RL8 - Zissner's On Writing Well (Part 1)

Having coming out of reading The Elements of Style, reading William Zissner's On Writing Well is more spiritual pep-talk than sly reference book. While the former book has a section on using orthodox language, Zissner's manifesto on good writing hammers the idea home. He doesn't have any patience for jargon at all.

It has the power to make someone like myself look over my shoulder. Is my vocabulary stuffed to the brim with figurative cliches? Is my plentifully verbose vocabulary cluttered out? Do I just turn a noun into a verb? I have to credit this book for these new concerns.

Some of these feelings have already been mutual. For example, the concept of journalese is something that I have been aware of, though not nearly to this person's level. I recall something Ira Glass said that any creative act naturally gravitates towards mediocrity. Journalese is the word to describe that happy medium. While Zissner stresses that we need to imitate others in order to learn, his is referring to the conscious kind where we pick apart our favorite writers and incorporate some of their styles. However, journalese embodies all the cliches that we subconsciously pick up while reading journalism. It is remarkable that many journalists (myself included) secretly know how to speak this language.

Having graded essays for a living, I can safely say that students also naturally know how to write in essay-ese as well.

If there's any underlying tension in reading On Writing Well it's the understanding of colloquialisms that my generation employs into daily usage. Zissner is an old man and he's lived long enough to see our language being reinvented by people much younger than him. The generation I speak for, Gen-Y, has more of its share of lingo mostly pertaining to the online world. Much of this lingo is transforming words into other parts of speech or stretching the definitions to fit new contexts, particularly on the internet. What people my age have done to language isn't bad by any means. But we must not take it lightly, either.