Anyone who has written even halfway decent prose knows the challenges and pitfalls that await. Good writing, an alchemy that embraces clarity yet avoids police-blotter tedium, is not easily achieved. The seeker will find no shortcuts, no magic bullets, no Xs marking the spot. Writing requires practice, study, practice, feedback, practice, skill, practice, and practice. Reading—lots and lots of it—is a must. A writer learns by example, absorbs the swing and rhythm of good prose by reading good stuff. Rules, grammar, syntax, how-to books, and helpful advice will go only so far. Sooner or later pen must be applied to paper, finger to keyboard: the game is afoot.
Bad writing glares sullenly at us from newsprint, paper, and computer screens everywhere. The Internet, with its Wild West atmosphere and laissez-faire dynamic, allows just about anybody to spray mists of words before the public, usually without recourse to editors or critics. (Free….ahem….cough cough…Composition.) Bad writing is unfortunately endemic to commercial enterprises as well, as five minutes spent poring through a copy of Newsweek will reveal. The varieties of bad writing are as numerous as are the mistakes, misjudgments, mistimings, and downright boo-boos that go into the fashioning of stinky prose. Academia has spawned a distinctive chamber of literary horrors, as has the computer industry with its musty aura of asocial, ungroomed 29-year-old males hammering out pompously intolerant proclamations regarding file formats.
Then there is dull prose, the stuff that causes your eyes to glaze, your mind to wander, and your interest to dissipate. Writing truly drab prose is something of an inverted art in and of itself. Most writers avoid dullness, if only by way of slipping into ghastliness, but there are those whose stolid and sodden mentality trumps all other influences. Such writers invariably extrude a gray mosh of tedium, its grammar and syntax correct, its meaning clear, but its soul shriveled, its eye dulled, and its pulse flatlined.
I stepped into a prime specimen—a review of a recent recording—just this morning. I will neither bore readers nor risk legal action by quoting it in full. The beginnings of each sentence of one particularly lock-jawed paragraph should make my point adroitly:
The performance is full of character…
The theme itself is supremely elegant…
The octaves of the fourth variation are robust…
The tenth variation is playful…
Variations 14-16 are full of bustling energy…
The mighty fugue at the end is played…
This is an outstanding recording…
That long slough of “to be” sentences, one after another. [X] is [Y], perhaps laden with a cliché in a doltish attempt at color. The net effect is like enduring a tedious after-dinner speaker droning stolidly through a typed-out speech.
The moral: even if you don’t know why it’s important, vary your sentences in both construction and length. Read your prose out loud, maybe to your teddy bear or your roommate. Listen to the rhythm, to the very sound of the words as they snap together in line. Revise the thing until you’re certain that any further change will hinder rather than help. Then take another crack at it. The prose quoted above emerges from a colorless, humorless, spiritless, get-the-job-done mentality. But in my book, it doesn’t get the job done at all. All it achieves is monotony.