Learning, he seemed to be saying, takes a multitude of forms; expect to find them in places where you least expect them to be. p10
Far too many Americans are prevented from doing useful work because they never learned to express themselves. p10
Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly–about any subject at all. p11
2. Writing Across the Curriculum
…for there’s almost to pedagogical task harder and more tiring than teaching somebody to write. p13
Another reason that it’s not what most English teachers want to do. Their real subject is literature–not how to write, but how to read: how to extract meaning from a written text. That’s what they were primarily hired to teach and what they were trained to teach. p13
Students should be learning a strong and unpretentious prose that will carry their thoughts about the world they live in. p14
Another powerful element in learning to write is motivation. Motivation is crucial to writing–students will write far more willingly if they write about subjects that interest them and that they have aptitude for. p14
Writing is learned by imitation. p15
…we eventually move beyond our models; we take what we need and then we shed those skins and become who we are supposed to become. But nobody will write well unless he gets into his ear and into his metabolism a sens of how the language works and what it can be made to do. That’s a fundamental premise of this book. p15
Another is that the essence of writing is rewriting. Very few writers say on their first try exectly what they want to say. p15
The shift–in the terminology of the trade–is from “product” to “process.” It puts the emphasis where it should have been all along: on the successive rewriting and rethinkings that mold an act of writing into the best possible form. If the process is sound, the product will take care of itself. p16
Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts. Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own. Writing enables us to find out what we know–and what we don’t know–about whatever we’re trying to learn. p16
This was the aspect of “writing across the curriculum” that excited me most of all. It was an idea based on two principles: learning to write and writing to learn. p16
As Professor Grover described how Mendeleyev juggled the elements into a coherent system, leaving blanks for elements that hadn’t been discovered but whose properties he could predict, the periodic table which had intimidated me at Deerfield took on the excitement of a puzzle abd a chase. If Mrs. Boyden had asked me to write a paper about Mendeleyev’s search for order in the elemental soup, or about the spiritual agony that Wohler caused by play God, I might have been drawn into the history and romance of the subject and lost some of my fear. Now, listening to Thomas Grover’s tales of Wohler and Mendeleyev and other chemists who journeyed into the unknown, I thought, “What an interesting subject!”–no small thought for someone with chemistry anxiety. Then I thought: Probably every subject is interesting if an avenue into it can be found that has humanity and that an ordinary person can follow. Writing was such an avenue–perhaps, in fact, the main route. p19
Gould never forgets one of nature’s oldest laws: that everybodt loves a story. p20
It’s by writing about a subject we’re trying to learn that we reason our way to what it means. Reasoning is a lost skill of the children of the TV generation, with their famously short attention span. Writing can help them get it back. p22
3. A Liberal Education
Editors are licensed to be curious. Besides, I enjoyed editing more than writing. I liked thinking of story ideas; I liked working with writers and helping them to present their writing at its strongest, and I especially liked the element of surprise: Every day an editor learns something new. p25
Meanwhile I draw on two sources of energy that I commend to anyone trying to survive in this vulnerable craft: confidence and ego. If you don’t have confidence in what you’re doing you might as well not do it. p25
Too much had been thrown at me, and I would need to throw quite a lot at the reader. It’s not enough for a nonfiction writer to just write good, clean sentences; he must organize those sentences into a coherent shape, taking the reader on a complicated trip–often with several flashbacks–without losing him or boring him. p33
One is that writing is linear and sequential. If sentence B logically follows sentence A, and if sentence C logically follows sentence B, I’ll eventually get to sentence Z. I also try to remember that the reader should be given only as much information as he needs and not one word more. p34
The trip was instant education–sufficient, at least, to enable me to tell my story to other generalists like myself. p34
After that came the hard part: wrestling my new-found education into a narrative that moved logically from A to Z. The only thing I knew at the beginning was how I wanted the article to end… p34
Only when the job was over did I enjoy it. I don’t like to write, but I take great pleasure in having written–in fhaving finally made an arragement that has a certain inevitability, like the solution to a math problem. p34
4. Writing to Learn
Fuzzy thinking turned up repeatedly as the main enemy. “Students don’t know how to be precise”… p43
As the term went on I tried to get them to use writing to focus their thoughts on specific ideas and issues. p43
I had merely learned by experience that thinking is the foundation of writing. But I had never thought about thinking as a process. How does it work? Why do some people think straighter than others? What are the factoes that prevent us from thinking clearly? Can it be taught? p45
An idea can have value in itself, but its usefulness diminishes to the extent that you can’t articulate it to someone else. p45
“I want them to go first to the literature, so that know how the experiment has been done before and what to expext in the lab and how to plan their work. Having to plan their work helps them to write it up as they go along, so that writing becomes woven through the enture class and lab experience. If they fall into a pitfall thet can explain how they got there, and that’s education. The process also enables me to see how theu mind worked. By having them describe how they arrived at a result I can comment on it, and they can make use of my comment when they go back to the experiment, There’s a feedback that isn’t possible when the teacher just grades from numerical answers. Revising helps the students to rethink.” p46
Writin is a tool that enables people in every discipline to wrestle with facts and ideas. p49
It forces us to keep asking, “Am I saying what I want to say?” Very often the answer is “No.” It’s a userful piece of information. p49
The poor paper was instantly noticeable. There wouldn’t be much in it to discuss–there’d be no place to start, or it was so unclear that we’d have to go back over it and try to figure out what it was about. p50
5. Crotchets and Convictions
I’ll generalize outrageously and state that there are two kinds of writing. One is explanatory writing: writing that transmits existing information or ideas. Call it Type A writing. The other is exploratory writing: writing that enables us to discover what we want to say. Call it Type B. They are equally valid and useful. p56
My advice to Type A writers begins with one work: Think! Ask yourself, “what do I want to say?” Then try to say it. Then ask yourself, “Have I said it?” Put yourself in the reader’s mind: Is your sentence absolutely clear to someone who knows nothing about the subject? If not, think about how to make it clear. Then rewrite it. Then think: “What do I need to say next? Will it lead logically out of what I’ve just written? Will it also lead logically to wheree I want to go?” If it will, write the sentence. Then ask yourself, “Did it do the job I wanted it to do, with no ambiguity?” If it did, think: “Now what does the reader need to know?” Keep thinking and writing and rewriting. If you force yourself to think clearly you will write clearly. It’s as simple as that. The hard part isn’t the writing; the hard part is the thinking. p56
Abiguity is noise. Redundancy is noise. Misuse of words is noise. Vagueness is noise. Jargon is noise. Pomposity is noise. Clutter is noise: all those unnecessary adjectives (“ongoing progress”), all those unneccessary adverbs (“successfully avoided”), all those uneccessary prepositions draped onto verbs (“order up”), all those unnecessary phrases (“in a very real sense”). p61
Information is your sacred product, and noise is its pollutant. Guard the message with your life. p61
Obsurity
Voice and tone
Brevity
Jargon
They are words that make the reader feel important when he uses them but that don’t really mean anything. p67
The illiteracy of the elite
Killer nouns
More important, all the nouns are working nouns: they denote objects (bread) or activities (race, battle) or attainments (riches, favor) or conditions of fate (time, chance) that we can relate to our own lives. 70
Nouns that denote concepts are the death of vigorous writing. Good writing is specific and concrete. p70
Lifesaving verbs: One way to take the mush out of concept nouns is to turn them into active verbs. Verbs are the strongest tools a writer is given, because they embody an action. Active verbs are strong than passive verbs, because they propel a sentence forward. They also enable us to picture who did what, because they require a pronoun or a noun: “I,” “we,” “she,” “you,” “boy,” “girl.” Seeing a pronoun or a noun and an active verb together, we visualize a specific event that occurred at a specific moment. Passive verbs have no such enery or precision:
Active: I saw the boys skating on the pond.
Passive: The boys were seen skating on the pond. [By whom? When? How often?]
Active verbs are a writer’s best friend. p72
Visible detail
Enjoyment
The he said: “The reader has to believe that the writer is feeling good.” p74
The sentence hit me with tremendous force, especially when he added, almost as an afterthought, “even if he isn’t.” p74
Now, thinking of that feat, I realize that audacity was only part of what Perelman was talking about. He was also talking about courage. Humor is the most perilous of writing forms, full of risk; to make a vocation of brightening the reader’s day is an act of continuing gallantry. He was also talking about energy. Energy is the divine spark in creative work. p75
6. Earth, Sea and Sky
No science writer should be “above” pointing to anything that relates his knowledge to our lives. p83
Again, it helps to look for some human link… p100
7. Art and Artists
But art is a language that has to be studied like any other language. p103
Whenever I listen to an artist or an art historian I am struck by how much they see and how much they know–and how much I don’t. p103
A cat may look like a king, as the old saying goes, but the visual message is more interesting if the onlooker also knows what a king is. p104
I especially like the sentence about the cat looking at a king. Liek a well-constructed joke, it makes its point at the end and thereby take us by surprise–always a tonic in writing. p105
Also notice how Nelson anchors his writing in specific detail. He doesn’t talk about “Cubism”; he talks about “the Cubists”–real people–abd how they broke various conventions to create the ism. p106
This is the personal connection that every reader wants to make with a writer; if we care about the writer we’ll follow him into subjects that we could have sworn we never wanted to know about. p114
Along with vigor of the style and the photographic clarity of its images–the feathery-edged projectiles and the crystal-clear fossil–a quality that I like in Szarkowski’s wrigin is confidence. This is a man with hard-won knowledge of a subject that requires an understanding of both a creative process abd a technical process, and he states his opinions boldly; there is nothing feathery-edged about them. A writer who undertakes to be a tour leader can’t afford to be bashful. We want a guide who is in command. p117
8. The Natural World
Enthusiasm…is crucial to writing well. p126
Notice how welcome it is to hear about human activity in the midst of so much scientific activity. p134
Nonfiction writing should always have a point: It should leave the reader with a set of facts, or an idea, or a point of view, that he didn’t have before he started reading. Writers may write for any number of good person reasons–ego, therapy, recollection, validation of their lives. But what they produce will have a validity of its own to the extent that it’s useful to somebody else. p136
With “patagium” Professor Allen throws a technical term at us from his discipline of zoology. That’s the prerogative of any writer writing about a special field, and as educated readers we should be glad to know about such strangers and to make them our own. I’m delighted to meet “patagium.” But a writer also has an obligation to make us comfortable with these terms, not to use them unnecessarily or just to show off or to exclude everyone who isn’t a member of the lodge. p146
Specific detail, as always, helps… p147
9. Writing Mathematics
Her usual procedure, she said, is to pose a problem to the class, lead a discussion of it and ask the students to write about it in this format: (1) Describe the problem; (2) Discuss your approach; (3) Explain what you found out. p154
…many of his best student papers had been failures–papers in which the student explained why he couldn’t get where he wanted to go. p157
But the point that Hasan makes in his paper is that you have to be careful that your model relates to the work, because very often it leaves out significant problems. p160
Writing is what forced them to think through both the math and its relationship to their own lives. p161
Where was that old math anxiety? I hadn’t been at any loss for questions; they came to me naturally. Like the process of writing, the process of asking and telling me what I wanted to know next. I was genuinely curious. It never occurred to me that this was a subject I wasn’t supposed to be any good at. What did occur to me was that mathematics was not some arcane system of numbers; it was a language, a way of putting thoughts together. I might never master the language–my checkbook might still go unbalanced–but at least I had begun to glimpse what the language was trying to say and how it could help people to understand the world around them. p161
Instead you can give your class a problem that requires a quadratic equation and let the machine solve the equation. That liberates you to think about what makes the problem interesting and what its ramifications are. In the past, kids spent all their time figuring out how to do the equation. p162
10. Man, Woman and Child
Originality and surprise are the most refreshing elements in nonfiction writing. p173
A writer who comes at his discipline from an oblique angle is almost always more fun to travel with. Risk gives writing an edge. p173
In all of Geertz’s essays I feel that he thinks of himself as a writer. He is personal and spontaneous–having a good time and writing above all for himself. p182
Other people’s rules are shackles on the mind. Timidity never produced a good piece of writing. p183
By now we are caught up in the anthroologist’s sensory gavotte. He has put us into his own chair, one that we realize we have often occupied–in the subway or some other public space–and always with mounting squeamishness. p185
11. Writing Physics and Chemistry
But it is in fact a delightful lead. In one paragraph Einstein reminds us of one of the greatest temples in intellectual history–Euclid’s geometry–but also raises some doubts about how solid its foundations are today. p193
Reduce your discipline–whatever it is–to a logical sequence of clearly thought out sentences. You will thereby make it clear not only to other people but to yourself. You will find out whether you know your subject as well as you thought you did. If you don’t, writing will show you where the holes are in your knowledge or your reasoning. p198
Once students accept the fact that correct but poorly written answers are unacceptable, most of them write more carefully. p204
Writing can only be learned when a writer coldly separates himself from what he has written and looks at it with the objectivity of a plumber examining a newly piped bathroom to see if he got all the joints tight. p209
12. Worlds of Music
American Popular Song made me realize that the subject–what a book is about–isn’t as important as the quality of mind or personality that the writer brings to it. p211
First, he was fearless. During Virgil Thomson’s tenure no sacred cow could safely graze. p222
Ultimately, however, every critic is an outsider, one step removed from the creative spark. p226