English Made Fun

Benjamin Dreyer is the Stephen Colbert of grammar, style, and punctuation—informative while always being cheerfully acerbic.

When he tells us in Dreyer’s English to never use actually, it is “because, seriously, it serves no purpose I can think of except to irritate.” When offering examples, Dreyer also gives us cause to smile. Honorary titles should be capitalized, as in, “Please don’t toss me in the hoosegow, Your Honor.”

You’ll have fun with this book whether or not you care or know that “the verb in a relative clause agrees with the antecedent of the relative pronoun”—not least because Dreyer hates that stuff too! Even as a decades-long copyeditor he still has to look things up in dictionaries and style guides. We should too!

His stance toward the nature of rules in English is one I have long advocated to authors. They are helpful, but don’t take them too far because spoken English profoundly affects written English (eventually, usually). And he chirpily breaks, bends, and bruises them all the time—once, for example, suggesting we “give it a good think,” right there in front of God and everybody.

Memorable tips abound. How do you tell if a sentence is passive (with the likely result of changing it to active)? If you can add “by zombies” to the end. “The floors were swept, the beds made, the rooms aired out.” Yep. Passive.

And here I can now confess that I could never keep straight the rule about restrictive and nonrestrictive commas because neither can Dreyer. But he has a dandy new name for it that makes all the difference.

Use the “only” comma, as he calls it, when the noun in question is unique. So “Lincoln’s eldest son, Robert, was born in 1843” because Lincoln only had one eldest son. But if more than one son could be under discussion and must be named for clarity—no comma. Thus “Lincoln in the Bardo concerns Lincoln’s son Willie.”

He also festoons his text with, well, I wouldn’t call them explanatory footnotes. They are more like asides. After offering three acceptable options for use of a possessive he concludes with, “You choose.†” At the bottom of the page we find, “†Psst. Take the middle option.”

What every one of you is wondering, of course, is how Dreyer’s English differs from my Write Better (available October 2019, since you asked). Dreyer’s book is a wonderful journey into the details of punctuation, grammar, and use of numbers, augmented by many lists of misspelled, misused, and miscellaneous words—all whimsically annotated. I say almost nothing about these things.

My focus is on larger strategies for writing which Dreyer does not —such as, how to find openings, focus on readers, develop a structure, battle writer’s block, be persuasive, make a compelling title, increase our creativity, use metaphors, and say more by saying less. The last part of Write Better considers how the act of writing affects our relationship with God.

The two books should be enjoyable and valuable companions.

The Struggle of Our Better Angels

We seem to live in unusually contentious times. Tensions between established ethnic groups and against new immigrant groups seems on the rise. Many wonder if peace and justice still have a place in our future.

In The Soul of America, Jon Meacham says the lens of history can offer a corrective perspective. Our current situation is not unprecedented. By touching on key conflicts and changes over the centuries, Meacham shows that our better angels have always had to struggle to overcome our lesser instincts.

The Civil War to end slavery was one such struggle. But the battle continued on new fronts, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries being one of the most obvious. The decades-long, hard fought struggle to gain women the vote in 1920 was another high point except that it took so much effort to achieve what now seems so obvious.

The powerful fear-mongering of media-savvy Senator “Play Fast and Loose with the Facts” Joe McCarthy in the 1950s was certainly a low point. Yet politicians of both parties were finally willing to challenge him. Soon thereafter the determined efforts of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and President Lyndon Johnson to overcome fear led to the passing of the landmark Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act of 1964 and 1965.

Throughout our history the doors of immigration have also alternately opened wider and narrowed through many cycles. The shameful internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was followed in the 1960s by widening the doors of immigration from Asia.

The three-steps-forward-two-steps-back nature of American history is not new nor is it easy. Meacham suggests nonetheless that this should be cause for hope about our present situation. After all, it will not last.

We are far from a perfect nation. But we are a country rooted in the propositions that “all men are created equal,” that all have a right to equal justice under the law, and that the freedoms of religion, speech, the press, and the right to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances shall not be abridged.

As we strive to live up to our aspirations for the future, says Meacham, we do well to remember our past.

Women in Mark’s Gospel

Ancient writers are known for sometimes considering women to be minor, unimportant, and perhaps not fully human. In the Gospels, that is far from the case. Women are not presented as lesser or one-dimensional beings. They are presented as people who show the full range of human agency, experience, and potential. Consider the array of characters we find just in the Gospel of Mark.

Sometimes women are simply recipients of grace such as Peter’s sick mother-in-law who was healed by Jesus or Jairus’s daughter whom Jesus raised from the dead (Mark 1:30-31; 5:21-24, 35-43). They are no less deserving of divine attention than men, regardless of their age or position.

In other cases women are honored overtly for taking public initiative to show their faith against the pressures of culture and circumstances. These include the woman who was sick for twelve years, the Gentile woman whose daughter was possessed, the widow who gave sacrificially to the Temple treasury, and the woman who anoints Jesus at Simon’s house with very costly perfumed oil (Mark 5:25-34; 7:24-30; 12:41-44; 14:3-9).

At least one woman is presented as evil. Herodias had long wanted to have John the Baptist killed for speaking against her divorce from Philip and marriage to Herod. When the opportunity arose, she callously used her daughter to have John executed without cause (Mark 6:17-29).

Women are also shown to have a complex mixture of faith and fear. Several bravely stood near the cross when Jesus’ male followers had deserted him. Yet two days later, after seeing the angel at the empty tomb, they fled in terror, afraid to tell anyone what they saw and heard (Mark 15:40-41; 16:1-8).

In short, women are presented much as men are—sometimes passive, sometimes evil, sometimes flawed, sometimes courageous. In the ancient world women were rarely allowed to hold positions of responsibility and were often treated much like servants. In contrast Jesus and the Gospel writers see women as full participants in the drama of humanity and of the kingdom.

New Look, New Book

This fall I’m releasing my new book, Write Better. To help celebrate that, we’re giving Andy Unedited a big facelift. What’s the new book about then?

Writing is hard work. So in Write Better I want to make the job easier, especially for nonfiction writers, and help them do it better. I’ve loved words, reading, and writing almost my whole life, and want to share what I’ve learned with others.

Why Write Better when there are already many good books on writing? First, many books on writing are actually memoirs of the writing life without much help on how to write. Many other helpful books get into the details of grammar, punctuation, and very specific style issues without considering broader topics. Write Better instead considers the larger issues of craft and art in writing, offering practical strategies on a wide range of topics.

Second, few books consider so deeply the spirituality of writing—that is, how the act of writing and publishing affects our life with God. The very personal and very public nature of writing can make us vulnerable in many ways. So I explore how knowing who we are and who we are in God make an enormous difference, as one example, when facing success or failure.

What are some of the things you’ll learn from Write Better?

  • Coming up with strong openings and closings can be difficult. I not only show the wide variety that are possible but offer very practical strategies for developing the best ones.
  • Being creative is not the sole domain of people who seem to have especially creative personalities. It is for all of us. In the book I show how we can develop these skills by following some simple, concrete practices.
  • Using story and narrative is vital for nonfiction writing, not just for fiction. You’ll find how to use narrative to touch not just the mind but the whole person, moving readers not just emotionally but to live differently.
  • Persuasion is often a dirty word these days. In the book I suggest how this time-honored skill can and should be redeemed and rehabilitated.
  • Working to develop the right tone in our writing can set our writing apart and give it a power that lasts in the lives of readers. In Write Better you’ll find out how.
  • On the issue of spirituality, writers can often bounce between great insecurity and a sense of superiority. I consider how to nurture, for example, the spiritual disciplines of humility and thankfulness which are especially important in properly ordering our relationships with God, with others, and with ourselves.

Having spent my whole career as a writer and editor, I am happy to offer a book on craft and character for writers because who we are as writers is as important as how and what we write.

The Seedbeds of Extremism

How frustrated are you? Really, how frustrated are you with the culture, the government, the economy, the church, your world, your career, your life? If you are a lot, you are a candidate for becoming a true believer.

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In his classic book The True Believer Eric Hoffer unpacks the dynamics of mass movements–who they attract, the phases they go through, the types of leaders they possess, how different groups react, and how they move forward or fail. His working hypothesis is “that the frustrated predominate among the early adherents of all mass movements and that they usually join of their own accord” (p. xii).

They are so dissatisfied with their present world that they are willing to wreck it for only the possibility of a new future. Their dissatisfaction extends to themselves–and as a result they are ready to give themselves over unconditionally to something greater than they are (their party, their nation, their religion, their race). Two generations after Hoffer’s book, J. D. Vance hints at some of these themes in Hillbilly Elegy.

But leaders and followers grow out of somewhat different soils of frustration. Hoffer observes, “Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some” (p. 29). Thus leaders of mass movements are often people of modest talent who yearn to join the elite but have been shut out.

When I first read this book fifty years ago, I thought it was a book of history about Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, the French Revolution, the Reformation, the rise of Islam–and so a book about a distant past. On rereading it, the book feels as current as today’s Twitter feed where political and religious true believers so often dominate.

It is hard to categorize this book. Hoffer, a longshoreman by trade, was called a self-educated philosopher but the book is more one of social and political psychology. He is dense, pithy, provocative, and intensely insightful. Each sentence is like an aphorism that could bloom into a book.

Consider one example: “Equality without freedom creates a more stable social pattern than freedom without equality” (p. 33).

Or this: “It is the sacred duty of the true believer to be suspicious. He must be constantly on the lookout for saboteurs, spies and traitors” (p. 125).

The True Believer was one of the most important books of the twentieth century. It deserves to be one of the most important of the twenty-first.

Thinking with Grace

In a world of extremist language on all sides, what saddens me most is Christians who fail to speak with grace, humility, wisdom, and love. In short, who fail to act like Christ. No, actually, what saddens me most is when I fail to.

Alan Jacobs puts his own advice into practice in How to Think. He winsomely walks us through important dynamics regarding how we can and should think and talk when we believe something strongly.

Jacobs highlights, for example, that “when people commend someone for ‘thinking for herself,’ they usually mean ‘ceasing to sound like people I dislike in starting to sound more like people I approve of.'” They forget that we are all influenced by others and by our communities. “Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social” (37). And terrifyingly social, because changing our minds can mean losing our friends, our family, or our community.

No one wants to be completely open-minded either. “No one wants to hear anyone say that, while there is certainly general social disapproval of kidnapping, we should keep an open mind on the subject” (126). And no one wants to hear that thinking requires balance.

Sometimes facts or reasons do come to light which should alter our views. We want to have commitment in our convictions along with the humility and honesty to hear different perspectives.

If we can shrink others to less than human or more than evil, then we can absolve ourselves of the need to open our ears and our minds. To listen takes courage. Yet, “working toward truth is one of life’s great adventures” (150). In that lies hope.

Why Do We Hate Each Other?

Why are Americans so at odds with each other? Why have so many people entrenched themselves in opposing camps, viciously vilifying each other? What has turned us into a nation of Us vs. Them?

Is cable news responsible? Did the Russians do it? Does it go back to Newt Gingrich or the Robert Bork confirmation?

In his book, Them, Senator Ben Sasse has a very unpolitical answer. It’s because, he says, we are lonely. We have fewer friends. We are more disconnected from our communities. So we grasp for a group to feel part of, to identify with. More and more that manifests itself in our political and social identities.

Since World War II single-person households have tripled to 26 percent. Technology has also pushed us into self-reinforcing corners where we just don’t encounter people as people who might have differing views. Other significant factors are at work as well.

Yes, cable news and radio talk showmen and show women have taken advantage of our situation. And yes, the Russians have fanned the flames too with more than 50,000 Russian-linked Twitter accounts fueling outrage by sending automated messages on both sides of issues. But these only feed on a pre-existing condition.

What’s the cure for our illness? The last half of the book offers several worthwhile remedies, from setting tech limits in our personal lives to building into a neighborhood or community to re-educating ourselves on how democracy works and what it stands for.

Sasse regularly says the book is not political in the sense of party politics or hot-button issues. He is right. The book is social and personal. When he does touch on political examples, he is to be commended for being very evenhanded–criticizing and praising as appropriate both right and left, both politicians and journalists, both Republicans and Democrats. Sasse models how we can treat each other as human beings, as fellow Americans who deserve our listening ear and our respect.

The Importance of Being Factual

The world is better than you think. Really? Really. Consider these–all based on UN statistics:

  • Life expectancy has risen worldwide from 31 years in 1800 to 72 years in 2017.
  • No country in the world has an average life expectancy of less than 50 years today.
  • The percentage of undernourished people has dropped from 28% in 1970 to 11% in 2015.

Continue reading “The Importance of Being Factual”