Writing like we talk

They fell for each other when she was in London and love has been burgeoning ever since, if burgeoning means what I think it means, until they felt they could bear being separated no longer.

P.G. Wodehouse, Aunts Aren't Gentlemen

P.G. Wodehouse

One of the running gags in Aunts Aren't Gentlemen and other Jeeves and Wooster novels is Bertie Wooster's desire to sound more intelligent and better educated (never mind that he attended Eton) than he really is. And so he searches for impressive words and literary quotations, usually depending upon his man Jeeves to fill in the blanks.

Many of us, though we lack a Jeeves in our lives, are much like that, in our writing if not in our speech. My wife, when writing letters, would often ask me for a fancier word to say what she wanted to say. I usually told her the everyday word she had in mind would work perfectly well. Even so I understood her compulsion to find more high-sounding language. I often suffer from the same malady.

In her book What to Read and Why, Francine Prose talks about the papers written by her college students. "I have never heard a student use, in conversation, the words attire, surmise, or, especially deem ('the story can be deemed as being ironic,' 'her face could be deemed as kindly'), but these words recur, almost every year, in the first papers they write for my classes," she says.

Notice that she wrote "first papers," for after this she tells them "not to write anything that they wouldn't say." In other words, write the way you talk. I assume she refers to basic vocabulary, not youth slang or phrases like "you know" or the incomplete sentences many of us use in our speech.

The other day I wrote that John Simpson, when hiring people to work on the Oxford English Dictionary, rejected anyone who used the word hone in interviews. That may have had something to do with the pretentiousness of the word as it is so often used. I feel much the same way about the word craft, as when actors accepting Oscars use the word.

Prose writes, "It's remarkable how rapidly students' writing improves — how much clearer it becomes — when they feel liberated from the burden of forcing their ideas through the narrow channel of 'thus we see,' the constricted passageway of 'furthermore, the man's attire could the deemed characteristic of his gender and social status.'" We write better when we write like people talk.

One question nags at me, however. How does one explain the literary success of the likes of James Joyce, William Faulkner and Henry James?