1159. This week, we look at "civic clarity" with writing instructor Roy Peter Clark in a newly edited version of our 2020 conversation. We look at the ethical code of clear communication and why "civic clarity" is more important now than ever. We also discuss the strategy of "writing short" for social media and how to navigate the difficult process of cutting a draft to find your focus.
1159. This week, we look at "civic clarity" with writing instructor Roy Peter Clark in a newly edited version of our 2020 conversation. We look at the ethical code of clear communication and why "civic clarity" is more important now than ever. We also discuss the strategy of "writing short" for social media and how to navigate the difficult process of cutting a draft to find your focus.
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And that phrase, "civic clarity" became a kind of a mantra for me, and any chance I've gotten over the last three decades to hold up and honor an expression of civic clarity, not just by journalists, but by people in government, people in the business world, health officials, public health officials, that's what I've tried to do. And I'm on a sort of a small crusade now to try to do this at a time when I believe we may need civic clarity more deeply than we have in my lifetime.
MIGNON: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and over the last few weeks, I've been thinking a lot about an interview I did back in 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, with rock-star writing instructor Roy Peter Clark, and this concept of "civic clarity." He had so much good, practical advice that I want to share it with you again, and I've re-edited it to focus even more on the ways his advice can make you a better writer. Here's the interview.
MIGNON: Roy Peter Clark, thank you so much for being here with me today.
ROY: Mignon, it is a pleasure to be here on the other end of this amazing continent.
MIGNON: You are working from home now. So how are things now that you've been doing this for six weeks or longer?
ROY: Yeah, it's, it's closing in on, and from our point of view, it's closing in on three months.
MIGNON: Mm-hmm.
ROY: It's been going … I would say we feel lucky in my family.
Have had certain effects on our lives, our interactions, our imaginations. My wife and I who have established a routine, which we walk every day, but the sky outside has never been bluer here.
The birds and other animal life have never been more active. So, it's been a kind of a reeducation. And from a writer's point of view, that has been a kind of a gift Because [it's] generated a lot of stories and essays.
MIGNON: Yeah, no, it's the same. My husband and I, we do also go for a walk every day, which helps give some structure to our days. You mentioned that you found yourself doing different kinds of writing, or more writing. Can you talk more about how it's affected your writing life?
ROY: Well, one thing I didn't expect is that I'd be able to write from home as effectively as I have. So, I have to say I've been astonished at both my level of productivity and also the variety of writing forms, which I have engaged in in the last, let's say a hundred days.
MIGNON: And why have you been writing in different forms all of a sudden?
ROY: So there was this moment where I said to my wife. Said, Karen, look, I said, we've been having these wonderful walks, and we've spent more time together now in our 49th year of marriage than maybe ever before.
I'm gonna write a sonnet, and it was published almost immediately in the Tampa Bay Times in the Sunday section. And it's been it's just, it's been fun, it's been interesting, and it's made me realize that there are some things that I can say in a poem that I can't say in an essay or a story or a narrative or, or an article.
MIGNON: I see. Yeah. That makes sense. It's true. We've lost all track of time. When I said earlier, "six weeks," I was like, I don't really know how long it's been.
ROY: Yeah, no, it's, we've lost so many things. We've lost track of time. I wrote an essay this morning in which I, um, we talk about the loss of precious ceremonies and rituals.
MIGNON: Mm-hmm.
ROY: And most poignantly the loss of memorials and ceremonies for the dead.
MIGNON: Yeah.
ROY: Which the New York Times signified brilliantly on the front page of last Sunday's paper, in which they listed 1000 of the dead.
MIGNON: Yeah.
ROY: As a signifier of the hundred thousand that we were about to, that number that we were about to cross.
MIGNON: Yeah. So, we were going to talk about your books first, but I think I'm going to switch this up and talk first about the importance of communicating clearly and effectively right now.
Because you've taught, I mean, you do some of the most amazing teaching on writing clearly that I've ever seen. You're regularly putting out great work, helping writers write better.
ROY: Mm-hmm.
MIGNON: And you know, I know the piece that you had about the New York Times front page was about communicating almost more visually.
ROY: Mm-hmm.
MIGNON: Than with words, but there was also some word stuff in it too. And so why don't you talk a little bit about why and how it's so important to communicate extra clearly right now.
ROY: When I started out as a writing teacher in St. Petersburg and worked with the American Society of Newspaper Editors and others, and when we talked about good writing or when you looked for examples of good writing or when you looked at the the Pulitzer Prizes or the ASNE Writing Awards, most of the work that was being honored I would say, fell into the category of story or narrative.
MIGNON: Mm-hmm.
ROY: And it was usually about something big and important that had happened, of famine in Ethiopia or war in the Middle East. And when I would make these presentations, I had these very hardworking journalists come up to me and say, "Roy, listen, we honor the work that you are holding up for us, and I hope one day I'll be able to write stories like that, but my assignments right now are to cover city hall.
And the zoning commission and utility rate hikes, and it's really difficult for me to make hard facts easy reading, so anything that you can do to help us do that will be greatly appreciated. And will fulfill a responsibility of journalists, not just to write with literary grace, but with civic clarity.
And that phrase, "civic clarity" became a kind of a mantra for me and any chance I've gotten over the last three decades to hold up and honor an expression of civic clarity, not just by journalists, but by people in government, people in the business world, health officials, public health officials, that's what I've tried to do. And I'm on a sort of a small crusade now to try to do this at a time when I believe we may need civic clarity more deeply, than we have in my lifetime.
"Civic clarity" means not just gathering facts, checking out facts, making facts available to the public. It requires taking responsibility for what readers and viewers and listeners know and understand about the world.
MIGNON: One of your previous books was called "How to Write Short," and I think that is especially relevant these days mostly because misleading headlines and tweets just make me bonkers because we know that most people don't read beyond the headline or beyond the tweet. You know, studies have been done showing that the majority of people don't read more than that. So it's especially important to get those short teasers right, and not think of them so much as teasers, but think of them as the only chance you're going to get to communicate what's in your article.
ROY: So the last time I had a story it was published in the New York Times, was about maybe three or four years ago.
MIGNON: Mm-hmm.
ROY: When they were doing some essays on the writing craft. And it was very much related to, connected to the book, "How to Write Short" and I believe the headline was "Short sentences reveal the gospel truth."
Now, that was a idea that I harvested many years ago from an interview I heard between conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. and Tom Wolfe of the New Journalism fame. And somebody had written something about the art world in which Tom Wolfe says, said to Buckley something like "It's a lie, but it feels like the truth."
And Buckley essentially said, "Well, how is that possible?"
And he said "because he wrote it in a short sentence."
MIGNON: Hmm hmm.
ROY: Is that … now listen: you can tell lies with short sentences. I don't have to reach very far for examples.
You can also save the most important thing you have to say for the shortest sentence you can construct. Dan Barry on Sunday, a great New York Times writer, had a column, which was interweaved with this litany of the dead, and he's talking about all the ceremonies that have to be put on hold, especially memorials. And at one point in the column he writes, "Even the dead have to wait." Wow.
MIGNON: Wow.
ROY: I'm looking at my, if you can see my arms now on video, you can see the horripilations, which is the fancy word for goosebumps. "Even the dead have to wait." So that's one of the, one of the lessons is that of writing short and using a form like Twitter or text message is that people are going to probably believe what you have to say.
So it's incumbent upon you to embrace not just a craft of clarity, but a kind of ethical code to tell the truth, to tell it in a way that people can understand it. And to tell it well, to embrace the mission and purpose of using language well. The other thing about the short sentence, Mignon, is that, you know, one of my favorite tools or strategies is that, you know, think of the period as a stop sign.
And we know that the Brits don't call it a period, they call it a full stop, which is a very, very effective sort of rhetorical definition of punctuation. And when, when the information I'm trying to render is very, very complicated. Like what it means to flatten the curve in an epidemic.
MIGNON: Mm-hmm.
ROY: You are gonna see in my work, shorter words, shorter sentences, shorter paragraphs at the points of greatest complexity. There are times when I, you know, we kind of grow up thinking that we want our readers to be able to move quickly through a text. And I say like, yeah, a lot of times that's the case, but there are some times when we want them to move slowly, when we want to render something as suspenseful, when we want to kind of, um, render something with emotional power. So they can feel it.
And then when we want to slow down so that they can understand, so we can say to them, you've heard about flattening the curve, period. Here's how it works, period. And establish a slower pace of understanding and comprehensibility.
MIGNON: Yeah. That's great. So, um, we're gonna take a quick break for our sponsors and when we come back, we're going to talk about your newest book, "Murder Your Darlings."
ROY: Yay.
MIGNON: Yay.
So your newest book, you've written many books, but your newest book is called "Murder Your Darlings," and I had the pleasure of reading an advance review copy of the book and thought it was really inspirational and quite different from a lot of the other things you've written. So, can you tell our listeners sort of the, the big picture about that book "Murder Your Darlings?"
ROY: So, you know, I realized at some point that, number one, that I was one of a group of writers, and Mignon, I would add you to this list. I think together, you and I could list about a dozen or so contemporary writers.
MIGNON: Mm-hmm.
ROY: Who write about many different things overall, but essentially have built our careers and our reputations writing about language, writing, reading, grammar, and culture, American culture. So I kind of felt that, number one, I owed a debt of gratitude to our predecessors, going back to Aristotle.
MIGNON: Right? We stand on the shoulders of giants.
ROY: We do, we do! Although I think Aristotle was short, but, you know, a great intellectual giant. And the fact that one of my great professional friends passed away a couple years ago, William Zinsser.
MIGNON: Mm-hmm.
ROY: Wrote a book, influenced me and many others on writing well, sold a million copies, and so I don't know what it came to me in an odd way.
I had a … was making a collection of these books, and I saw Aristotle was sitting to my left, and Zinsser was sitting to my right. I said, oh my god, A to Z! You know, so in the subtitle. "Murder darlings and other gentle writing advice from Aristotle to Zinsser" I was able to, uh, kind of establish two things.
One was the alphabetical order trope, but it was also a historical trope that in fact, all contemporary writers, whether they know it or not, are dependent upon more than two millennia of other writers and experts on language whose who've shared their wisdom has come down to us and been reimagined for a particular sort of historical period.
So in the course of this book, there are about 50 writing books that I refer to, and my goal was to do two things. Number one, to help writers learn about these books and create a menu for them for their reading, based on their interests. Second thing is to try to harvest what, for me, was the most useful, interesting, challenging morsel of advice, especially if I knew examples, either from my own work or from the writing of my friends and colleagues where they were formed as writers by the influence of a particular piece of advice, such as in "Strunk & White: The Elements of Style." Place the emphatic word in a sentence at the end period.
I can't tell you how important that particular piece of advice, which is also in "Writing Tools," emphatic word order. That Shakespeare didn't write in "Macbeth" "The queen is dead, my lord," he wrote "The queen, my lord, is dead." And when I teach that lesson, especially in person, I tell students and professionals, I said, go back this afternoon and look at something you've written either recently or in the past, and I bet you you're gonna find a key word or phrase that's hiding in the middle of a sentence or the middle of a paragraph.
And if you can move it out to the end, next to the period, next to the white space, where people can see it, the impact of your writing is going to increase dramatically. And I stopped saving the notes and letters of gratitude I've received from people who, um, who've shared how important that tool was.
At one point I thought that maybe I had invented that. Then of course I found it in "Strunk and White." And then when I read the book by Sir Arthur Quiller Couch from a hundred years ago who used the phrase, "murder your darlings." He quotes a Roman teacher named Quintilian, who offers the same advice to Roman orators.
He says, "if you want to be an effective speaker, You may find that you have a key word to deliver that's right now hiding in the middle of a paragraph, you might want to put it out at the end."
MIGNON: Wow.
ROY: You know, and I often, I often use as examples, Michelle Obama, in a well-regarded speech, said, "I live in a house that was built by slaves."
MIGNON: Mm-hmm.
ROY: Not "Slaves built the house I live in," which would be grammatical, but this idea that the acute she sticks the landing, drops the mic.
MIGNON: Mm-hmm.
ROY: We use it in humor. We use it in oratory, and we should use it in all forms of communication, I would say, including text messages and tweets. Even if it's short, you can move the important part to the end.
Yeah. By the way, I don't know if many people do it, but I find myself more and more trying to, in an era of fast writing, I don't think I deliver a text message without reading it once. Number one, because the spellchecker is changing it without my permission. But often I'll find that, you know, what if I just move these two words around, this will be funnier or this will be more sympathetic.
MIGNON: Mm-hmm.
ROY: So no dumping, no dumping allowed.
MIGNON: That's more complicated than my rule, which is don't tweet before coffee.
ROY: Nice.
MIGNON: Yeah, so, you know, reading "Murder Your Darlings," you took the best parts of, you know, 50 or so books. And as I was going through it, I was thinking it must have been so hard to pick just the one thing or the main lesson from each book.
Were there things that you wish you could have put in that didn't quite make it? Or was it actually easier than I imagine.
ROY: So it wasn't hard. It wasn't so hard, Mignon, to pick the element because there was usually a story attached to it.
MIGNON: Hmm.
ROY: So, for example. In 1985, I think it was '84, '85 when I wrote my first book now to print.
It's called "Free to Write: A Journalist Teaches Young Writers," and it was the story of my three years as a volunteer teacher in my daughter's public school. I was teaching writing to fourth and fifth graders using a lot of the strategies of journalism. But I had never written a book before, and I just happened to be reading a collection of John McPhee's magazine stories, which became books in which the editor Bill Howarth, who became a friend, and who taught at Princeton with John McPhee. He wrote an introduction about how McPhee writes one of these book length magazine articles, and I followed it step by step by step and 19 books later, I don't follow it as carefully. But you would see if I could show you my, my bulletin board, for example, while I'm writing a book and how I organize these index cards in order to try to imagine the structure of that, all of that came out of that book. And so it was easy for me to choose that one because it had such an effect on me. My problem is always, and why "Murder your Darlings" is such an appropriate title for me, is I'm a "putter inner" rather than a "taker outer."
MIGNON: Mm-hmm.
ROY: When I wrote "The Glamor of Grammar," and every time I, I look at that title, by the way, I think of you and your work.
That I handed in a hundred chapters for a 50 chapter book. I couldn't stop. And in this particular case, "Murder Your Darlings," I submitted 130,000 words for what became essentially about a 75 or 80,000 word book. So for me, the issue is not choosing which ones are going to go in. Because I could certainly write about another 50 or a hundred writing books that are out there. The problem for me is deciding what to take out which of my little babies.
MIGNON: Mm-hmm.
ROY: Well, what I've, what I teach is that you don't have to murder your darlings, but you can gently pick them up and cuddle them and put them in a file for another day.
MIGNON: Right. Imagine you're saving them for the next book.
ROY: But it's very hard.
So for me, I have to lower my standards. Before I write a first draft I have to write a zero draft. I have to write earlier than I think I can. And then as I get close, as I go through the process, whether it's an essay or a book, raise my standards, become more demanding, and to make sure that I'm selecting material, not just my best material or the stuff that I like the best, but the material that most closely support the focus of the work. Because learning from the writing process from Donald Murray, a great teacher, process was important to him and for all of us who worked with him. But focus was the center of the process. The ability to understand what this is really about, what you're trying to say, what you want your readers to learn and pass along to others.
And, that takes time, and it takes a kind of discipline.
MIGNON: Yeah, no, it does. Well, thank you. And I'm especially glad to hear that you feel like you're being so productive right now, because I want you to keep writing because we absolutely need your work and good advice that you're constantly putting out there, whether it's on the Poynter Institute website or in all your books.
That's the end of our interview. I hope it sticks with you as much as it stuck with me. You can still find Roy teaching and writing at the Poynter Institute website at poynter.org, and he is also active on Facebook.
For the Grammarpaloozians at Patreon and beyond, since I didn't have a bonus conversation with Roy back in 2020, I have a bonus segment for you about the rhetorical use of "um." It can just be a filler word, but it can also be more. So look for that on your feed or in your text messages.
And if you want to support the show and get the extras, go to Patreon.com/grammargirl.
That's all. Thanks for listening.