Philip Brown Says Freshman English Teachers Develop "Smart Writing"

Smart Writing

A fifteen year old secondary school boy who had been assigned the writing of a Christmas poem was still struggling at eleven O'clock the night before the poem was due, with two or three lame lines. Finally, having searched in vain for acceptable synonyms, he sagely remarked that he considered the meaning more important than the metre. I agreed and, as he trudged off to bed, I reflected upon some reading that I had just done in the works of an author with an extraordinary facility for rhyming. This particular author is scintillating, facetious, and resourceful, but my conclusion was that the particular cante that I had been reading did not meet the fundamental requisite of my clear-thinking, unsophisticated high school lad.

Freshman Tribulations

A very able freshman, whom I have known from childhood, has been laboring diligently on theme writing. There are times when he would forego a week's spending money to be rid of his weekly task of writing an English A theme. The youth has been doing exceedingly well in his other courses, but his marks on English A themes have not matched his other course grades. Partly to encourage him and partly to save him the long night hours, which 1, as a freshman theme writer spent grudgingly and fruitlessly, I have tried to help him. At first our united efforts were not successful in lifting his grades much above G. Then it was that I began asking him about the type of themes his instructor read aloud in class and about the latter's comments. What he told me and what our recent experiments have shown confirm my suspicious of long standing. This English A instructor admires what may be termed "smart writing."

Camouflage for Ignorance

"Smart writing" is good writing only from the superficial point of view. It consists of well-phrased "easy deductions," employment of striking adjectives and adverbs, rhetorical questions, subtlety that is not subtlety, at all, brevity that is not scholarly, and of innuendo to camouflage ignorance. In short, "smart writing" is attention to everything except the difficult task of weighting considerations and of truthfully appraising the proposition at hand.

Sophisticated Technique

English A instructors must, I suppose, concentrate on the expression of ideas rather than their abundance or soundness. In so far as the two objectives are separable, but I had dared to suppose that they would recognize two facts that it takes only a little experience in scholarly writing to appreciate: First, that the more involved and the more abstract the subject matter is, the more difficult becomes the writing: Secondly, that the more thoughtful and balanced one tries to be in one's judgement, the less one can rely on sophisticated devices of writing techniques and hence the less crisp and the less "to be taken over a cup of coffee" becomes such writing. I am sure that others share my conviction that it is easier to write "engagingly" when one is not rigorously intent upon the truth.

Dilettante Sophistry

There is no denying that "the world is still deceived with ornament"; consequently, the world is full of "smart writing." It is easy to arrest interest by the statement of extremes by pointing in humid, blesrre colors: every back writer known this. But what is the worth of all this dilettante writing which delights in dressing up half-truths in racy jargon and in tickling the fancy by turning commonplaces into paradoxes by standing them on their heads; the latter requires only a bit of sophistry which comes easily. For my part, I heartily disapprove of attempts of English instructors to develop easy, flippant writing, when such an endeavor requires the turning away from the difficult and serious treatment of concepts not easy to evaluate and sometimes exceedingly complex, and the adoption of a sort of Heywood Broun style of writing.

Heywood Broun

Recently I have been rereading those articles of Heywood Broun which are brought together in his book, "it seems to Me." It is easy enough to discern the man's talents and to see why it is that the sophisticated world "goes for him."In fact, I envy not a little his art of happy phrasing, dramatic power, conciseness, together with the whole bag of tricks which he has mastered. However, I think that all this brilliance and techniques make me dislike the more this man's writings for art in such a case makes palpable half-truths and even errors a which would be recognized as such if they were stripped naked of their glittering verbiage. Here there is no painstaking conscientious attempt to discover and portray truth whenever truth is not starting or when it calls for judicious balancing of content considerations. All is black or white in such writing. Truth comes usually in a gray mantle. Whether Broun in sincere but carried away by his emotions or whether he prostitutes his talents for the world's favor I know not., but I should surmise the former to be the case. I do know, however, that long after his flippant, scintillating judgments of passing events a have been forgotten, the scholarly but much more prosaic writings of men who have truth as their primary objective in writing will be prized.

Flashy Writing vs. Conservative

If English Composition instructors fall to realize that the primary consideration of writing and conversation is to arrive at truth, whether it be merely the truth shown by holding the mirror to life objectively or to one's own mind, or whether it be by the blazing of new trails of thought by rigorous and logical analysis, then their task certainly cannot be properly conceived. At present my impression is that certainly sent my impression is that the light-hearted, superficial but clever boy, given to extremes in thought and dress, is overrated and that the immature but serious boy struggling honestly to express in unadorned English now ideas, and trying always to appraise them judiciously, is underrated for lack of appreciation of what the youth conceives to be the basic purpose of writing. The question in its last analysis, is one's choice between the shown shoddy road of ultra extreme but passing fashion and the genuine all-wool garment of conservative cut