John Leo on writing well
I don’t want to make a habit of quoting from City Journal, but I thought this was good:
But writing isn’t a personal or private enterprise. It’s an attempt to change consciousness and change the world. In his book The Ethics of Rhetoric, Richard Weaver says that the right to utter a sentence is one of the world’s greatest freedoms. It is the “liberty to handle the world, to remake it, if only a little, and to hand it to others in a shape which may influence their actions.” Speech and writing constitute what Weaver calls “the office of assertion,” a force adding itself to the other forces of the world. Writing is power. If you write well, you can have an impact.
Bad writing, as George Orwell and John Leo have both said, also has an impact on the world. It is another kind of attempt to change consciousness:
In plain English, what does it mean when students “achieve a deficiency” or reach a “suboptimal outcome?” It means they failed. A “suboptimal outcome” is even worse in a hospital. It means the patient died. The airline industry sometimes speaks of a “hull loss.” What it means is that a plane just crashed. Here’s more twisted language: your doorman is now known as an “access controller,” and a receptionist is a “director of first impressions.” Hospital bills can be filled with such language. How about a “thermal therapy unit”—an ice bag—or a “disposable mucus recovery unit,” also known as a box of Kleenex?
Perhaps it would be better to say that poor writing can be a deliberate attempt to dull consciousness, to return us to a dependent state in which we don’t mind paying $27.65 for a disposable mucus recovery unit or $2 billion dollars a week to bring democracy to the Middle East.
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