Style and the love of words
I recently read Style: An Anti-Textbook by Richard Lanham and was impressed. It doesn’t have a load of useful or immediately effective info in it, but what it does have is a clear, well-argued claim that the best way to teach writing is to instill a love of words and what they can do. Lantham indulges in a lot of snarky and very fun scalpelling of “The Books”–the traditional composition textbooks– as well as of the common bureaucratic-speak and academia fog machine prose. But he kept coming around to the idea that Style is not so much a love of clarity in the sense of limpid mountain pools but in the expressive sense of a style that attends to the purpose of the writing. In this way, even crazy, pull out your armhair and stab yourself with a #2 pencil postmodern speak has a purpose: to proclaim the writer a member of the secret Illuminati of semioticians.
What does this mean for next year?
One thing I want to work on is finding ways to introduce a sense of playfulness in language. Sometimes that can be accomplished by showing models of this (such as this review of the Hulk and this one of The Happening or even this one of the book How to Talk about Books you Haven’t Read). This I’ve done. The other is to try to play games. For instance:
- Will Shortz word games
- Scrabble
- Writing captions for the New Yorker cartoon contest
- Rewriting lyrics to songs
- Neologisms or slang dictionaries
- Online Word Games
