Washin the Dog

It was Jean Arthur who told me that you had to learn the rules before you could break them. That was the takeaway from her magazine writing seminar I took one Wednesday night about 3 years ago. It just so happened that was the night that I decided to go back to school. Reading Doug's post about the future of English majors definitely reinforces the notion that writing is still relevant. But the type of writing this guy was talking about was storytelling. How odd is it that it is THAT - simple storytelling that is in demand. Yet storytelling seems like such a silly, informal thing. It certainly isn't taught in K-12. Read stories - oh certainly, but writing stories - no way dude. You keep that crap to yourself.

Even in the writing program here I have had few opportunities to truly tell stories. The exceptions have been this class and my Writ 201 class, unless you include poetry. But poetry doesn't exactly sell iPhones. Or does it?

Anyway, breaking the rules. Yes. I've seen it. Though if it's well done, I think a reader should barely notice it. To me it should "work" so well that the alternative - following the rules would sound silly or be less powerful or not be as funny. But what strikes me as odd is that most of what we have read so far is remarkably "normal." I suppose that many of the rules of writing don't change all that much from genre to genre. Good science writing is good writing. Dyson quoting Einstein says "One may say the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility" (161). I suppose you could say the same thing about writing.

I suppose I don't yet know the rules or this would be easier to write. I did notice that a lot of these pieces are written in somewhat short, choppy sentences. Perhaps that's the way many scientists have been trained to write - heavy on the nouns, short on adjectives and concise as possible. There also seems to be a lot of first person...a LOT. I's and we's abound in many of these pieces. But I wouldn't call any of this daring. In fact, even the short, choppy sentences seem well-suited to the excitement that scientific discovery demands.

I suppose the rules really depend on the genre. Most of these writers wouldn't be caught dead without a clear thesis starting out their journal articles, but have no problem starting en medias res for a popular piece. I imagine the rules shift must be something of a shock for some of these folks, just like not using adjectives would be a shock for most of the folks in this class.