Clarity And Grace--Personified

I am still in the process of trying to write my paper for the Exceptional Legal Writing Course to be given by the State Bar on April 26.

So it is only fair that you suffer along with me.

The challenge for me is how to make something abstract interesting. How do you make clear writing . . . clear? How do we know when good is good?

One way that worked for me was to find a good piece of strong writing and then ruin it. Take something taut and reverse engineer it into something you'd find in a law school or the Environmental Protection Agency.

(Governments and institutions are particularly good at removing all humanity from the written word. They are kind of the neutron bomb for prose.)

After the jump, a teaser.

Last time, I wrote about how English brains long for that click between subject and verb. That click is most satisfying when we give a good, strong, and simple verb to a character capable of acting it out.

But Noooooo. We always want to try and sound smart. So we tack suffixes onto the ends of perfectly healthy, Anglo-Saxon verbs and turn them into wimpy, Latin nouns--a process called nominalization, which is itself a nominalization.

"So, what?" you ask. Nominalizing good prose disguises who the characters are and what they are doing. It sucks the story write out of your story, and puts the suck right into your writing.

Want proof? Imagine that it is the late 1930s and the British government tries to reassure the populace with bureaucratic tripe like this:

Defense of the island will be conducted notwithstanding the costs incurred. Fighting will be necessary on the beaches, the landing grounds, in the streets, in the hills. Surrender will never happen.

Or

Provision of the tools will result in the finishing of the assignment.

Look all the suffixes: -nse, -ing, -ion. Look at all the verbs turned into nouns: defense, fighting, surrender, provide, finish. Why not use verbs as verbs and use subjects like "We" and the imperative "You."

We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we...