It's fall...
... and people are writing grants
Technically it is not fall until the 21st of September, but it feels like fall in Berlin. Fall is my favorite season. My second favorite is summer, then winter, then spring (grrr, spring!). I like fall because my body is still warm on the inside from the summer but my darling control mechanisms of tightening up, buckling down, and layering are finally appropriate. ‘Tis the season of gleeful preparation for a season of cold and dreary darkness. Spirits are high while they still can be. We’re on the edge of the void, having fun while we still can.
Someone, a stranger, told me they were a writer who wrote about writing, although they also said that as a profession, they were new to writing itself. Right on, I thought. My education had taught me that only once the ‘rules’ of the language were fully engrained could the writer start experimenting with style, let alone speak to the act of writing itself.
By virtues of being the child of writers and of my interest in English in a town where most speak it as a second or third language, I find myself reading a vast panoply of texts, each with drastically different relationships to Berlin’s lingua franca. This Monday, I walked my dog from Wohnung to Wohnung, helping buddies edit their grant applications. The day made me want to share some principles for clear writing, which I hope will be useful.
My favorite and most-used book about writing is “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White (who wrote Charlotte’s Web). If you do not come from my US-American liberal arts college background, you might have never heard of this book. And if that is the case, I want you to know it’s a classic. When I turned 15, a family friend and long time science and medicine journalist for the Washington Post, David Mosser Brown, gave me the Elements of Style - a beautiful, arty edition - and I rolled my eyes and left it on the shelf. When I moved to Berlin in 2013 and started editing COVEN BERLIN’s online magazine, I realized I needed to brush up on the basics, like how to use a semi colon.
Exactly what I needed sat upon my shelf. The authors approach language and how to best deploy it with love and humor. The examples are instructive and hilarious. The narrative voice is patronizing and charismatic. The reader is assumed to be aspiring and eager to please, which I may always be and am not sad about.
The chapter “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused” contains examples that I think reveal how passionate, unabashedly opinionated, and somewhat condescending the authors are.
“The truth is… The fact is… A bad beginning for a sentence. If you feel you are possessed of the truth, or of the fact, simply state it.”
Or
“Clever. Note that the word means one thing when applied to people, another when applied to horses. A clever horse is a good-natured one, not an ingenious one.”
Or
“Interesting. An unconvincing word; avoid it as a means of introduction. Instead of announcing that what you are about to tell is interesting, make it so.”
Or
“Unique. Means “without like or equal.” Hence there can be no degree of uniqueness.
It was the most unique eggbeater on the market. vs. It was a unique eggbeater.”
If you’ve ever had questions about punctuation, this slim book will answer all of them and you will never look back. It also contains copious subtler advice. The writer should write with nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs, for no adverb or adjective is strong enough to squeeze a weak or inadequate noun or verb out of trouble (chapter 5, rule 4).
Shall I go on? In a different chapter, called “An Approach to Style,” the authors advise to avoid “the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, the cute” (anyone guilty of this?). They say, “Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able.” They encourage the writer to use her ear and her good judgement. They say, “gut is a lustier noun than intestine, but the two words are not interchangeable, because gut is often inappropriate, being too coarse for the context. Never call a stomach a tummy without good reason.”
The “Dis-Tanzen” grant due this past Monday stipulated the main pitch at a merciless 3000-characters, including spaces, to explain a project that could be worth between 3,000EU-12,500EU. It’s difficult to write anything convincing with so little room, especially when you are in this twisted shame-prone position of needing to explain to government-appointed academics that your life and work are worth a few grand.
So my friend and I were talking about the process of writing the grant and all these really basic language structures seemed relevant again. For example, one sentence expresses one idea. A paragraph is a series of 4 or 5 sentences that unfold one important aspect of your main idea. Paragraphs need to transition out of one and into the next, somehow.
These rules feel satisfying to me the way math feels satisfying to others. Like, it’s cozier to stay within the broadest of parameters. Sometimes I think that the most nefarious archetype of our time is the void. You’ll catch me decrying the post-modern soup I fear we’re all swimming around in. Vague purposelessness is an ailment I see many suffer from. That’s part of why I am writing this newsletter: to shake the violence and hierarchy off of certain structures and put them to work for us instead of against us.
In preparation for the winter, squirrels collect nuts and put them somewhere safe. Sometimes I look around me and I’m like WHERE ARE MY NUTS? WHERE SHOULD I PUT MY NUTS? ARE THESE NUTS EVEN MINE?? DO I EVEN DESERVE THESE NUTS? WHY DON’T I USE MY NUTS BETTER? WHAT’S THE POINT OF COLLECTING NUTS IN THE FIRST PLACE???? When asking for money, I notice that a similar set of thoughts set in. That’s why I think it’s cool to look for the simplest structures that can hold you aloft in the void we are all floating in regardless of whether we know it or not. Language has all these rules, but also, look at this meme:
Aside from the structure of clarity and helpful grammar and style, when writing or editing I like to think of being considerate of my reader. Writing is a lonely process and it can be easy to forget that someone is going to be there on the other end. Your words might hurt their feelings. Your opinion might not have considered their experience thoroughly enough, which weakens the validity of your opinion and makes the reader feel disregarded. You might not have been clear enough, and then the reader could assume they are not smart enough or proficient enough to understand you, and you’ve lost someone you really wanted to talk to. “Muddiness is not merely a disturber of prose, it is also a destroyer of life, of hope:” They say, “even to a writer who is being intentionally obscure of wild of tongue we can say, “Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand!””
These are dramatic words – words with imperative and direction. For all its quirk, treasure, and charm, The Elements of Style is majorly dated. It warns of the dangers of using a word processor, and how the singular ‘they’ should be avoided and replaced by ‘he.’ It’s a writer’s Bibles and, as with all Bibles, it is best served with salt, to taste. How much salt do I like? I’m figuring it out. Do I want a book written by old white men to serve as the ‘bare minimum’ structure to navigate the post-modern soup? These days the compass-question is what stories are used to tell stories, not what is worth salvaging from a patriarchy in free-fall.
But I dunno, I love this book and what it taught me and I think it’s got really useful information for all kinds of writing. Here is the pdf. Just because it comes from a fucked up place doesn’t mean we shouldn’t loot it for tricks, tools, and potential rewards, especially when said rewards are German cash.
Guest readers this month were Alistair Watts and Martin Hansen. Guest editing by Henry Trueheart.
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Lil’ Announcements
Come see The Superimposition (scenes 1-3) this Sunday between 15h and 19h at Bärenzwinger! Here is the link with all the info. The performance is at 16h. An essay by yours truly will also be available on site.
Speaking of essays, have you read the one I wrote in SPREAD? Not sure I ever advertised this fun piece about the corona edition of the Club for Performance Art Gallery. I also talk about Pompeii and talk about the artwork of like 15 artists. Maybe I even talk about you! You need to scroll a bit to find it.
This month there is a lot on! I’m looking forward to seeing checking out Caroline Alexander’s new piece called Fear and Fantasy, the return of Sheena McGrandles’s musical DAWN, and also this program #Commonings at HKW looks cool and my pal Lorena Juan is doing a workshop on Saturday.