Tag: writing

Culture-Specific Writing Styles

~ Clarissa ~ 17 Comments

Blogger Steve, whose great blog you can find here,  made the following comment that I would like to address in more detail:

I read somewhere that different cultures have different styles of writing, and it had some diagrams, and one that I remember showed English culture as going straight to the point, but Spanish culture taking as long as possible to get to the point, and circling around it for a long time, and a lot of this also involved preference for the passive voice.

I have tended to think that beating around the bush is undesirable, and I agree with what you say about the passive voice. But I also wondered if that was just an Anglo-centric viewpoint, and was something I needed to become aware of, as others have implied that I need to become aware of my alleged white-centric viewpoint.

But then I think, you are more likely to have a Ukrainian-centric viewpoint than an Anglo one, and yet I agree with you about the passive voice, so perhaps it isn’t an example of cultural chauvinism.

For years, I preferred to write my research in Spanish and dreaded writing in English because precision and concision that are marks of a good writing style in English were completely alien to me. If Spanish allows for interminable, roundabout sentences, then Russian does so to even a greater degree. I can create a sentence with 15 dependent clauses that goes on for 20+ lines and uses a passive construction in every clause. I really dig writing this way, too, because it reflects my way of being so well. Learning to stop beating around the bush and just saying what I want to say was a long and painful process for me. It was very hard to get rid of all the verbal flourishes, all of the “It might be argued”, “One might be justified in venturing a suggestion”, “It should probably be mentioned”, “What seems to be in need of being pointed out in this situation”, etc.

When I first started writing in English, I thought it would be OK simply to transfer my very Russian writing style into English. I soon discovered that it was not acceptable, though. One of the reasons I started this blog was to learn to write in a way that would sound less Russian and would be more attractive to English-speaking readers. (I think this has been a very successful strategy and my writing has improved dramatically in the 2,5 years of blogging.)

Now, the question is: why are the writing styles in Russian and in English so different?

I believe that the vague, imprecise, never-really-coming-to-the-point, passive-voice writing style in Russian is a result of our painful and long history of political repression.

When I read Belinsky and Pisarev, my favorite XIXth-century Russian literary critics, I see a very beautiful, powerful writing style that is free of any trace of vagueness and imprecision. When Pisarev wants to say that Pushkin is an idiot, he does it without hiding behind any verbal flourishes. When Belinsky wants to say that women are downtrodden and abused in the Russian society, he does so in a crystal-clear and passionate way.

The roundaboutness and lack of precision gradually became the hallmarks of the Russian writing style as the twentieth century progressed. The Soviet censorship was so terrifying and careful that sneaking any marginally original insight by the censors required significant skill. Readers learned to decipher interminable sentences for any sign of mildly subversive reasoning. The art of writing simply, clearly and directly was lost because there was no use for it. Whether the knowledge of how to write in a less convoluted, passive style has any hope of being reborn in Russian-speaking countries will depend on how well the freedom of speech will be protected in our countries.

Observations on Student Writing

~ Clarissa ~ 20 Comments

As I shared before, my students did very poorly on their first essay. They did so badly that I couldn’t even give grades for their papers. So today we spent the entire class meeting rewriting the essay together. The students started rewriting their papers by hand, while I came up to each of them individually and discussed what was wrong in the paper and how it could be fixed.

And a very strange thing happened. A student who had produced a jumbled mess of God knows what in the paper he handed in, crafted a really outstanding piece of work by hand with almost no help on my part. It was original, profound, and a pleasure to read. Another student wrote a completely different paper, and it was so superior in quality to the original essay that I started wondering if the same person was the author of both pieces. And it was like this for almost single one of the students.

So now I’m wondering: how did this happen? Does writing by hand help them to write better? Or is the secret simply that in class there are no distractions, no noise, no Internet, no television, no music, and this helps them write well?

I am very surprised right now. After reading the papers, I felt quite desperate because I thought that this was a hopeless group where nobody was capable of writing a grammatically correct sentence. It turns out, however, that most of the students write very well.

Does anybody have an explanation for this strange phenomenon? And also, what should I do for our future written assignments? This is a Freshman Seminar that, of necessity, has a very strong writing component. We will write several more papers in this course. How do I ensure that no more poorly written papers are handed in to me by students who, apparently, are perfectly capable of writing well?

Impostor Syndrome

~ Clarissa ~ 7 Comments

Academics often share that they feel like an impostor in a variety of situations: while speaking at a conference, delivering a lecture, introducing themselves as Professor ABC, etc. I often feel like this when I talk to my students about how to write well. I’m sure most (if not all) of it exists only in my imagination, but I can swear I see them think, “You even speak with an accent, so who are you to tell us how to write well?” (And then I get nervous, and my accent becomes stronger, and I feel even more like an impostor, and so on).

This is why I was so gratified to read the following comment on Jonathan’s blog:

Students often seem bland to me, because what they write is generic. They give me a standard view of things, not what they really think when that is stripped away. On the other hand, bloggers like Clarissa or Z always have something interesting to say because they are very much themselves. It doesn’t even matter whether I agree with any particular statement they make or whether I think their personal viewpoint is generalizable to any other human being on the planet. Who cares?

See? I do have the right to tell students a few things about how to write well.

Anthony Trollope’s Writing Strategy

~ Clarissa ~ 9 Comments

Anthony Trollope was one of the most successful Victorian writers. He wrote over 80 very lengthy novels, travel books, and short story collections. The most curious thing about his prolific writing career, though, is that, all the time he was churning out his 800-page-long novels, Trollope had a full time job that had nothing to do with writing. Trollope worked for the Postal Service and his job often involved extensive traveling. So how did the writer manage to create so many high-quality works of fiction while working this very demanding job?

Trollope’s life-long regimen of writing consisted of writing for at least two hours a day every day irrespective of where he was or what he was doing. If his regular job required that he get to the office by 8 am, he would wake up at 6, write for two hours, and then go to work. On his extensive travels, he always managed to make a writing space for himself to fulfill his writing goal for the day. He had a diary where he recorded how much he managed to write each day. Days when no writing was done for reasons of health or family problems were also recorded.

Trollope didn’t come up with this strategy on his own. He learned it from his mother who, at the age of 51, had found herself with no money, a mountain of debt, a chronically depressed husband, and a bunch of children who relied upon her to provide for them even in adulthood. So Mrs. Trollope decided to become a writer. She would get up each morning – often as early as four am – and do her two daily hours of writing before assuming the endless duties of running a Victorian household. She didn’t create any masterpieces but the books she wrote allowed her to repay her husband’s debts, create a comfortable lifestyle for herself and her children, travel, and lead an exciting life of a bestselling author.

I gleaned these interesting facts from Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Trollope.