The Person on the Page

“The fun’s in how you say a thing.” Robert Frost

Probably because they assume I know a good deal more than I do, instructors often write asking me what I think are the most important aspects of critical thinking or reading. I usually answer by identifying two elements of critical reading I have focused on as both a teacher and a writer of textbooks: (1) the analysis of arguments, not just their reasons and conclusions but also their underlying premises and (2) the recognition of an implicit bias that reveals itself through imagery, allusion and what’s left unsaid.

For the record, I still think those are two of the most important topics to cover in a critical reading course. But lately, I’m inclined to add a third element to my admittedly brief list of absolutely critical topics, the notion of the “implied author,” a term used by the literary critic Wayne C. Booth. In the simplest terms, Booth’s “implied author” is not the actual author of the text. It’s the person conjured up by the words on the page. It’s the imaginary author the readers feel they know because they've read the author’s work.

I’ve been thinking about Booth’s concept because of a little book I recently read called “The Sound on the Page” by Ben Yagoda. I really liked the book and agree with Yagoda’s claim that “no truly transparent or anonymous style can exist: the many choices the act of writing requires will sooner or later betray a stance, an attitude, a tone.” In other words, a personality will come through in the writing, sometimes the personality is colorless, tedious, and earnest, as it all too often is in far too many textbooks (In a future post, I’d like to introduce a list of textbooks like Joseph Conlin’s American history text, "The American Past," which manages to be both informative and delightful to read. Textbooks like this one make teaching so much easier). But one way or another, a sense of the person behind the prose is there on the page, even if the writer did his or her best to appear totally objective and totally impersonal (although why anyone would even want to do that is not clear to me).

I think this idea of a personality emanating from the page is a valuable concept for students to consider because it could make them do what both Booth and Yagoda do: Look very closely at a text and pay attention to the many different devices writers use to create the personality they want readers to respond to. Among those things are word choice, use of formal and informal language, alliteration, references (or lack of them) to the self, sentence length, punctuation, imagery, anecdote, choice of simile or metaphor, presence (or absence) of example.

The list is very long, longer than the one I created here. To a large degree—obviously content plays no small role—these are the things that make the writer sound like a particular person, to sound, for instance, like an implied Harold Bloom or Maureen Dowd, to link two writers who couldn’t be more different. Bloom sounds passionately serious as if he emerged from the womb quoting Milton, and Dowd, in print at least, always seems to long for another life as a stand up comic.

What Yagoda also points out, with the help of lots of revealing comments from famous writers, is how writers struggle to evoke and even sometimes override the author they summon with their words. The essayist and novelist Anna Quindlen apparently thinks that she developed her written style from her battle with stuttering, “I think there’s clearly a link between trying to create a charming, erudite and coherent ‘voice’ on the page and being unable to use your voice easily in real life.” The novelist Juno Diaz talks about his ongoing battle with the person who turns up when he starts writing “I have problems saying what I need to say. That’s odd, because my personality tends to be blunt, straight-forward, outspoken. My written personality is nowhere near as dynamic. I have a hundred failed stories in my drawer, and they all have the mark of the writerly person I for some reason need to be.”

I think Booth’s concept and illustrations like those from Yagoda’s book could combine to make students better readers and writers. Students could, for instance, answer the question, “Whom do you want to evoke in the mind of readers when they see your words on the page.” As a group, students could analyze several pieces of writing by writers with a strong style or voice—I think Calvin Trillin is a good choice, Amy Bloom another-- and make a list of the kinds of devices they see these writers using. Trillin likes comic exaggeration, for instance, while Bloom often injects short, direct, personal commnets into her essays and reviews. Once the list is compiled, students could think about how they want to sound on the page and write a paragraph or two that calls up the person they want to be in print.

Starting at the Beginning, or God Bless Joseph Williams

When I was in graduate school, I got a “D” on one of my first papers and my professor told me that I should consider dropping out of the program because my writing was incoherent. I was aghast. I had always gotten As in high school and thought I was a good writer, not great but good.

When I asked the professor for suggestions about how to improve, he must have thought the task hopeless and was less than forthcoming. Since there was no way I was dropping out, I decided to teach myself how to write what I now realize was academic or expository prose. In high school, we had focused mainly on narratives, with the emphasis on telling a good story. But stories weren’t going to get me my degree. That was pretty clear.

Thus began a long struggle to learn how to write by studying what was considered good writing in academia. Along the way, I must have read—and still read—books on how to write. I found a lot of them useless, filled with general advice about the importance of things like clarity and coherence. That was all fine, but my question was this: What was a concrete way to achieve those things?

At some point in my search, I picked up a copy of Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace by Joseph Williams and saw what I had been looking for: step-by-step explanations on how to achieve clarity and coherence. In a marvelously straightforward fashion, Williams explained how to use sentence openings to keep readers following along as they moved from sentence to sentence. That advice can be summed up in a German proverb used in the book: “Beginning and end shake hands with each other. “

One key point Williams makes is the importance of sentence openings as directives, guides or, as he says at one point, “orienters” to what follows. In other words, when writers open a sentence with the word “Allegedly,” or “As numerous studies show,” they already alert readers to how the information about to come up should be viewed, the first one with a bit of suspicion, the second as potentially sound evidence.

Just as important, it’s at the beginning of sentences that the writer tells a reader, here’s how this new information arriving in the sentence you are about to read links up with what you’ve just learned from the previous sentence, in other words, how the new sentence shakes hands with the old.

Here's a perfect example of two sentences shaking hands: “President John F. Kennedy was, as novelist Norman Mailer wrote, ‘our leading man.’ Young, charismatic, and handsome, the new chief executive was the first president born in the 20^th century.” Sentence 1 introduces the notion of Kennedy as a glamorous figure. Sentence 2 opens by telling the reader, we’re still talking about Kennedy’s leading man image and readers know that because the writer has used adjectives associated with glamorous leading men: They are likely to be “young, charismatic, and handsome.”

Guided by Williams’s advice, I continue to find new ways to teach reading and writing students about the importance of sentence openings. I have developed a chart identifying the various signals common sentence openers or orienters (the chart goes way beyond the more typical, “for example,” “however”) can supply. Anyone interested in seeing the chart, adding to it, creating their own, or explaining why they do or do not think sentences openings are an important element of teaching reading and writing, please do comment or reply.