Let’s write

The proverbial idiom goes that it always takes two to tango, which means in its positive connotation an activity that needs two agencies to produce a synergy. Tango is a dance in which two people hold each other closely to dance in marked rhythms.

Reading and writing must also waltz in tango to produce a beautiful piece of writing. As said in the last article, to write good, one has to read good. To read good and to read well are two different things. The former means reading good content while the latter means reading between the lines of that good content which, if not read well, would offer us nothing: Roy Peter Clark in his book The Art of X-ray Reading calls it “the myopia of common reading” which can only be cured by the art of x-ray reading — the special vision that allows us to see beneath the surface of the text.

Now what constitutes “good” content is not hard to locate. It ranges from the English textbooks of syllabi to the best seller fiction or nonfiction. The textbooks include essays and stories of great classical as well as modern writers. Take an example of English Textbook of Modern Prose for higher secondary classes published by Punjab Curriculum and Textbook Board. Similarly, essays of Francis Bacon and Bertrand Russell teach one how to look at a topic extensively and intensively.

The second tier of good content consists of English newspapers and digests. The articles published there not only bestow upon readers immense wealth of new and current ideas but also help them build up a muscular vocabulary and keep it up-to-date. Reading of newspapers’ articles particularly editorials help readers vicariously making them well groomed for English essay and precis writing.

After acquiring robust understanding of grammar, the start should be taken from writing sentences. Utmost and earnest attempt must be made to write true sentences. Ernest Hemingway, well known for his short and pithy sentences, give a simple trick for overcoming writer’s block or beginner’s block in his memoir A Moveable Feast: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” As most of the topics are self-generating, every next sentence must add to the force and thought of the previous sentence in a paragraph. In the movie Finding Forrester, the lead role Forrester advises his apprentice Jamal on the art of writing: “No thinking — that comes later. You must write your first draft with your heart. You rewrite with your head. The first key to writing is to write, not to think!”

The 2-3-1 rule of emphasis by Donald M Murray, an American journalist and professor, makes it easier to construct sentences. Place the least emphatic words in the middle; the second most important goes at the beginning while the most important nails the meaning at the end. This is also the go-to method for writing long sentences. You continue adding propositional defining relative clauses to the subject to create suspense and glue the attention of the reader, and then place at the end the gist of the sentence. The aesthetics of a sentence are based on what and how we want to say. But care must be taken as the young learners sometimes lose clarity of thought and create jumbled syntax. Gertrude Stein defines the purpose of constructing a sentence: “Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?”

To write a sentence, another important factor is what style it should be phrased in. In his book On the Art of Writing, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch says: “The first virtue, the touchstone, of a masculine style is its use of the active verb and the concrete noun.” It is concrete when we say “Honest people are respected everywhere”, and abstract “Honesty is respected everywhere.” H Martin in his essay Active Verb And Concrete Noun says: “Woolly abstract nouns leave readers with a hazy idea of the meaning. Concrete nouns, on the contrary, are not only definite and precise, but give vividness to style because they are pictorial.” (To be continued)

Published in The Express Tribune, November 17^th, 2023.

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