Creating Texts

An Introduction to the Study of Composition

Walter Nash, David Stacey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780582244863
• eBook ISBN: 9781317891529
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Creating Texts emphasises a practical approach to composition and enables students to understand what is involved in the creation of a text and to learn from the practice of other writers. Extensively rewritten and updated from Walter Nash's earlier volume, Designs in Prose, attention is paid to the general theory of composition, in both traditional and original terms, so that students are made familiar with the basic resources of composition, in grammar and in the lexicon.

The essence of every chapter is the discussion of examples of text, sometimes devised by the authors, but more often drawn from the work of authors writing in diverse styles of English. This practical approach is most evident in the final section of the book where detailed suggestions for projects and exercises reinforce the connection between theory and practice, and encourage students to develop their creative sense and to adapt their style of writing to fit the particular audience and context. In addition, this section is cross-referenced to the main text to allow students to consult easily the relevant chapter.

One

Beginning at some beginnings

Let us suppose that you are about to write, at the request of your insurance company (Brightside Brokers), a brief factual description of what happened when your motor vehicle was rear-ended at the intersection of Rollinghome Road and Wanderlust Way, one fine afternoon in July. You are of course wholly innocent of any responsibility for this deplorable event, which occurred while you were singing along to some old Leonard Cohen tapes and patiently waiting for the traffic lights to change. All you know is that a big car came up behind you and removed your rear bumper, your stop lights, and most of your baggage compartment, including your fairly usable spare tyre and those pretty flowering baskets you were carrying home from the garden centre. It is a miracle that you are not going round in an orthopaedic collar. As you recall the event your grief and rage are truly indescribable, but never mind, if a description is what they want at Brightside Brokers Inc., a description is what they are going to get. So you describe:

I’m sitting at a stop light on Rollinghome Road, doing no harm to anyone, when suddenly BANG this mindless oaf or to put it more accurately this lobotomized gorilla chooses to ram his BMW up my tailpipe. Right there in broad daylight, visibility perfect, the street empty. He demolishes my back end, this yuppie hooligan. Totals my fuchsias, he does, and has the gall to ask me what of it? Then, would you believe it, he accuses me of rolling back, the unprincipled hound, yes, rolling back – at 20 m.p.h.! – into his squeaky-clean corporate sales-chariot. Can you believe that? Do I have witnesses, you ask – well, yes, I have a witness, I have a myopic pensioner being taken for a walk by his long-haired dachshund, which, I am happy to say, paused to lift its little leg against the BMW, proving beyond a doubt the intelligence and discriminatory powers of this breed of animal. That man, or possibly that dog, could if invited testify to the accuracy of my narrative.

Now having at this point experienced the first fiery outbreak of the compositional impulse – the calor cogitationis as Quintilian calls it – you stop to read over your work, with a possible view to improving a turn of phrase here, sharpening a point there, even, it may be, adding one or two tasty insults to what is already a reeking dish of contumely. You are quite pleased with it. You consider it not half bad. You show it, looking for approval, to your spouse, or your partner, or your sibling, or your best friend, and you are surprised and a little hurt when they tell you that, fine though your description undoubtedly is, it will not get you too far with the steely-eyed cynics at Brightside Brokers. Much more in this vein and you might find yourself paying for your own repairs. What is required, they gently remind you, is a brief description of the facts; not of how it feels to have had those outraged feelings; not of how satisfying it is to nurture feelings until facts disappear; just a little cool description of the facts themselves.

At first you sulk, because nobody likes to abandon a fine ebullient piece of writing, but eventually you are persuaded to attempt an impersonal, coldly objective account, in conventional documentary style, of what really happened at the intersection of Rollinghome Road and Wanderlust Way on that afternoon in July. This turns out to be surprisingly hard. It is always easier to give expressive rein to your personality than it is to come down to little brass tacks. You struggle with the problem, however, and after several drafts manage something along the following lines:

The accident occurred on Friday, 22 July, at 3 p.m. approximately, at the intersection of Rollinghome Road and Wanderlust Way. (See the enclosed sketch-map.) My vehicle, a 1957 sand-coloured Bono-de-Luxe convertible, reg. nr. OUR Al, was waiting at the traffic lights in Rollinghome Road South, when it was struck from behind by a silver-grey BMW saloon car, reg. nr. BEAST 666. I estimate that the BMW was travelling at 10–12 m.p.h. when the collision occurred. It appeared that the driver had failed to apply his brakes in good time. Visibility was good, and the road surface dry. The impact was so hard as to result in appreciable damage to the rear of my vehicle. (See the enclosed mechanic’s report.) The collision was witnessed by a passing pedestrian, Mr J. P. Shufflewell, a retired minister of religion, whose address I append.

This you show to your friendly adviser, who reads it through with nods and grunts and eventually suggests that you should add the words ‘with the gear shift in neutral and the parking brake engaged’ after ‘waiting at the traffic lights in Rollinghome Road South’. You make this addition partly for the sake of domestic peace, and partly because you see the wisdom of representing yourself as one who follows good driving practice to the uttermost letter of virtue. Of course your purpose is to present a reliably objective account, but even so there are ways, without actually loading the piece, of conveying to the insurance assessor how blameless you are and how culpably negligent the other driver has been. ‘It appeared that the driver had failed to apply the brakes in good time’, you say. Appeared? You wouldn’t really know, would you? Butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, would it? You wouldn’t like to imply that he was asleep, would you, or drunk, or reaching into his back pocket for a sachet containing a narcoleptic substance, or just suffering one of those blinding lapses of memory he has kept concealed from his general practitioner? You will only say that when he slammed into your rear end it appeared that he had failed to ‘apply’ the brakes – and let the experts at Brightside see what they make of that. It is devious dealing, but the conventions of this kind of writing allow for it. Then again, ‘the road surface was dry’. This is in case the other fellow, in his account, comes up with the well-known slippery tarmacadam ploy, or invents an oil slick, or happens to remember a sudden squall of intensively localised rain breaking precisely over his car. You forestall him with your laconic assertion, ‘the road surface [was] dry’. Good stuff. It will probably save your no-claims bonus. Peace descends on your heart as you fold the form into its pre-paid envelope. These things, you tell your domestic consultant, should only be written after a period of mature reflection. And you are right. Never be in a hurry to put pen finally to paper; you may presently be obliged to put paper finally into waste basket.

Such experiences, however, may tell us something about the craft of writing. If nothing else, they teach us to write appropriately, using – or exploring, sometimes expanding – conventions of form and style most likely to achieve an envisaged purpose: making a report, arguing a case, appealing to an audience, telling a story. All such purposes are essentially social, or, as we shall say, societal. A society is an intricate thing, a complex of institutions, hierarchies, kinships, practices, assumptions about behaviour, powerfully influential not only as they exist in themselves, but also as they are perceived in the mind of the individual. We each have a diffuse mental impression of our society, a kind of internalised map/guide in accordance with which, whether consciously or unconsciously, we think and act societally. Writing itself thus becomes in many ways a societal practice, though beginners in prose, and college aspirants to poetic stardom, dislike the proposition that writings exist and take shape in societies. Asked why they write, they will often say ‘to express myself’, learning only by grudging degrees that ‘self-expression’, if not exactly a will-o’-the wisp, is always a light to be followed circumspectly. In any case, nobody who writes formally, in full sentences and completed texts, can write for ‘myself’ and ‘myself’ alone. Even diarists do not write wholly for ‘themselves’, unless, perhaps, like Samuel Pepys, they resort to a secret code; as long as they write in plain English (or any ‘natural’ language), they write for someone, for ‘the other me’, the postulated audience. They write as if this diary-making, for all its privacy, were nonetheless a societal act.

Let us nevertheless allow that of all forms of text, the diary is the most personal. It is even, to use an out-of-town word, solipsistic. Your diary will allow you to please yourself in many ways. You need not be able to spell, or construct grammatically correct sentences, or use a standard vocabulary, or proceed logically in connected stages, or indeed do so many of the things a societally-governed text will demand of you. The diary puts no constraints upon you. It leaves you to scribble, to fumble, to stumble, just as you please and just as the words come out; and for that very reason the keeping of a diary may be an excellent school of unhampered facility and assurance in writing.

The case is greatly altered, however, when you have to write a letter of application for a job, say, or an academic essay It will be a vain endeavour, and a foolish one, if you write ‘Having seen your advertisement in The Times newspaper for a linguist with special reference to Spanish, seek no further señoras y señores! for I am el supremo when it comes to languages and such’; or if your paper on the disposition of the fleets at Trafalgar begins ‘Horatio Nelson, England’s number one sea-dog, had an ace plan to whack the French’. You will get no job and you will be graded C minus, because you are technically incompetent and too dull (or conceited, or deranged) to understand the proposed function of the piece of writing on which you are engaged. Society is, let us repeat, complex. It has its hierarchies, its accepted attitudes, its permissible relationships, its notions of normality, its patterns of conduct, its prescriptions for correct behaviour. With all this, it has its institutionalised activities, and to each of these certain conventions are assigned: there are conventions of writing for letters of application, for submissions to insurance companies and other commercial bodies, for laboratory reports, for conference papers, for many of the functions we associate with our map of society. Such writings are thus functionally framed, and in them we express our societal selves only by accepting the functional conventions. That Active fellow whose car was rear-ended at the corner of Rollinghome Road made the initial mistake of supposing that in writing to his insurer he could come directly to the societal heart of the matter – that he had been wronged, in a world that accommodates complaints and proffers remedies; he had to be persuaded that his personal feelings and his societal position could only be expressed by working through the appropriate functional channels. Had he been setting out to write a novel – to invent that scene and those characters – he would have been at liberty to reject the conventions that direct the writing of a simple report; though even the novelist, seemingly so free to roam the societal field, is not altogether free from functional constraints.

There are, it would seem, three stations on the route through the beginnings of writing: call them person, convention, and society. The route is circular. Map it in this way. Draw a circle, and then at the six o’clock position locate a point marked person. At ten o’clock locate convention, and then at two o’clock place society. (The diagrams on p. 8 illustrate this.) For some kinds of writing, the route runs clockwise. When ‘I’ set about writing an academic paper or a report, for example, my first reference is to the functional conventions of my task, as modelled by papers and reports beyond number. My paper then takes its place in the societal repertoire, as a representative of a certain kind of institution. ‘I’, as a member of society, defer to the force of that institutional repertoire – I read academic papers or reports, and am personally affected by them; they stimulate my thought, they change my ideas, they shift the landscape, or ‘mindscape’, of my observations and memories. The case then is not so much ‘I express myself by writing’ as ‘I am expressed by many writings, including my own’; and so the route comes full circle.

That, however, is only one of three possible routes. We must all be aware of writings that do not take as their first step the imitation of conventional models, but rather seek to express without impediment the relationship – the negotiations and explorations, if those words are preferred – of a person within a society at large. When ‘I’ sit down to write a story, I take no functional guide, no formula – or if I do, I must risk the scorn of literary critics, who will expect me to disguise the mechanisms of writing. There are formulae in fiction, to be sure, and – to complicate matters – fiction may, as part of its fictionalising, parody or mimic the conventions of purely functional writing; but still the fact remains that for the fiction writer, or, in general, the ‘art writer’, the compositional route runs anti-clockwise, through a contemplation of societal actions, suppositions and relationships which may then beget imitations of some functional styles. Consider again the accident on Rollinghome Road. If ‘I’ want to make out an insurance report in due form and order, I write ‘clockwise’. If I want to let off steam and damn all careless drivers in expensive automobiles – but still present the semblance of an insurance report – I write ‘anticlockwise’. This is the route I will later follow if I want to recover the experience in a short story. The creative act goes widdershins, in risky opposition to the normal round (‘risky’ because there is usually no middling result between total success and utter disaster; the conventions are a safeguard which is removed as soon as one tries to write non-conventionally).

Now there remains a third possibility, when the route runs both clockwise and anti-clockwise. Take a case. ‘I’ embark on my paper for the Journal of Philological Conundrums. ‘In this paper’, I write, ‘I propose to address some aspects of the study of English pronunciation in the eighteenth century’ So far, so good, for the language of this opening is wholly conventional, following a well-established model. Dozens of papers begin in that way The Journal likes them that way Contributors like them that way; it makes them feel secure. But as the writing proceeds, as my paper bids fair to fill its societal place among the massed exhibits of scholarly deliberation, I am struck by the thought that this is dismally boring – not necessarily that the topic itself is boring, but that this way of composition is inert, mute, unsinewed, and wholly devoid of companionable appeal. I accept that writing should instruct, but I feel the force of another societal notion, that writing should cajole, please and persuade. So, when the time for a second draft comes round, it is possible that I will attempt a different strategy for my opening. I begin, perhaps, like this: ‘Did Samuel Johnson distinguish a sewer from a shore? How did they pronounce tea in Queen Anne’s day? Why did Dean Swift rhyme vermin with garment? These are not uninteresting questions.’ Quite probably the editor of the Journal of Philological Conundrums, a conservative soul, will reject my paper, or return it with a request that I re-draft it in the good old conventional-functional style that has kept the Journal going for the last fifty years. What I have written is more like a causerie or an essayistic book review than a ‘serious’ academic article. But in the event of his accepting it, I will have made a breakthrough of a kind. My revision of the customary form is potentially innovative; by insisting on my societal role, I will have pointed to the possibility of modifying the functional conventions. The innovative, the creative, and the mainly functional make up what is described in the diagram on p. 8 as the ‘three-ring circus’ of writing. It is easy enough to perform, and to train others, in the conventional round; much less easy to perform, and virtually impossible to take on a trainer’s role, in the creative ring; and in the circus of innovative feats it is desperately easy to fall and come off limping.

Writing, like other phenomena, exhibits the refusal of things in general to be assigned to places in particular; there are all sorts of blends, borrowings, mixtures, hybrids, making it difficult to establish, in the abstract, what modes of writing are to be called ‘functional’, clockwise-running, and what species are unmistakably ‘creative’. Fictions, obviously, are creative, and so are literary essays – those that come under the title, or stigma, of belles-lettres – and the commentary columns of the freelance journalist, and some kinds of scholarly work, for example histories and biographies, and personal memoirs, and, not infrequently, books designed to ‘popularise’ an academic subject. But documentary exercises – official letters, applications, complaints, claims – are functional; as are encyclopaedia entries, general instructions, formal reports, minutes, editorials (some), abstracts, papers in learned journals. Some of these ‘functional’ types can be handled creatively, and hence innovatively; some – but not all. An innovative tax return is not to be contemplated, and committee chairpersons will not be amused if the minutes run creatively counter-clockwise. (‘Right on, Madam Chair! Greetings, people! Well, didn’t we have a wicked meeting last week?’) But editors and complainants, for example, have been known to turn the occasional circus trick, and even professors in their learned writings, studiously avoiding the first person pronoun and cultivating the passive voice, will sometimes mount a creative rebellion against customary forms. It becomes, in the end, a question of judgement, taste, and the willingness to take risks – none of which properties can be conveyed or taught or even h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• 1 Beginning at Some Beginnings
• 2 How Reading Teaches Writing
• 3 About Paragraphs
• 4 Charley's Tale, or the Gaps Between Sentences
• 5 Sentences: Penning and Parsing
• 6 Plausible Words in Possible Places
• 7 Objects and Varieties: Description as Active Participation
• 8 Discourse as Dialogue: Writing on the Internet: E-Mail, Discussion Lists and Newsgroups
• 9 Projects, Themes and Diversions
• Bibliography
• Index A - Topics and names
• Index B