Plain Speaking*
Guest Writer: Ken Fellows
Ken Fellows: Stonington House
Communication is the transmission of thought –and we should do what we can to reduce confusion and not introduce new barriers to understanding. We should all write the exact manner we speak; it isn’t all that hard once you get the hang of it.
Gustave Flaubert, the French novelist, said: “Whenever you can shorten a sentence, do. And one always can. When we speak, we almost always avoid the compound sentence. Only when we write, we swell up and get pompous …. lawyers and doctors more so than most.”
Many years ago, Stinnett came into the possession of a book called The Art of Readable Writing by Rudolf Flesch, and he was captivated by two of his points. One was a list of “empty” words ---participles, prepositions, conjunctions, adverbs –that worked their way into language and made up more than 50% of all words commonly used. The list included “for the purpose of” (for), “for the reason that” (since, because), “in order to” (to), “in the neighborhood of (about), “with a view to” (to), “with the result that” (so that), and a few dozen more, all enemies of simplicity and clear speech.
Flesch’s other thing was his vigorous defense of an author’s ending sentences with a preposition, which he said unfailingly turned stiff prose into idiomatic prose. Stinnett added that he personally liked a good prepositional ending and was delighted to read that the National Council of Teachers of English President said, “A preposition is a good word to end a sentence with.”
Stinnett’s concern over abuse of the English language came at an early age when he was taken by his mother each Sunday to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in a small Virginia town. A popular hymn at the time went
“And He walks with me, and He talks with me, and He tells me I am his own.”
Stinnett wrote that he never cared for the hymn because he never knew who Andy was, although he thought about him a lot and searched for clues.
Peter DeVries, the novelist, must have suffered a similar bewilderment as a child. In one of his books, he told of having heard, for the first time, a hymn called “Oh, What a Cross I Bear.” What was so unusual, he wondered, about a cross-eyed bear that a hymn should have been written about it?
*Excerpted from “Get Me a Translator” by Caskie Stinnett in his book, Slightly Off Shore.
Ken Fellows
Joanna Seibert. joannaseibert.com