How to Say Nothing in Five Hundred Word Essay

Paul McHenry Roberts (1917-1967) taught college English for oer twenty years, first at San Jose State College and afterwards at Cornell University. He wrote numerous books on linguistics, including Understanding Grammar (1954), Patterns of English (1956), and Understanding English (1958).Freshman composition, the likes of everything else, has its sh atomic number 18 of fashions. In the 195Os, when this hold was written, the almost pop argument raging among student es phraseists was the proposed abolition of college footb all game game. With the greater social consciousness of the early 60s, the topic of the day became the morality of capital punishment. Topics whitethorn change, alone the effect principles of good writing remain immutable, and this essay as be grapple something of a minor classic in ex discernibleing them. Be concrete, says Roberts get to the manoeuvre express your opinions colorfully. Refreshingly, he even practices what he preaches. His essay is humorous, direct, and almost salty in summarizing the working habits that all good prose salvers must cultivate. Editors note from JoRay McCuen & Anthony C. Winklers Readings for Writers , 3rd ed., Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980Its Friday afternoon. and you pull in almost survived an other week of classes. You ar single if looking forward dreamily to the weekend when the English instructor says For Monday you will knock everywhere in a cardinal hundred-word composition on college football. Well, that puts a good hole in the weekend. You wearyt have any(prenominal) strong views on college football i way or the other. You get kinda excited during the season and go to all the home games and find it rather more fun than not. On the other hand, the class has been reading Robert Hutchins in the anthology and perhaps Shaws Eighty-Yard Run, and from the class discussion you have got the idea that the instructor theorizes college football is for the birds. You atomic number 18 no foo l. You give the axe figure divulge what incline to take. After dinner you get out the port adapted typewriter that you got for high school graduation. You might as well get it over with and enjoy Saturday and Sunday. Five hundred words is astir(predicate) two double-spaced pages with normal margins. You put in a sheet of report, sound off up a title, and youre offWHY COLLEGE FOOTBALL SHOULD BE ABOLISHEDCollege football should be abolished because its bad for the school and also for the players. The players atomic number 18 so grouchy practicing that they dont have any time for their studies. This, you feel, is a mighty good suffer. The only trouble is that its only thirty-two words. You still have quadruplet hundred and half-dozenty-eight to go, and youve pretty well exhausted the subject. It comes to you that you do your best(p) thinking in the morning, so you put away the typewriter and go to the movies. But the side by side(p) morning you have to do your washing and s ome math problems, and in the afternoon you go to the game. The English instructor relinquishs up in addition, and you wonder if youve taken the mature side after all. Saturday night you have a date, and Sunday morning you have to go to church. (You dissolvet let English assignments interfere with your religion.) What with one and only(a) thing and another, its ten oclock Sunday night before you get out the typewriter again. You make a pot of coffee and start to fill out your views on college football. Put a small meat on the bones.WHY COLLEGE FOOTBALL SHOULD BE ABOLISHEDIn my opinion, it bets to me that college football should be abolished. The priming why I think this to be genuine is because I feel that football is bad for the colleges in nearly every respect. As Robert Hutchins says in his article in our anthology in which he discusses college football, it would be best if the colleges had race horses and had races with one another, because then the horses would not ha ve to attend classes. I firmly check with Mr. Hutchins on this point, and I am sure that many an(prenominal) other students would agree as well as. One reason why it seems to me that college football is bad is that it has become too commercial. In the time-worn times when people played football just for the fun of it, maybe college football was all right, besides they do not play college football just for the fun of it now as they used to in the old days. Nowadays college football is what you might call a big business.Maybe this is not true at all schools, and I dont think it is especially true here at State, unless certainly this is the case at most colleges and universities in America nowadays, as Mr. Hutchins points out in his very interesting article. Actually the coaches and alumni go c stick out to to the high schools and offer the high school stars large-mouthed salaries to come to their colleges and play football for them. There was one case where a high school star was offered a convertible if he would play football for a certain college. Another reason for abolishing college football is that it is bad for the players.They do not have time to get a college education, because they are so busy playing football. A football player has to practice every afternoon from three to six and then he is so tired that he cant concentrate on his studies. He just feels like dropping off to sleep after dinner, and then the next day he goes to his classes without having analyse and maybe he fails the running play. (Good ripe stuff so far, but youre still a hundred and fifty-one words from home. One more push.) as well as I think college football is bad for the colleges and the universities because not very many students get to federal agencyicipate in it. Out of a college of ten thousand students only seventy-five or a hundred play football, if that many. Football is what you might call a spectator sport. That intends that most people go to pump it but do not play it themselves. (Four hundred and fifteen. Well, you still have the conclusion, and when you retype it, you can make the margins a little wider.)These are the reasons why I agree with Mr. Hutchins that college football should be abolished in American colleges and universities. On Monday you turn it in, moderately hopeful, and on Friday it comes back marked weak in confine and sporting a big D. This essay is exaggerated a little, not much.The English instructor will recognize it as reasonably typical of what an assignment on college football will bring in. He knows that nearly half of the class will contrive in five hundred words to say that college football is too commercial and bad for the players. close to of the other half will inform him that college football builds character and prepares one for life and brings prestige to the school. As he reads paper after paper all saying the same thing in almost the same words, all bloodless, five hundred words dripping out of no thing, he wonders how he allowed himself to get trapped into teaching English when he might have had a happy and interesting life as an linesman or a confidence man. Well, you may ask, what can you do about it?The subject is one on which you have few convictions and little information. Can you be expected to make a dull subject interesting? As a matter of fact, this is precisely what you are expected to do. This is the writers meaty task. All subjects, draw out sex, are dull until somebody makes them interesting. The writers job is to find the argument, the approach, the angle, the wording that will take the reviewer with him. This is seldom easy, and it is curiously hard in subjects that have been much discussed College Football, Fraternities, Popular Music, Is Chivalry Dead?, and the like. You will feel that there is nothing you can do with such subjects except repeat the old bromides. But there are some things you can do which will make your papers, if not throbbingly alive, at least less insufferably muffled than they might otherwise be.AVOID THE OBVIOUS CONTENTSay the assignment is college football. Say that youve decided to be against it. Begin by putting down the arguments that come to your mind it is too commercial, it takes the students minds off their studies, it is hard on the players, it makes the university a kind of circus instead of an intellectual center, for most schools it is financially ruinous. Can you think of any more arguments, just off hand? All right. Now when you write your paper, make sure that you don t use any of the material on this list. If these are the points that leap to your mind, they will leap to everyone elses too, and whether you get a C or a D may depend on whether the instructor reads your paper early when he is fresh and tolerant or late, when the sentence In my opinion, college football has become too commercial, inexorably repeated, has bought him to the brink of lunacy.Be against college football for some reaso n or reasons of your own. If they are keen and perceptive ones, thats splendid. But even if they are trivial or foolish or indefensible, you are still ahead so long as they are not everybody elses reasons too. Be against it because the colleges dont spend enough money on it to make it worthwhile, because it is bad for the characters of the spectators, because the players are forced to attend classes, because the football stars hog all the beautiful women, because it competes with baseball and is therefore un-American and possibly Communist-inspired. There are lots of more or less unused reasons for being against college football.Sometimes it is a good idea to sum up and dispose of the trite and conventional points before going on to your own. This has the advantage of indicating to the reader that you are going to be neither trite nor conventional. Something like thisWe are practically told that college football should be abolished because it has become too commercial or because i t is bad for the players. These arguments are no doubt very cogent, but they dont really go to the warmth of the matter. Then you go to the look of the matter.TAKE THE LESS USUAL SIDEOne rather simple way of getting into your paper is to take the side of the argument that most of the citizens will want to invalidate. If the assignment is an essay on dogs, you can, if you choose, explain that dogs are faithful and lovable companions, intelligent, useful as guardians of the house and protectors of children, subjective in police work in short, when all is said and done, mans best friends. Or you can suggest that those big brown eyeball conceal, more often than not, a vacuity of mind and an inconstancy of purpose that the dogs you have known most intimately have been mangy, ill-tempered brutes, incapable of program line and that only your nobility of mind and fear of arrest prevent you from kicking the flea-ridden animals when you pass them on the street.Naturally personal convic tions will sometimes dictate your approach. If the designate subject is Is Methodism Rewarding to the Individual? and you are a pious Methodist, you have really no choice. But few depute subjects, if any, will fall in this category. Most of them will lie in broad areas of discussion with much to be said on both sides. They are intellectual exercises, and it is legitimate to moot now one way and now another, as debaters do in similar circumstances. Always take the that looks to you hardest, least defensible. It will almost always turn out to be easier to write interestingly on that side.This global advice applies where you have a choice of subjects. If you are to choose among The Value of Fraternities and My Favorite High schoolhouse Teacher and What I Think About Beetles, by all means plump for the beetles. By the time the instructor gets to your paper, he will be up to his ears in tedious tales about a French teacher at Bloombury High and assertions about how fraternities buil d character and prepare one for life. Your views on beetles, whatsoever they are, are bound to be a refreshing change. Dont worry too much about figuring out what the instructor thinks about the subject so that you can cuddle up with him.Chances are his views are no stronger than yours. If he does have convictions and you oppose him, his problem is to keep from grading you high than you deserve in order to show he is not biased. This doesnt mean that you should always cantankerously dissent from what the instructor says that gets tiresome too. And if the subject assigned is My Pet Peeve, do not begin, My pet peeve is the English instructor who assigns papers on my pet peeve. This was still funny during the War of 1812, but it has separate of lost its edge since then. It is in general good manners to avoid personalities.SLIP OUT OF ABSTRACTIONIf you will study the essay on college football near the beginning of this essay, you will perceive that one reason for its appalling dullne ss is that it never gets down to bad-tempereds. It is just a series of not very seem generalities football is bad for the colleges, it has become too commercial, football is big business, it is bad for the players, and so on. Such round phrases thudding against the readers brain are unlikely to convince him, though they may well render him unconscious.If you want the reader to believe that college football is bad for the players, you have to do more than say so. You have to display the evil. Take your roommate, Alfred Simkins, the second-string center. Picture poor old Alfy coming home from football practice every evening, bruised and aching, agonizingly tired, s cable carcely able to shovel the mashed potatoes into his mouth. Let us see him staggering up to the room, getting out his econ textbook, peering desperately at it with his good eye, falling asleep and failing the test in the morning. Let us share his unbearable tension as Saturday draws near.Will he fail, be demoted, los e his monthly allowance, be forced to turn in to the coal mines? And if he succeeds, what will be his reward? Perhaps a slight ripple of applause when the thirdstring center replaces him, a moment of elation in the locker room if the team wins, of despair if it loses. What will he look back on when he graduates from college? Toil and torn ligaments. And what will be his coming(prenominal)? He is not good enough for pro football, and he is too obscure and weak in econ to succeed in stocks and bonds. College football is tearing the heart from Alfy Simkins and, when it finishes with him, will callously toss aside the shattered hulk.This is no doubt a weak enough argument for the abolition of college football, but it is a stack better than saying, in three or four variations, that college football (in your opinion) is bad for the players.Look at the work of any professional writer and notice how unceasingly he is moving from the generality, the abstract statement, to the concrete ex ample, the facts and figures, the illustrations. If he is writing on juvenile delinquency, he does not just tell you that juveniles are (it seems to him) delinquent and that (in his opinion) something should be done about it. He shows you juveniles being delinquent, tearing up movie theatres in Buffalo, stabbing high school corpuss in Dallas, smoking marijuana in Palo Alto. And more than likely he is moving toward some specific remedy, not just a general wringing of the hands.It is no doubt possible to be too concrete, too illustrative or anecdotal, but few inexperienced writers err this way. For most the soundest advice is to be seeking always for the picture, to be always turning general remarks into seeable examples. Dont say, Sororities teach girls the social graces. Say, Sorority life teaches a girl how to carry on a conver sit downion while pouring tea, without sloshing the tea into the saucer. Dont say, I like certain kinds of popular music very much. Say, Whenever I hear Ge rber Sprinklittle play Mississippi Man on the trombone, my socks slip up my ankles.GET RID OF OBVIOUS PADDINGThe student toiling away at his weekly English theme is too often tortured by a figure five hundred words. How, he asks himself, is he to achieve this staggering total? Obviously by never using one word when he can somehow work in ten. He is therefore seldom content with a plain statement like truehearted driving is hard. This has only four words in it. He takes ideal, and the sentence becomes In my opinion, fast driving is dangerous.Better, but he can do better stillIn my opinion, fast driving would seem to be rather dangerous. If he is really adept, it may come outIn my humble opinion. though I do not claim to be an expert on this complicated subject, test driving, in most circumstances, would seem to be rather dangerous in many respects, or at least so it would seem to me.Thus four words have been turned into forty, and not an iota of content has been added. Now this i s a way to go about reaching five hundred words, and if you are content with a D grade, it is as good a way as any. But if you aim higher, you must work differently. Instead of stuffing your sentences with straw, you must humble steadily to get rid of the padding, to make your sentences number and tough. If you are really working at it, your first draft will greatly exceed the required total, and then you will work it down, thus It is thought in some quarters that fraternities do not contribute as much as might be expected to campus life.Some people think that fraternities contribute little to campus life. The average doctor who practices in small towns or in the country must toil night and day to heal the sick. Most country doctors work long hours. When I was a little girl, I suffered from shyness and embarrassment in the presence of others. I was a shy little girl.It is absolutely necessary for the person employed as a marine fireman to give the matter of steam pressure his undi vided attention at all times.The fireman has to keep his eye on the steam gauge.You may ask how you can arrive at five hundred words at this rate. Simple. You dig up more real content. Instead of taking a couple of obvious points off the surface of the topic and then circling warily around them for six paragraphs, you work in and explore, figure out the details. You illustrate. You say that fast driving is dangerous, and then you prove it. How long does it take to stop a car at forty and at eighty? How far can you see at night? What happens when a tire blows? What happens in a head-on smash at fifty miles an hour?Pretty soon your paper will be full of broken glass and blood and headless torsos, and reaching five hundred words will not really be a problem.CALL A FOOL A FOOLSome of the padding in freshman themes is to be blamed not on anxiety about the word minimum but on excessive timidity. The student writes, In my opinion, the principal of my high school acted in ways that I belie ve every unbiased person would have to call foolish. This isnt exactly what he means. What he means is, My high school principal was a fool. If he was a fool, call him a fool. Hedging the thing about with in-myopinions and it-seems-to-mes and as-I-see-its and at-least-from-my-point-ofviews gains you nothing. Delete these phrases whenever they creep into your paper. The students tendency to hedge stems from a modesty that in other circumstances would be commendable.He is, he realizes, young and inexperienced, and he half suspects that he is dopey and fuzzyminded beyond the average. Probably only too true. But it doesnt help to announce your incompetence six times in every paragraph. Decide what you want to say and say it as vigorously as possible, without apology and in plain words. Linguistic self-doubt can take various forms. One is what we call euphemism. This is the tendency to call a spade a certain garden implement or womens underwear unmentionables. It is stronger in some era s than others and in some people than others but it always operates more or less in subjects that are touchy or taboo death, sex, madness, and so on.Thus we shrink from saying He died last night but say instead passed away, left us, joined his Maker, went to his reward. Or we try to take off the tension with a lighter clich kicked the bucket, cashed in his chips, handed in his dinner pail. We have found all sorts of ways to avoid saying mad mentally ill, touched, not quite right upstairs, feebleminded, innocent, simple, off his trolley, not in his right mind. Even such a now plain word as insane began as a euphemism with the meaning not healthy.Modern science, particularly psychology, contributes many polysyllables in which we can wrap our thoughts and blunt their force. To many writers there is no such thing as a bad schoolboy. Schoolboys are maladjusted or unoriented or misunderstood or in the need of guidance or lacking in continued success toward sitisfactory integration of the personality as a social unit, but they are never bad. Psychology no doubt makes us better men and women, more sympathetic and tolerant, but it doesnt make writing any easier. Had Shakespeare been confronted with psychology, To be or not to be might have come out, To continue as a social unit or not to do so.That is the personality problem. Whether tis a better sign of integration at the conscious level to display a psychic tolerance toward the maladjustments and repressions comed by ones lack of orientation in ones environment or But Hamlet would never have finished the soliloquy. Writing in the groundbreaking world, you cannot altogether avoid modern jargon. Nor, in an effort to get away from euphemism, should you salt your paper with four-letter words. But you can do much if you will hinge upon guard against those roundabout phrases, those echoing polysyllables that tend to slip into your writing to rob it of its crispness and force.BEWARE OF PAT EXPRESSIONSOther things bein g equal, avoid phrases like other things being equal. Those sentences that come to you whole, or in two or three doughy lumps, are sure to be bad sentences. They are no universe of discourse of yours but pieces of common thought floating in the community soup.Pat expressions are hard, often impossible, to avoid, because they come too easily to be noticed and seem too necessary to be dispensed with. No writer avoids them altogether, but good writers avoid them more often than poor writers.By pat expressions we mean such tags as to all practical intents and purposes, the pure and simple truth, from where I sit, the time of his life, to the ends of the earth, in the twinkling of an eye, as sure as youre born, over my dead body, under cover of darkness, took the easy way out, when all is said and done, told him time and time again, parted the best of friends, stand up and be counted, gave him the best years of her life, worked her fingers to the bone. Like other clichs, these expressio ns were once forceful. Now we should use them only when we cant possibly think of anything else.Some pat expressions stand like a wall between the writer and thought. Such a one is the American way of life. Many student writers feel that when they have said that something accords with the American way of life or does not they have exhausted the subject. Actually, they have stopped at the highest level of abstraction. The American way of life is the complicated peck of bonds between a hundred and eighty million ways. All of us know this when we think about it, but the tag phrase too often keeps us from thinking about it.So with many another phrase dear to the politician this great land of ours, the man in the street, our national heritage. These may prove our patriotism or give a clue to our political beliefs, but otherwise they add nothing to the paper except words.COLORFUL voice communicationThe writer builds with words, and no builder uses a raw material more slippery and elusiv e and treacherous. A writers work is a constant struggle to get the right word in the right place, to find that particular word that will convey his meaning exactly, that will persuade the reader or soothe him or startle or amuse him. He never succeeds altogether sometimes he feels that he scarcely succeeds at all but such successes as he has are what make the thing worth doing.There is no book of rules for this game. One progresses through everlasting look into on the basis of ever-widening experience. There are few useful generalizations that one can make about words as words, but there are perhaps a few.Some words are what we call colorful. By this we mean that they are calculated to produce a picture or induce an emotion. They are dressy instead of plain, specific instead of general, loud instead of soft. Thus, in place of Her heart beat, we may write, her heart pounded, throbbed, fluttered, danced. Instead of He sat in his chair, we may say, he lounged, sprawled, coiled. Ins tead of It was hot, we may say, It was blistering, sultry, muggy, suffocating, steamy, wilting.However, it should not be supposed that the fancy word is always better. Often it is as well to write Her heart beat or It was hot if that is all it did or all it was. Ages differ in how they like their prose. The nineteenth century liked it rich and smoky. The twentieth has usually preferred it lean and cool. The twentieth century writer, like all writers, is forever seeking the exact word, but he is wary of sounding feverish. He tends to pitch it low, to understate it, to throw it away. He knows that if he gets too colorful, the audience is likely to giggle.See how this strikes you As the rich, golden glow of the sunset died away on the eternal western hills, Angelas limpid blue eyes looked softly and trustingly into Montagues flashing brown ones, and her heart pounded like a prink in time with the joyous song surging in her soul. Some people like that sort of thing, but most modern re aders would say, Good grief, and turn on the television.COLORED WORDSSome words we would call not so much colorful as colored that is, loaded with associations, good or bad. All words except perhaps structure words have associations of some sort. We have said that the meaning of a word is the sum of the contexts in which it occurs. When we hear a word, we hear with it an echo of all the situations in which we have heard it before.In some words, these echoes are obvious and discussible. The word mother, for example, has, for most people, harming associations. When you hear mother you probably think of home, safety, love, food, and various other pleasant things. If one writes, She was like a mother to me, he gets an effect which he would not get in She was like an aunt to me. The advertiser makes use of the associations of mother by working it in when he talks about his product. The politician whole shebang it in when he talks about himself.So also with such words as home, libert y, fireside, contentment, patriot, tenderness, sacrifice, childlike, manly, bluff, limpid. All of these words are loaded with associations that would be rather hard to indicate in a straightforward definition. There is more than a true(a) difference between They sat around the fireside and They sat around the stove. They might have been equally warm and happy around the stove, but fireside suggests leisure, grace, quiet tradition, congenial company, and stove does not. Conversely, some words have bad associations. Mother suggests pleasant things, but mother-in-law does not. Many mothers-in-law are heroically lovable and some mothers drink gin all day and beat their children insensible, but these facts of life are beside the point. The point is that mother sounds good and mother-in-law does not. Or consider the word intellectual.This would seem to be a complimentary term, but in point of fact it is not, for it has picked up associations of impracticality and ineffectuality and gener al dopiness. So also such words as liberal, reactionary, Communist, socialist, capitalist, radical, schoolteacher, truck driver operator, salesman, huckster, speculator. These convey meaning on the literal level, but beyond that sometimes, in some places they convey contempt on the part of the speaker. The question of whether to use loaded words or not depends on what is being written.The scientist, the scholar, try to avoid them for the poet, the advertising writer, the public speaker, they are standard equipment. But every writer should take care that they do not interfere for thought. If you write, Anyone who thinks that is nothing but a Socialist (or Communist or capitalist) you have said nothing except that you dont like people who think that, and such remarks are effective only with the most naive readers. It is always a bad mistake to think your readers more naive than they really are. pallid WORDSBut probably most student writers come to grief not with words that are colo rful or those that are colored but with those that have no color at all. A pet example is nice, a word we would find it hard to dispense with in casual conference but which is no longer capable of adding much to a description. Colorless words are those of such general meaning that in a particular sentence they mean nothing. Slang adjectives like cool (Thats real cool) tend to explode all over the language. They are applied to everything, lose their original force, and quickly die.Beware also of nouns of very general meaning, like circumstances, cases, instances, aspects, factors, relationships, attitudes, eventualities, etc. In most circumstances you will find that those cases of writing which master too many instances of words like these will in this and other aspects have factors leading to unsatisfactory relationships with the reader resulting in unfavorable attitudes on his part and perhaps other eventualities, like a grade of D. Notice also what etc. means. It means Id like t o make this list longer, but I cant think of any more examples.