The Details Make It Real and Interesting

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I am working on the part of the book where Sam has just gotten married in the town of Derby, and now he and his wife, Elizabeth – his beloved “Tetty” – are back in Sam’s home town of Lichfield. They need to find a job for him as a teacher. He is 26, well educated and knowledgeable, but with no experience and no degree, the latter because he had to drop out of Oxford after just over a year because the funds to support him simply ran out. Tetty, née Jervis, by the way, is 46, and one scholar suggests that the reason the wedding wasn’t held in either of their hometowns (hers was Birmingham) was that the families on both sides were adamantly opposed to the marriage for many reasons.

It’s the kind of situation one can easily imagine playing out today as well. Sam is young, without financial prospects, and (unfortunately this was an issue for some people) ungainly and unhandsome. Tetty was recently widowed and at that age where, many would conclude based on stereotypes, her romantic prospects for the future were slender. The thing that often gets forgotten is that they liked each other, they were sexually attracted to each other, and, well, they were in love. So, the families railed, but Sam and Tetty got down to the business of finding an income for their household.

The way I try to write, as much as possible, is to be “finished” with a section or sentence or word before I move on to the next one. I don’t just quickly write just to get the facts down, with the idea that I will be revisiting all this and likely making some major editorial changes. Instead, when I write a sentence it is, at the time, what I think it will look like in the final book. However, the reason I put “finished” in quotation marks is that I know from experience, editing my own writing and that of others, that all writing will be changed to some extent once it gets re-read (and it should be re-read, and more than once). It’s probably true though that my writing will change less than the writing of those who write more in the “just get it all down now” style. No method is better: you have to write in the way that works best for you.

So.

I was writing earlier this week, and I not only came across an ad that Sam had put in a magazine to advertise for a school he would set up and take in students as boarders, but also because of the awesomeness of the internet – notably the various projects going on around the world to digitize older materials, usually universities either alone or in cooperation with projects such as the Internet Archive and the Hathi Trust ­– so because of that, I was able to sit here in my chair and read it (digitized) in its original form. Here are what the title page of the issue and Sam’s specific ad look like.

I was about to start writing about this ad when I suddenly realized that it was published in July 1736, and Sam and Tetty had gotten married in 1735. So once I did a little more research I realized that at first Sam just tried to get jobs, and it wasn’t until about a year later that he and Tetty made the decision to rent a building and set up his own school. As you can see from the ad, the school would be in a town called Edial, which is about 5 km west of Lichfield.

What happened after the wedding (five weeks after) is that Sam’s lawyer friend Gilbert Walmesley wrote a letter (a “reference”) in support of Sam’s candidacy for the headmaster position at the school in the town of Solihull, about 40 km south of Lichfield. The reply that came back a couple of weeks later (August 30) was a rejection. Sam wasn’t even interviewed – they simply took “some time to make enquiry of the caracter of Mr. Johnson” – and conclude that though he’s an excellent scholar and the job at Solihull might even be a bit beneath him, he also has some personal and physical faults which make them say no. They are referring here to his sometimes rough manner, his physical appearance (scars on his neck from childhood scrofula), and his tics and gesticulations which some scholars and doctors now think was Tourette syndrome.

So, no job, but if you have three more minutes, I can tell you a bit about his marriage, and what the next big step in his life was …

In Terms of “In Terms Of”

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I Googled this phrase at 7:14 a.m. on Wednesday, April 21, 2021, and there were 517,000,000 hits. It’s a phrase or word like any other in English in that its meaning and use have changed over time. It’s also a phrase that I resolutely never use in my writing, not because I object to change in language – I accept and embrace it – but because the way it is generally used these days results in a sentence that is either lazily written or, at worst, even ambiguous.

For example, just to take one of those 517M hits:

Canadians and Americans have relaxed in terms of following COVID-19 safety measures.

http://fopl.ca/news/leger-polls-canadians-and-americans-have-relaxed-in-terms-of-following-covid-19-safety-measures/

This is just lazy writing. The writer knows that Canadians and Americans are following COVID safety measures less stringently, and they want to link the two concepts – relaxed on the one hand, and COVID measures on the other – and has chosen the easiest go-to method of doing so: “in terms of.” There’s not really an ambiguity here: it’s just lacklustre and wordy. If you think about it for a minute, you can figure out that what they mean (or could have written) is “Canadians and Americans have relaxed their following of COVID-19 safety measures.”

There are cases though where the use of “in terms of” causes genuine ambiguity because it doesn’t specify enough the relationship between the two thoughts on either side of it. For example:

Talking in terms of the [housing] industry, salary represented approximately 15% of total compensation out of all the companies we analyzed, while other remuneration made up 85% of the pie.

https://finance.yahoo.com/finance/news/heres-why-equity-lifestyle-properties-053951949.html

This is typical of how the expansion of the use of “in terms of” starts to produce sentences in which you kind of know what the writer is getting at, but when you examine the sentence it is not reliably accurate. This sentence, for example:

  • It could (and probably is intended to) mean that in the housing industry, total compensation is made up of 15% salary and 85% other compensation.
  • It could also (literally but unlikely) mean that if you use the terminology (“terms”) of the housing industry, then total compensation, etc. … And the added ambiguity is that the sentence could imply that terminology such as “total compensation” is used only in the housing industry.

Again, just lazy writing.

But it’s gotten even worse because “in terms of” has mutated like a certain kind of virus. You often hear it when people are speaking, formally or informally – especially when it’s not from a prepared script, or when they have two ideas that they want to link together but they’re not able to do so on the spot, or when they think they sound fancy by dressing up what they’re saying with a few extra words.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do in terms of a dress for Mary’s party.”

“We’ve got lukewarm interest so far in terms of people signing up for the seminar.”

“This glossary is coming along nicely in terms of terms.”

I had a look at the Oxford English Dictionary to see when this scourge started. It provides this definition …

By means of or in reference to (a particular concept); in the mode of expression or thought belonging to (a subject or category); (loosely) on the basis of; in relation to; as regards.

… and cites the first work in which it was used in this sense as published in 1821! Voilà: “Contradictoriness … manifested, in terms of a certain degree of strength, towards some proposition or propositions, that have been advanced by some one else.”

So I was interested to see whether Sam Johnson used the phrase in that sense in any of his writings. Short answer: he does use the phrase, but not in that sense, at least for one of his major works. I did a keyword search through the entire text of all 208 Rambler essays (ah, how the luxury of an e-version so easily permits this). It is used only once, and not in the looser way as above: “All this, as I was no passionate lover, had little effect. She next refused to see me, and because I thought myself obliged to write in terms of distress, they had once hopes of starving me into measures.”

What about the dictionary of English that Sam himself published in 1755? Does it make any mention of “in terms of”? Do you have three more minutes to find out?

Sam and the Ossian Fraud

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I’ve been writing since I was about 15 (that was the mid-1970s). Three things I remember working on at that time were a novel (unfinished), at least one short story, and poems (execrable and happily lost for eternity). When I think of the fiction, it often reminds me of the old saw about writing, that a writer needs to find his voice. I didn’t have mine then. I remember feeling that my work was inadequate somehow because it lacked the detail about clothing and people’s features and the surroundings that I was reading in novels at the time. I later discovered that of course not all writers do that, that some rely on perfect single details, or use a very spare, minimalist style. That was encouraging. I also remember that one of the stories I read at the time was “Trois visions réfléchies” by Alain Robbe-Grillet. It, at least, was very different: what I remember is a passionless, geometric, highly detailed description of a space.

I started writing short stories in my own style around the late 1980s and continued writing them till the mid-1990s. I managed to get six published, and then in the late 1990s, after I moved to Boston where I lived for five years, I switched to writing novels. I never managed to get any of the novels published by a publisher, so I decided to self-publish what I considered to be the two best of the six I had written: Will’s Dead Wife, and The Killing Type.

After that, for various reasons, I either got tired of writing fiction or lost interest in doing so. That was about the late 2000s (when I was in my early 50s), and it’s non-fiction that I have been writing ever since. I’ve self-published two of them and am working on two more:

I mention all this detail to illustrate that I’ve spent a lot of time during my life writing, and even though I’ve never been even close to making a living from it – always had to have a day job – I’ve learned a lot from it, and continue to love writing, reading, and the words of this lovely messy thing we call the English language. Words matter and as a writer I’ve always tried to choose them carefully in order to achieve an aesthetic effect and to say exactly what I intend to say.

No writer can be fully convicted of imitation, except there is a concurrence of more resemblance than can be imagined to have happened by chance; as where the same ideas are conjoined without any natural series or necessary coherence, or where not only the thought but the words are copied.

Samuel Johnson, 1751

One of my favourite anecdotes from the life of Sam Johnson concerns fraud. That is, writing words which you claim are someone else’s. In Sam’s case it’s now known among scholars as the “Ossian fraud,” and it concerns the poet James Macpherson, a contemporary of Sam, who claimed that some poems he published in the 1760s were actually his translations of ancient Gaelic poems from the 3rd century CE (wikipedia has a good summary of the whole dirty business). Sam’s reaction to the affair is great, and if you have three more minutes I’ll even recount the letter that he wrote to Macpherson after Macpherson threatened him …

Editing Is Not Just Typos

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As I’ve mentioned on this blog before, for two solid years exactly Sam wrote a series of essays called The Rambler, which he published twice a week, one on Tuesday and one on Saturday. He started on March 20, 1750, and ended with number 208 on March 14, 1752. These were also not brief little things or the equivalent of Huffington Post listicles. An average Rambler essay was about 1,500 words, which is about six double-spaced pages from a modern printer. They had range like the HuffPost listicles, but Sam covered morals and the arts, and not so much “23 Things Women Are Tired of Hearing” and “Explaining The Logic Behind Candy Corn Hatred.”

His Rambler essays were enormously popular during the latter 18th century and are still viewed by scholars – and general readers who tackle the excellent but sometimes difficult prose – as great literary works. Boswell offered to bet that it was impossible for Sam to improve them, to which Sam replied that

I shall make the best of them you shall pick out, better. There are three ways: putting out, adding, or correcting.

James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. David Womersley (Penguin Classics, 2008), p. 997.

Deleting, adding, or revising. That’s not a bad succinct summary of what a professional editor does. There’s a narrow-minded myth shared by some people that you just need an editor to correct the typos in your writing and make sure your grammar is right. Sure, yes, they can do that, but there are at least two other ways in which editors can save any piece of writing. I couldn’t find a listicle about this, but they are providing advice to the writer about the entire structure of the work, and ensuring that the sentences are well written and make easy, intuitive sense to the reader, and are not just a brilliant toss-off from the writer’s imagination that the poor reader is left to struggle with, translate, or ignore and move on to the next paragraph. As in everything from advertising slogans to articles to standup comedy to short stories and big tomes of professedly literary novels, everything, everything depends on the quality of the writing.

I am writing not only my Sam bio but also co-writing with my financial planner a book about retirement planning. Some people assume that because I’m a professional freelance editor, at least one stage and expense I can save in those books is the hiring of an editor. That is definitely not true and the plan is to hire an editor (or two) before the books are published. Part of it is for the reasons I just cited, but another part is just having another person look at writing that seems fine to you. Yes, you can get your friends to read it or parts of it and tell you what they think, and that input is valuable, but they are not professionals and frankly in some cases they might not be objective (“This is great, Wayne!”).

I always imagine a book in layers. There’s the grand structure, the way you choose which chapters are going to be included in the book and in what order they are going to flow out in the table of contents. It’s similar within each chapter: choose your paragraphs and make sure they are in a logical order in order to encourage easy comprehension on the part of your reader. A paragraph or section that is out of place – too soon or early in the chapter, or not belonging to this chapter, or not belonging in the book at all – can stop the reader, throw them off, confuse them, and if it happens too frequently make them put the book away and look for better reading (and writing).

Well-crafted sentences are extremely important and within each sentence the words should be carefully chosen. A writer shouldn’t just spew out the first thing that comes from their head, call it imagination or inspiration, and consider it finished. That’s a recipe for the reader quickly dumping your book and going to their computer to search online for more listicles.

And it’s kind of then where we come to the typos and the grammar and syntax and the rest of it, the stuff that many people think are the only things that editors do. Please don’t misunderstand me: those things are very important. A book littered with typos or ungrammatical sentences will not inspire confidence in readers that the writer is someone whose thoughts are worth considering. They discourage the faith of the reader.

One of my favourite stories about editing – yes, people who are editors and have majored in English have favourite stories about editing – is by the textual editor, G. Blakemore Evans, of one of the authoritative modern editions of the works of Shakespeare. In the acknowledgments, his final thanks is to his wife, “who with truly Spartan endurance read aloud to me the complete text (including all the punctuation marks!).” * That’s true love.

Editing overall is one of those undervalued arts and sciences. It requires a pretty solid and comprehensive knowledge of the English language, from the basics to the niceties. And English being the messy beast that it is, editing requires a lot of judgment as well. Especially as the attitude toward the language has grown less prescriptive and more descriptive over the centuries, partly led by that impressive work of scholarship, the Oxford English Dictionary, there are often choices that an editor has to make, and those choices need to be made consistently and for a reason, keeping in mind both the reader and the writer. The editor has to play diplomat or prodder as well, convincing a categorical writer, for example, that this choice of word or this way of writing the sentence is just not conducive to being seamlessly understood by the reader.

And that, in a sense, is the main goal. The biography I’m writing of Samuel Johnson is explicitly aimed at the general reader, and so at every point where I make a choice about this or that, I always have that in mind. Is this episode minutia that the general reader won’t care about? Is this minutia, yes, but important to understanding Sam, so I have to write it in a way that makes it compelling? I may not always make the right call in my “final” draft, so I will rely on a good editor to help me a little.

* William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare (Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p. vi.

Woke

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Some read for style, and some for argument: one has little care about the sentiment, he observes only how it is expressed; another regards not the conclusion, but is diligent to mark how it is inferred: they read for other purposes than the attainment of practical knowledge; and are no more likely to grow wise by an examination of a treatise of moral prudence, than an architect to inflame his devotion by considering attentively the proportions of a temple.

Samuel Johnson, The Adventurer #137 (Februrary 26, 1754)

One of my favourite activities when I was head of the library at Carleton University was our celebration of Freedom to Read Week. Every year we put on at least the two core activities – an exhibit about freedom of expression and anti-censorship, and a public event on the main floor of the library where people read passages from books that had been banned or challenged in Canada. I always thought of it as poking censors in the eye: here we are in reading aloud in public from this book you want banned. Yes, it’s the early 21st century and some books are still banned and more often are “challenged,” usually by a concerned parent of a child attending a school where the library has a book in its collection that they consider inappropriate for one narrow-minded reason of another. The same thing happens in public libraries – and, I can say from personal experience, even in university libraries. The challenger usually wants the book moved to a more appropriate section of the library (e.g., from the young adult section to the regular collection), or sometimes wants it removed entirely from the library. Freedom of expression was and is a principle that’s very important to me and so I made sure that, with the help of staff in my office and throughout the library, we put on a good event every year.

There’s been a lot written in the last few years about the developing conservatism among young people (let’s say the youngest Millennials or the oldest of Gen Z), and a recent offshoot of that has been what’s called wokeness. Definitions of “woke” vary widely. It depends to some extent on whether you support the concept or not. Some people (I’m one of them) think of it as political correctness gone amok, whereas others believe strongly in it as, according to Merriam-Webster, being “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).”

There was an excellent (and very clearly written) article about it published anonymously earlier this week by “an American educator” in The Critic (and reposted by Zero Hedge). I found it scary and angering. Some excerpts:

  • “Schools are obsessed with sophomoric and divisive notions of diversity, equality, and justice; increasingly hostile to freedom of expression; addicted to cancelling anything that offends the woke movement; and prioritising activism over understanding as the goal of education.”
  • “White or Western students are told not to participate in cultural traditions of non-white, non-Western people – the oppressors cannot participate in the culture of the oppressed. For example, several white students who wore shirts with African designs were reprimanded and forced to change their clothes. The fact that the shirts were a gift from their teacher, a black African man, made no difference. The students wore the shirts to show affection for their teacher and to honour his gift, but that was still cultural appropriation. In another instance, a musician was reprimanded for blending a western and non-western musical style into a new artistic expression. The musician was accused of cultural imperialism.”
  • “Faculty are frequently pressured to identify their pronouns. Failure to identify one’s pronouns is seen as transphobic or cis-centric or both. Students can reassign their own pronouns at will. If a teacher mistakenly does not use the student’s preferred pronoun, the teacher is accused of misgendering. Misgendering is a serious offence, even a kind of violence.” (Cis refers to a person whose gender is the same as their sex at birth – e.g., I’m cis because I was born male and I consider myself male.)
  • “In place of free-thinking young scholars, you will begin turning out a generation of woke activists who believe that feelings matter more than facts, that perception is reality, and that it is more important to judge a text than to understand it – where ‘judging’ means anachronistically interpreting the author’s words in light of the most recent woke orthodoxy.”

For a person just trying to live their daily life, this is bad enough; if you are a writer or practice any other art (like that culturally imperialistic musician) it’s a zombie abyss. I attended by Zoom recently a reading by two young playwrights of works in progress. One was a young white Jewish woman who had written a piece featuring a Chinese woman who operated a Chinese restaurant. There was a Q&A at the end, and someone asked if she had had a Chinese person do a “cultural sensitivity reading” of the play. I cringed a little, thinking that of course she hadn’t, and was disheartened that she said that was a very good and important question, and yes, she had.

The idea is that if you write about or in the voice of someone whose race, gender, culture, or other aspect of their personhood you do not share, then you need it vetted.

As I write this, that kind of attitude feels like ridiculous parody to me, and the fact is that it is directly counter to the principle of freedom of expression. A writer writes, an artist expresses, and they do not require anyone’s permission in the choice of their subject matter or voice. As a cis white male (the worst of the worst, by the way) I believe that strongly. Free speech is more important than being insensitive to anyone’s culture.

The anonymous teacher writes a fair bit in the article about what they call “sleep-wokers,” that is, someone who goes along with all the crazy rules that woke true believers make or claim to make, but doesn’t really think about it too much. “They are like religious folk who say prayers without thinking,” says the teacher. The “sleep” part reminded me of another disheartening story that I read this week, about a visual artist whose contribution to Vancouver’s Capture Photography Festival was billboards with photos of people caught sleeping in public. Sounds innocent, right? Sounds like fun. But no. There was a barrage of complaints from citizens saying that the people looked like they were dead, and – save me, Jesus, on this Good Friday – the festival was forced to take them down. That’s sad and shameful and angering and heart-breaking all wrapped up into one. (Here are some of the photos.)

And that’s one of the dangers of being too woke or too sensitive: you lose tolerance for anything that upsets you, that moves you, that goes against your supposed values. That is not a good thing.

pronouns: I/me/mine