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.
Grammar Girl here.
I'm Inyan 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.
Roy Peter Clark, thank you so much for being here with me today.
It is a pleasure to be here on the other end of this amazing continent.
You are working from home now.
So how are things now that you've been doing this for six weeks or longer?
Yeah, it's closing in on, from our point of view, it's closing in on three months.
So it's been going, I would say we feel lucky in my family.
I wrote an essay this morning in which we talk about the loss of precious ceremonies and rituals.
Mm-hmm.
And, most poignantly, the loss of memorials and ceremonies for the dead, which the New York Times signified brilliantly on the front page of last Sunday's paper, in which they listed 1000 of the dead as a signifier of the 100000, that number that we were about to cross.
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.
Yeah.
And you know, I know the piece that you had about the New York Times front page was about communicating almost more visually than with words.
But there was also some word stuff in it, too.
And so.
So why don't you talk a little bit about why and how it's so important to communicate extra clearly right now?
When I started out as a writing teacher in St.
Petersburg and worked with the American Society of Newspaper Writers and others, and when we talked about good writing, or when you looked for examples of good writing, or when you looked at the Pulitzer Prizes or the ASE Writing Awards, most of the work That was being honored, I would say, fell into the category of story or narrative.
And it was usually about something big and important that had happened.
Oh, 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.
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.
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.
So the last time I had a story that was published in the New York Times was about maybe three or four years ago, 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 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 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.
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.
Wow.
I'm looking at my.
If you can see my arms now from the video you can see the horripilation which is the fancy word for goosebumps.
Even the dead have to wait.
So...
That's 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 and 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 one of my favorite tools or strategies is that 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 effective sort of rhetorical definition of punctuation.
And when the information I'm trying to render is very, very complicated, like what it means to flatten the curve in an epidemic.
You're going to see in my work shorter words, shorter sentences, shorter paragraphs at the points of greatest complexity.
There are times when 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 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.
Yeah, that's great.
So we're going to take a quick break for our sponsors.
And when we come back, we're going to talk about your newest book, Murder Your Darlings.
Yay.
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 advanced 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 big picture about that book, Murder Your Darlings?
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 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.
Right.
We stand on the shoulders of giants.
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 of years ago.
William Zinsser wrote a book influenced me and many others on writing well.
Sold a million copies.
And so I don't know, it came to me in an odd way.
I 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 Your Darlings and Other Gentle Writing Advice from Aristotle to Zinzer, I was able to 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 on, upon more than two millennia of other writers and experts on language, 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, 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 and White's.
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 And look at something you've written either recently or in the past.
And I bet you you're going to 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'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 Strutton White.
And then when I read the book by Sir Arthur Quillercouch from 100 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.
Wow.
You know, and I often use as examples, Michelle Obama's, in a well-regarded speech, said I live in a house that was built by slaves, not slaves built the house I live in, which would be grammatical, but this idea that the key she sticks the landing drops the mic.
We use it in humor.
We use it in oratory and we should use it in all forms of communication, and 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 a year of fast writing, I don't think I deliver a text message without reading it once.
Number one, because the spell checker is changing it without my...
But often I'll find that you know, you know what, if I just move these two words around, this will be funnier or this will be more sympathetic.
So no dumping, no dumping allowed.
That's more complicated than my rule, which is don't tweet before coffee.
Nice.
So, you know, reading Murder Your Darlings, you took the best parts of 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, 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 imagined?
So it wasn't hard.
It wasn't so hard, Mignon, to pick the element because there was usually a story attached to it.
So, for example, in 1984.
I think it was, 84 or 85, when I wrote my first book, now out of 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 um 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 uh 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 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.
When I wrote... the glamour of grammar.
And every time 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 130000 words for what became essentially about a 75 or 80000 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 100 writing books that are out there.
The problem for me is deciding what to take out.
Which of my little babies?
Well, what I teach is that You don't have to murder your darlings, but you can.
You can gently pick them up and cuddle them and put them in a file for another day.
Right.
Imagine you're saving them for the next book.
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 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 supports 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.
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.
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 slash grammar girl.
That's all.
Thanks for listening.
