The Wordcraft Walk

Transcript of Helen Sword’s podcast episode The Wordcraft Walk

Hi, I'm Helen Sword from the WriteSPACE, and this is Swordswings, my podcast series for writers in motion. Whether you're out walking or writing in a car, on a train or a bus, or just moving around your kitchen, this recording will help you think about your writing in a way that moves it and you forward. 

My title today is The Wordcraft Walk in honor of my new six-week WordCraft course, where we're going to be really nerding out and focusing on grammar and syntax and how sentences work, the building blocks of language. So I really wanted to call this episode 'the syntax walk'; syntax describes the order of words in a sentence in English. And the order of words is very important for a reader's understanding of them. So, the syntax of a basic English sentence, the easiest to understand, is a noun followed by a verb. And that's you. You're walking. You are a body. Moving through space. Noun plus verb. You are a sentence. And the best sentences, the ones that stick in our reader's minds, are the ones that follow a similar pattern. A body. Moving through space, an object, something you can visualize going from one place to another. Of course, there are many, many exceptions to that, but the basic noun-verb (concrete noun + active verb) structure is a great one to come back to again and again to ground and orient our readers. 

I'm going to take you through a couple of examples of sentences that do that well and sentences that do that badly, and guess which category a lot of academic and professional writing falls into?! So we're going to be talking about how we can take the energy of, let's say, a good piece of fiction writing or descriptive writing and bring that into the kind of writing where we're talking about abstract ideas that we can't so easily visualize and perhaps that don't feel to us like they're moving anywhere. 

So, settle in, and off we go on our walk. I am gonna start you off with two sentences. The first one I'd like you just to listen to and try to visualize it as you listen. That will help fix it in your mind. 

The man in the red cap walked around the corner into a bakery, where he asked the woman behind the counter to hand him a loaf of sourdough bread from the highest shelf. The freshly baked bread was still warm and smelled like his grandmother's house on a Sunday afternoon. 

So there are lots of things there that you can visualize, that you can pick up with your senses. And my guess is that if I asked you to repeat that sentence back to me or to write it down for me, you would do a pretty good job.

You might miss a detail or two. You might miss the fact that the woman in the bakery got the bread down from the highest shelf because that doesn't seem to have huge significance to the story so far. But you'll probably remember the smell of the bread. You'll remember the fact that it's a bakery. You may remember that the man had a red cap. All those sensory details tend to stick in our minds. 

Now, I'm going to give you another example, and this comes from a highly cited book in the social sciences, which I will not name, two sentences of a similar length. And let's see how much you can visualize here. 

Full participation, however, stands in contrast to only one aspect of the concept of peripherality as we see it. It places the emphasis on what partial participation is not or not yet. In our usage, peripherality is also a positive term whose most salient conceptual antonyms are unrelatedness or irrelevance to ongoing activity. 

All right, let me guess. If I asked you now to repeat that one back to me, you would have a lot of trouble stringing those words together. You might not even remember what those words are. Likewise, if I asked you to paraphrase the two passages I've read to you, the first one, you'd be able to say, well, it's something about a man running, going for a walk, going into a bakery. You'll remember that it involves bread, a few things like that... Whereas if I ask you about the second one, maybe you'll remember that the words participation and peripherality occur a couple of times, but very likely, you won't be able to even tell me what was going on there. They're very difficult to paraphrase because they're very difficult to even interpret. 

So our goal here is to walk our way from writing like that second sentence to writing like that first sentence, even if we're writing about abstract, academic, or conceptual topics. And it's a challenging thing to do, but it really starts with grammar and syntax. It starts with understanding how a sentence works. 

A sentence, by definition, contains a noun and a verb, at the very least. It may contain many other things, and linguists talk about simple sentences, complex sentences, compound sentences, and compound-complex sentences. We're not going to go into any of that now. Let's just stick with a simple sentence: Noun plus verb.
Two key principles for us to keep in mind here. One is that the human brain favors concrete language. So we more easily remember and can talk about things that we could experience with our senses, even if we're just reading about them. And that man with the hat is quite a good example of that. 

The other key principle is that we remember and relate to sentences with some active verb where things are moving forward. You can get a lot of expressive power into those verbs. The verbs often are not just telling us where the sentence is going, they're also telling us how. So, in my first sentence, I said the man in the red cap walked around the corner, but I could have said he strolled around the corner, or sauntered around the corner, or slouched around the corner, or slunk around the corner, or dragged himself around the corner, or bounced around the corner.

Each of those will give us a really different impression, not just of how he walked, but perhaps what kind of mood he might be in, or whether he's coming for a positive purpose or a nefarious one. So one reason that we can remember those first two sentences is because they have so much sensory information in them. Most of it's visual. We have man, which doesn't tell us much, but the red cap gives us a little detail there. The corner, around the corner, the bakery, each of those things we might just be visualizing a little bit, though we don't know the specifics. The walking we can visualize. The woman behind the counter--Well, we don't know whether she was a young woman, or an old woman, or a tall woman, or a short woman, because she's just sort of an accessory here. But she reaches up, gets the freshly baked bread from that top shelf and hands it to him. And then we have the warm bread in his hands. And we have the smell. The bread smelled like his grandmother's house on a Sunday afternoon. I could have said the bread reminded him of his grandmother's house and made it more of an interior kind of thing. I've made it exterior. The smell is something anybody could experience, but the smell like his grandmother's house, which I've sort of shortened the detail that it reminded him of or invoked his memories of.

Now, we don't know why she always baked the fresh bread on a Sunday afternoon (maybe it was for lunch after church). But we're getting a little bit inside the man's mind with these details. So lots of visual details, a bit of touch with that warm bread, and the scent of the bread as well. 
So we might say, Oh, are we missing any senses here? And out of the five main senses, taste and sound are missing here. Well, we probably don't need to get taste in here. I think the smell of the bread is enough to invoke that, but it might be nice if you're writing and really thinking hard about bringing your reader in, you might think, Oh, could I bring a sound in here as well? Or maybe I don't need to, but to be constantly thinking about how to bring sensory experience to your reader is a very helpful way of making sure that your reader then wakes up on the page, knows where you are, has something that they can hang on to. This is a great principle to practice when you're out for a walk. 

I don't know about you, but for me, when I go for a walk, if I'm thinking about my writing or anything kind of research or academic-related, I often find that my mind goes kind of inward and I almost shut down the senses. So I stopped noticing what's around me and I can come back from my walk and perhaps have made progress with my ideas.
But I did that by shutting off the senses unwittingly, but it seems that I become very unmindful of my surroundings when I move into that kind of mindfully intellectual mode. So, a good counter for that tendency, if that describes you as well, is to be consciously mindful of your surroundings and to get in the habit of thinking descriptively.
How would I describe this to someone else? Some creative writing teachers advocate, for example, that you just notice five things (and you can write them down if you want to or not), but for each one, you should try to create a phrase that really locks it in your mind, that captures it for you. So it could be the sound of water dripping, dripping from the eaves just after the rainstorm stopped. Or it could be the sight of a kingfisher, diving across the surface of the stream to catch insects. It's nothing fancy, but you're just stopping long enough to visualize it, to give yourself a bit of descriptive language and the noun, the concrete noun, something you could see or hear or touch, and some details to go with that, including some kind of action. 

And the more you do that, the more you notice that kind of writing as well when you're reading. The easier it gets to remember to bring that kind of noun, verb, concrete, active energy into all of your writing. Academic writers have been almost trained out of it sometimes, certainly habituated out of it. We've been trained to think in abstractions. Using the kinds of abstract nouns that I refer to sometimes as zombie nouns, words like modification or antagonism. Useful terms, don't get me wrong, but we can't visualize them. We can't visualize antagonism. We might be able to visualize people or I don't know bulls, animals in an antagonistic or antagonized posture, but antagonism itself is an abstract noun and therefore has no kind of material counterpart or material presence. That makes it perhaps interesting conceptually, but it creates a challenge for our readers because as they're reading, they have nothing to hang their conceptual hat on. And that's what happened with that passage about partial participation and peripheral reality. In fact, those two sentences were full of abstract language with almost nothing that you could visualize.

We have participation, contrast aspect, concept, peripheral reality, emphasis, partial participation, usage, peripherality, positive term, conceptual antonyms, unrelatedness, irrelevance, activity… That's just too much to hold in our heads. And the sentence is not doing enough work to show the relationship amongst these different abstractions or to steer us towards what we should notice here. 

So what if we took those two sentences and tried to find the noun, the concrete protagonist or doer? And what if we tried to find some active verbs, some language of motion, of doing, to go with it. It's difficult when you're reading something that someone else has written and you don't really even fully understand it, but let me give it a go. 

So the first phrase: Full participation, however, stands in contrast to only one aspect of the concept of peripherality as we see it. 

Well, we've got people and we've got an action, but we don't actually know who the we are, as we see it, what we are we talking about? Are we talking about we, generally the authors and the readers and people in the world, or are we just talking about the authors of this piece? Who is saying this is how we see the concept of peripherality? I can't actually tell from the sentence, but let's go with the idea that we've got a couple of authors here, co-authors, who see something that they want to describe to the rest of us. So, as we see it, full participation stands in contrast to one aspect of the concept of peripherality. Whoops. Okay, now we need to define participation and peripherality. Give them humans doing things. A local habitation and a name, as Shakespeare puts it. So what is participation? We could describe participation by thinking of, for example, a group of kids in a playground participating in a ball game and peripherality would be standing on the sidelines, being marginalized, not being at the center. So maybe there's something here that the authors could be talking to us about. An example, when kids are on the playground, and they're fully participating. They're at the center of what's going on. They're passing the ball. They're shouting. They're running. Whereas the kids on the margins, on the periphery, are much more passive.

And how do we look at the relationship between those who are participating and those who are peripheral? So right now, I have come to understand those concepts a bit more, the difference between full participation and peripherality. I have something, again, to hang my hat on. I have a way of conceptualizing that image now. And once the author has given that to me, I can more easily begin to understand those big concepts like participation and peripherality. I have a context for them. 

So for you, walking along, let's give it a go. Can you come up with some noun-verb phrases that describe a thing and an action that you are observing right now? You could choose as your subject a bird or a tree or a static object like the spoon on your countertop and you could give it description, you could give it a motion. The tree waves in the wind. The tree rustles in the breeze.

If we want to invoke the sound that you're hearing, you could flip things around and make yourself the center of the sentence. I hear the rustling of the tree. I pick up the wooden spoon and stroke its sleek surface. I pick up the spoon and look at my distorted reflection in its steel bowl. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, but it's getting into the habit of thinking noun, verb, noun, verb. 

The next step from there is to think, all right, what noun and verb, what story could I tell to describe an abstract concept that I deal with? I've given you the examples of participation and peripherality. It doesn't have to be an example from your actual research. The people who are writing about participation and peripherality in the workplace could use an example from the workplace rather than the playground. 

But the point is to help our reader grasp what it is that we're talking about. Grasp how the abstract concept gets made real in the material world. One of my absolute favorite examples of how this works comes from a very famous speech, which is Martin Luther King's I have a dream speech. And I love the story of how he wrote this speech in advance.

He had to get it vetted by the police because they were worried that there were going to be riots. And it was so beautiful. It had some abstract moments, it had things that were a little zombie noun-ish, let's say. But as he was talking and he started to pick up steam, he actually veered from the script and famously he had the jazz singer, Mihaela Jackson, standing behind him as he was talking saying, "Tell him about the dream, Martin, tell him about the dream." So the famous part of the speech where he starts talking about "I have a dream", that part was spontaneous. It wasn't in the script that he had worked out in advance, but he was a preacher. He was trained in that rhetoric of detail and storytelling and repetition and poetry. He knew how to use his voice as well.

But even without his voice reading through the speech, you can feel the power of I have a dream. I have a dream. I have a dream. I have a dream. I have a dream today. I have a dream. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day... You know, he repeats that over and over and over again. So what are the dreams that he has? 
Well, it's a dream of equality, justice, right? It's a dream that has to do with abstract concepts, but he makes them real. And in fact, he has a sentence that does that, that almost makes fun of zombie nouns. I have a dream that one day down in Alabama with its vicious racists, with its governor, having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification. Zombie dance. One day, right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. Do you see how he's gone from those abstractions, those big heavy words dripping from the lips of the governor, and he's given us something we can see? Those little black boys and girls joining hands with those little white boys and girls. We see what the opposite of nullification is, right? 

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. There's only one abstract noun in that sentence, unless you count dream, but dreams feel pretty real, don't they? But the only other abstract noun is brotherhood. He saves it for last. He doesn't say, here's what brotherhood looks like. He shows us what brotherhood looks like. And then he tells us what the term is for it. He gives us the Red Hills of Georgia. A setting. He gives us the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners. So real people. And then they will be able to sit down together. There's that action, the active verb, sit down together. Where? At the table. Again, you can't get anything much more visual and verbal than active than sitting down together at a table. We know exactly what that looks like. And then he tells us the name of that table. It's the table of brotherhood. It turns out it's not a real table. It's a conceptual table. It's a symbolic table, but he gets us to that symbolic table through something that we can picture.

The same principle is something you can apply to your writing again and again and again. And the way you do it, you read back what you've written, or even as you're writing, you feel that weight of the abstraction, those words like interposition and nullification and participation and peripherality. And go watch my zombie nouns video on YouTube if you want a bit more on zombie nouns, what they are and why they have this effect of slowing everything down. You choose what are these, which of these concepts are really central to what I'm talking about. You don't get rid of them, then you don't say, "Oh, I'm not going to use the word injustice to describe injustice". Of course you are, but think about what's the picture. What's the action, what concrete noun and active verb could illustrate that concept to your reader. And then you put that into your writing first or as part of it. So you're not moving away from abstract ideas, you're grounding abstract ideas in the concrete universe. Concrete nouns, active verbs will anchor your more static and abstract conceptions that you're talking about. 

All right, we've walked a ways there. Your body, I hope, has moved through space from one place to another. And if I've helped your writing move someplace new as well, all the better. So, I look forward to walking with you again soon. See you later!

Helen