in use words that might die otherwise. People with the gifts to do so well have to stretch the average reader. He will read writers whose insight can only be conveyed in a complicated sentence and often a bunch of them in a row. He needs to be supple enough to stretch.

That’s one of the things I tried to do in a small way in the “While We’re At It” section of First Things, by writing the occasional very long or unusually complicated sentence or putting parts of the sentence in unexpected places. I enjoyed the game and I hope the reader enjoyed it as well. The trick is knowing how far to stretch him so that he won’t react and shrink back up.

Probably my experience editing academics writing for more general readers has made me cautious. Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile, often the wrong mile for their own purposes.

A follow-up to Lapidary But Not Eristic, But Still Obscure, offering observations from my friend Matthew Boudway, an editor at Commonweal, and my responses. Matt wrote:

Thanks for this. I may not be a typical reader, but two or three unfamiliar words (short or long) don’t necessarily put me off an article. In some cases, they may even be an enticement to continue. Here, I think, is a writer who has something to teach me — about my own language if nothing else. But not all unfamiliar words are created equal. Some are just unusual near-equivalents of words we all know; it’s the showoffs who use these, and Fowler is right to condemn them.

But then there are the writers, like Patrick Leigh Fermor, who know all the words for things. Reading such an author can be hard going, since he or she keeps sending you to the dictionary, but you usually return with the sense that the trip was worthwhile, with the sense of discovery: aha! So there’s actually a word for that, often a good word, often a short one. Buckley’s sesquipedalian flourishes were nearly the opposite of this. Waugh has a small collection of favorite unusual words, most of them Latinate, that he uses again and again just because he likes the way they sound, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

I have a little more sympathy for Buckley than does Matt, though I also sometimes find his sesquipedalian flourishes (good one, Matt!) annoying. The writer ought to do what he can to keep some words in use, something like those people in England who annually walk down rights of way to make sure the legal right of public passage doesn’t lapse. And he will take pleasure in using just the right word even if that word is an unusual one. I like and use the word “lapidary” (as in the title of the website) which is the word to which the critical editor objected. There’s not another word that says quite the same thing.

Matt’s second observation:

Your Anaximander example made me think of something Louis Menand said at a conference for academic writers who wanted to learn how to write for nonacademic readers. “You have to devise a way of saying something completely obvious without making it sound as though you’re talking down to people. So, if you write a sentence in the sort of standard magazine style—say, something like ‘Charles Sanders Pierce, the nineteenth-century American philosopher . . . ‘ — that’s talking down to people because you’re assuming that they don’t have any idea who Charles Pierce was. But you don’t want to assume that. You want to make them feel they had heard of Charles Pierce and they kind of know who Charles Pierce is. So you say, ‘Like many nineteenth-century American philosophers, Charles Pierce had a Beard.’ Then they think, ‘Oh yeah, I knew he was a nineteenth-century American philosopher.’ It’s not that you’re not explaining everything; it’s that you’re explaining everything in a way that sounds by the way.”

Menand has a point. The writer who explains things always risks talking down to readers and can do very easily and entirely unwittingly. The writer should work a bit at conveying the information he has indirectly, though it’s hard to do this a lot without looking like you’re going out of your way not to talk down to them or padding your writing with unnecessary information, as in Menand’s example.

But I think his advice may also reflect the fact that when he writes for a general readership he writes for The New Yorker and its peers and that magazine’s readers know more than the average general reader. Or feel that they do. They don’t read The New Yorker to have their sophistication challenged. They feel they’ve been talked down to even when, as a matter of what they really know, they haven’t been.

But other readers, including I’m sure many readers of The New Yorker, are surprisingly humble. Seeing this after I began writing and editing was one of the insights that most surprised me. Many seem to feel that they don’t know enough or aren’t smart enough for the matters being discussed. They will try to read in the hope that they’re wrong, but they are easily convinced — by too many obscure words, for example — that they are right.

Whether this humility is always genuine or a cover for indifference or laziness I don’t know, but as far as I can from conversations it is very often genuine.

An old article of William F. Buckley’s I found while looking for something else (a title for this website, as it  happens): I am lapidary but not eristic when I use big words, published in The New York Times Book Review in 1986. He takes too long to make the point and never does actually help with the question of what unusual words a writer can use, but it may be of interest.

I would contest one claim. He’s speaking of the reader who runs into a word he doesn’t know.

That reader has the usual choices: he can ignore the word; attempt, from the context, to divine its meaning precisely or roughly . . . or he can look it up. Are these alternatives an imposition?

No, the reader has a fourth choice: he can stop reading. Readers may have changed since 1986, but I suspect they haven’t changed all that much. Now, a discouraging number of readers seem to look for signs saying “This isn’t for you” — even readers who have paid for the book or subscription and presumably want to invest their effort as well as their money. Even one unusual word or name they don’t recognize can put them off, and two or three or more will almost certainly send them to the next article or to the television.

Some readers will not be prevented from feeling this way, but you can prevent others from feeling put off by some care to define unusual words and names. For reasons I don’t understand, the slightest explanation can make such a reader feel all right, perhaps because the identification by itself signals that they are not alone in not recognizing the word or name.

A reference to “Anaximander” will put them off, but “the ancient Greek philosopher Anaximander” or “the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander” or “Anaximander, a Greek philosopher writing in the sixth century B.C.” will keep them reading. This identification doesn’t give them any real knowledge, and it may seem patronizing, but it does reassure them that the article is indeed for them.

A few quotes of use to the writer from A. G. Sertillanges’ The Intellectual Life. Sertillanges was a French Dominican, and therefore a Thomist, and clearly a wise man to boot. Though aimed mainly at philosophy and theology students, and though a little dry in places, it’s a wonderful book about intellectual work, mixing reflections on the moral and spiritual life of the intellectual with practical instructions on subjects like how to take notes and how to read well.

NECESSARY SACRIFICES (pages 121-122)

[W]e are obliged at a given moment to accept necessary sacrifices. It is a painful thing to say to oneself: by choosing one road I am turning my back on a thousand others. Everything is interesting; everything might be useful; everything attracts and charms a noble mind; but death is before us; mind and matter make their demands; willy-nilly we must submit and rest content as to the things that time and wisdom deny us, with a glance of sympathy which is another act of homage to the truth.

Do not be ashamed to know what you could only know at the cost of scattering your attention. Be humble about it, yes, for it shows our limitations; but to accept our limitations is a part of virtue and gives us a great dignity, that of the man who lives according to his law and plays his part. We are not much, but we are part of a whole and we have the honor of being a part. What we do not do, we do all the same; God does it, our brethren do it, and we are with them in the unity of love. . . .

The half-informed man is not the man who knows only the half of things, but the man who only half knows things. Know what you have resolved to know; cast a glance at the rest. Leave to God, who will look after it, what does not belong to your proper vocation. Do not be a deserter from yourself, through wanting to substitute yourself for all others.

KNOWLEDGE & VIRTUE (pages 19-20)

Truth visits those who love her, who surrender to her . . . . The true springs up in the same soil as the good: Their roots communicate. Broken from the common root and therefore less in contact with the soil, one or the other suffers; the soul grows anemic or the mind wilts. On the contrary, by feeding the mind on truth one enlightens the conscience, by fostering good one guides knowledge. By practicing the truth we know, we merit the truth that we do not know. 

INTELLECTUAL TRAINING (page 4)

The athletes of the mind, like those of the playing field, must be prepared for privations, long training, a sometimes superhuman tenacity. We must give ourselves from the heart, if truth is to give itself to us. Truth serves only its slaves.

THE DISCIPLINE OF TRUTH (page 130)

[T]here is something still more important, namely, to submit not only to the discipline of work, but to the discipline of truth. . . . Truth will not give itself to us unless we are first rid of self and resolved that it shall suffice us. The intelligence which does not submit is in a state of skepticism, and the skeptic is ill-prepared for truth. Discovery is the result of sympathy; and sympathy is the gift of self.

THE WORLD (Page xxiii)

THE IMPORTANCE OF NORMAL LIFE (pages 57-58)

[T]he solitude of the thinker does not imply neglect of his duties or forgetfulness of his needs . . . since we do not separate the intellectual from the man. . . .

[Linking your duties and needs with the intellectual life] is always possible. The time given to duty or to real need is never lost; the care bestowed on these things is part of your vocation, and would be an obstacle to it only if thought of your vocation in an abstract way, apart from Providence. . . .

You will not imagine that your work is of more importance than you, and that even an increase of intellectual possibilities should prevail over the achievement of your true self. Do what you ought and must; if your human perfection requires it, the different demands it makes will find their own balance. The good is the brother of the true: it will help its brother. To be where we ought to be, to do what we ought to do, disposes us to contemplation, and feeds it; it is leaving God for God, according to the saying of St. Bernard. . . .

On certain days it is only indirectly, by way of moral progress, that our intelligence will gain, in spite of its concessions to duty; in other circumstances it will gain of itself, indirectly.

The French version can be found on the web here, and the English translation, published by Catholic University of American Press, can be found here.