Remember the fabulous 1970s? The decade of Watergate, recession, gas lines, defeat in Vietnam, unemployment, inflation, and a failed Iranian hostage rescue? Add to that the advent of “whole language” theory in education. Whoever came up with that idea needs a one-way ticket to Svalbard. Check the map. It’s not Las Vegas. Mention “whole language” to my wife, a 40-year veteran of teaching in Catholic schools, and she’ll laugh you out of the room.
Whole language theory held that learning to read through meaning and context was superior to traditional classroom methods. Also more “authentic.” Teaching the young should thus reflect this. Children, it claimed, would naturally absorb sound-letter relationships through mere exposure to the printed word. Instruction in phonics – learning the relationship between sounds and the letter combinations that represent them – was downgraded, especially in public education. So too was grammar. The rules of grammar were seen as artificial and deadening.
Consider the results.
As early as the mid-1980s, national reading skills had clearly declined. Consequences followed. Christopher Lasch, the distinguished author and University of Rochester professor, felt forced to publish Plain Style, a manual to fix his elite students’ inept writing.
Today, more than half of American adults read at less than a sixth-grade level. Twenty-seven percent read no books annually. Twenty-one percent are functionally illiterate. Nearly a third of graduating high school seniors read below the basic proficiency level. Nineteen percent can barely read at all.
Predictably, student reasoning skills have likewise declined. Whole language theory is far from the only factor that fed these problems. But it helped set them in motion. Modern digital technologies, heavily image-driven, have simply compounded them.
Early in Plain Style, Lasch notes that
[Today] even those who can write a passable sentence. . .often find it beyond their power to arrange sentences so that one follows another in logical order. To construct a coherent paragraph, let alone a coherent essay, dissertation or monograph, exceeds their command of language. . . .Every point [in a text should lead] logically to the next, and every paragraph, every sentence even, adds something to the last, carrying the argument firmly forward to a conclusion that seems both effortless and irresistible because it has been so carefully prepared.
Bad writing suggests confused and lazy thinking. We fix, or at least improve, our reasoning skills by reading – books of substance, lots of them, varied and good. Screens have their uses (like sharing these words), but they fatigue the eye and brain. Books are tactile and silent; the print is still and permanent; the imagination thereby gets fed. Books demand focus. The best books also reward it, because in the process, they teach the fertile use of words and ideas.
No single model of good writing exists. It can’t. Histories, biographies, religious works, and fiction each need unique things from an author. Canyons of style separate Hemingway’s short story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” from Tolkien’s “Leaf by Niggle;” Graham Greene’s “The Hint of an Explanation” from Terry Southern’s “The Road Out of Axotle.”
All are little jewels of talent. Each has the stamp of the author’s personality. But every good writer first grasps the power of words, and then masters the rules of grammar before violating them for best effect.
So what constitutes “bad” writing? George Orwell was no friend of the Catholic Church, but he wrote a supremely useful essay – Politics and the English Language – for anyone who seeks to think clearly and write well. His main targets were the calculated lying and evasion that mark so much of modern politics. But the value of his essay goes well beyond politics.
Vague, insincere, lazy, and confused language inevitably corrupts thought. A mass of complicated words, he wrote, can “[fall] upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up the details” of the truth.
Orwell had a special distaste for the passive voice (as inherently weak); needless adverbs and adjectives; the clutter of compound words and sentences; turgid paragraphs; complex clauses; inflated style; and a reliance on pretentious, Latin- and Greek-based multisyllabic words rather than simple Anglo-Saxon clarity. All of these language elements do have their place, but bad writing recklessly overuses them.
The point of words is the accurate, transparent transmission of ideas, experiences, emotions, and facts that together express truth. For Orwell, a boogeyman label like “fascist” now means nothing more than “undesirable” to those who employ it. The writer who uses stale metaphors or empty phrases like “the fascist octopus has sung its swan song” has begun “turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved.”
Put simply, the deceitful or incompetent writer turns “instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
But why does any of the above matter? In his essay “The Death of Words,” C. S. Lewis wrote that “when, however reverently, you have killed a word, you have also. . .blotted from the human mind the thing that word originally stood for. Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.”
For Lewis, the word “Christian” today is too often the victim of attempted verbicide. It’s attacked again and again with both derision and faux approval. But it’s meaning is resilient and specific; ever fresh and demanding. It has power and beauty. It does not fear contempt. It has no use for nominal allegiance or polite affirmation.
Here’s the point. In Matthew 5:37, Jesus says, “Let what you say be simply yes or no.” The Epistle of James (5:12) repeats the message. Yet in neither case does Scripture encourage silence. Just the opposite: Jesus commands us to “make disciples of all nations.” (Mt 28:19) The Christian task is to change the world with the witness of our lives. We do that with the honesty, clarity, persistence, and zeal of our words and actions.
God is in charge. But the work belongs to us.
