other publications
Why Write Better? From Weaving to Layering
Mark Lamden
It's only right
that poets win from every man alive
esteem and honor; for the Muse holds dear
the tribe of singers, and to them she's taught
her rules of song - the way to weave a plot.
(Homer, The Odyssey, Book VIII lines 481-85)
O gods, how dark the night that rules men's minds!
Precisely when he weaves his plot, he seems
a man most dutiful; he wins much praise
for what is wickedness.
(Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book VI, lines 474-77)
Historically, from oral to literate culture, from Homer to Ovid and beyond, storytelling has been compared to the art of weaving. Weaving involves the intertwining of multiple threads, carefully crafted for a specific end. A woven basket can carry things. A woven piece of cloth can keep you warm. A woven tapestry can colourfully represent a beautiful image. Skilled weavers create beauty by carefully choosing where and how often each thread comes to the surface of the tapestry, and into display; they create strength by weaving threads together. In these ways, skillful storytelling is like weaving - useful and powerfully effective. In similar ways, highly skilled writing today is like (uhhh)…is like...(umm)…what is that word?
Don't you hate it when this happens? You know, when that perfect word is "on the tip of your tongue," when you can feel its shape, when you can taste its potency? Arrggh, it's frustrating, and so unsatisfying to give up and move on, to settle on an inferior word. Then there are times when you just can't make yourself clear, and your reader exclaims, "It was Greek to me" (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 1.2.283). That can be so frustrating. Clarity and precision are important to all purposeful communication, except that which aims to confuse like propaganda. And the development of these communication skills and techniques produces life-changing benefits.
My only niece turned four yesterday. Every time I visit, she astounds me with her increasing vocabulary and language skills. It used to be really easy to play tricks on her - to confuse her simple logic. But it's getting harder and harder as she learns to decode my slippery sentences and layered meanings. And I see the same thing happening around me in college. Words and arguments that abuse and confuse students' ears in first-year start foaming at the mouth in third-year, and by fourth they're uttered accurately, expressing complex ideas. Like most skills and technologies, communication and writing can be used for what is good or what is wicked, to help or to hinder. This learned ability to understand and communicate complex ideas is of utmost importance in Canada and the world today.
Whether we like it or not, our world is influenced and controlled by the highly literate, by those who have the skills and technology for communication. Sources of literate influence are innumerable, including private corporations (retail, service providers, media), political powers (governments, lobby groups, unions), non-profit groups (humanitarian, religious, educational) and others (friends, teachers, writers). And the more influential of these sources skillfully use many of the tools of communication, including all forms of mass media (TV, print, theatre, Internet, radio, billboard) and personal correspondence (mail, email, telephone, face-to-face). And while most of these media involve more than just words and syntax, the powerful and most successful communicators are highly literate, and like Homer the ancient poet, they clearly understand the "rules of song - the way to weave a plot."
However, Homer's poems were not written; they were composed and recited orally, a very different skill from that of writing. In his book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Walter J. Ong writes, "Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness" (78). The skills of communication today are understood and employed with new methods, but built on the foundation of literacy, and orality before that. Literacy has transformed the word and the world and is a powerful and necessary tool for living well in society today. That is why at preschool my niece is taught to recite the alphabet, write her name, and make picture books including simple sentences. That is why at college I was taught to create a thesis statement, compose a paragraph, and write an argumentative research paper. And literacy skills are important beyond one's school years. The Conference Board of Canada reports that
Employees with higher literacy skills earn more income, are less likely to be unemployed, have greater opportunities for job mobility, are more likely to find full-time work, and are more likely to receive further training…A male with higher literacy skills makes an extra $585 000 over his lifetime. For females, the amount is $683 000. (Bloom et al)
And the benefits of higher literacy levels are not limited to the work world, but influence all spheres of life because language enables knowledge, and literacy further increases our capability for deeper understanding and abstract thinking.
Influential French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan argues "that truth is a function of speech, that outside of the use of language there is no sense to be made of the notion of truth, and thus that the real (or reality) external to the symbolic resources of language is also external to the categories of true and false" (qtd. in Lee 43). Without language, symbolic and moral thinking is impossible. However, without literacy, the capacity of language to actualize this thinking is very limited. It is through literacy, and skillful writing specifically, that ideas about truth are understood and communicated. Ong says that "[w]riting, commitment of the word to space, enlarges the potentiality of language almost beyond measure" (7). Writing can help you discover what you do not know, and conceptualize what you do know. It is a path to deeper understanding and self-knowledge, in that it requires ideas to conform to the logical rules of grammar. Nonsense becomes apparent as ideas are defined and clarified. In these ways, writing skills also increase one's ability to understand the communication and persuasion of outside influences.
Simply listing the sources and tools of communication above makes me feel defensive; it seems like most everyone is trying to convince me of something, trying to get my attention, time, or money. Like my niece, I don't want to be tricked; an important skill developed by reading and writing is the ability to understand when writing is propaganda, and when that propaganda is inappropriate. The very presence of propaganda throughout history emphasizes the potential power inherent in communication and its susceptibility to misuse. Skillful writing allows the writer to communicate images, emotions, stories, arguments, information, moral judgments and abstract ideas. Unskilled writing leads to miscommunication of complex ideas, producing undesired results.
Because writing as technology has transformed our culture from the purely oral culture Homer composed in, and literature takes forms other than storytelling, I approach contemporary writing using a new analogy, replacing weaving (an ancient art) with that of layering. There are two ways this can be visualized: the overhead projector, or a computer photo enhancing program (depending on how techie you are). In both examples, an image appears on the screen. Let's say the first image you have is a beautiful photograph of the prairies, with yellow fields of wheat and a big blue sky. This is laid down first, appearing on the screen. Then you carefully draw a maple tree on another transparency or a computer program. This image is placed on top of the prairie scene. Now you have a maple tree in Alberta on your screen. Layer upon layer, your image becomes more complex, with each layer contributing something on a different level - one adds colour; another adds bold outlines; another adds speckles, and so on. Writing is similar.
In setting out to write this chapter, I first spent time researching and learning about language and orality, literacy and writing. I started making notes on important ideas and gathering useful quotations. In this way, I began working on my first layer: research.
Based on my research, I started thinking about my argument, eventually creating a written outline. This process helped me personally to realize the importance of advanced writing skills. I now had two layers on the go. Next, I considered my audience in the hope of writing more effectively. The importance of knowing and deciding upon your audience is the focus of Kimberly Birkland's "The Audience: Not Just Mom and Dad."
With an understanding of my research, argument and audience, I started to think of how to bring this piece to life. What narrative structures could I use? What stories or analogies? How could I give this a Canadian feel? I wrote out my rough ideas in what became a third layer. As you know, I chose to use my niece, the creation of this chapter, and the analogies of weaving and layering to illustrate and compliment my research and argument. How stories plot our reality and develop our texts in relation to other texts is the topic of Michael Nixon's "The greatest Stories Ever Told: A Compilation." Donna Hancock discusses writing as a Canadian in "So, You Think You're a Canadian Writer, Eh?"
Next, I started to layer my stories, analogies and quotations onto my argument. Combining these layers forced me to rewrite certain parts, condensing and elaborating to avoid overlap and confusion. As I did this, my voice started to inflect the text. Reading portions out loud, I found my tone much too relaxed and colloquial, sounding unauthoritative and slightly sarcastic. So I continued to rework this layer. Issues of voice are discussed in "Who Am I? Finding Identity and Voice in Composition" by Beverly Faryna while Jason Crawford explains the role of jargon and slang in "Sometimes Slang Rocks! The Limits of Jargon."
Re-working the illustration of my niece led me to wonder about the truth and accuracy of my account. How close do I have to stick to the truth? What type of writing is this anyway? In "Lines in the Mud: Exploring Creative Non-Fiction" Aaron Pope tackles these questions, attempting to clarify very murky waters. At the same time, I wanted to work quotations and dialogue into the text. In "Dialogue Tips for Documentation" Anna Mullis explores the methods to develop this conversational layer of a text. And throughout the whole process, I continually analyzed the nature of the total piece, striving to be motivational, while avoiding the creation of propaganda, a topic discussed by Barbara Douglas in "Writers, Readers, Researchers: Beware! Propaganda Ahead!"
While the above layers are specific to the act of writing, layering can be developed in many other ways through the use of computer publication. This topic is important as electronic publishing increases and the use of physical print declines. Judsen Garside's "Hypertextual Juxtapositions: TBD" explains the nature and role of associative links and their relation to writers today.
To become a better writer, one must first recognize the importance of communication both personally and within society. Theorist Julia Kristeva, in explaining that texts are not only mediums of communication but are also in constant communication with other texts, writes that "any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation or another" (37). Texts, and most other form of communication, are composed of many layers, borrowed from all aspects of life, working together to create a new text which influences its writer, readers and all other texts. Writing is a skill that transforms the way we communicate and think. It's time to write better.
Works Cited
Bloom, Michael R., Marie Burrows, Brenda Lafleur, and Robert Squires. "Conference Briefing." The Economic Benefits Of Improving Literacy Skills In The Workplace. 1997. (http://www.nald.ca/fulltext/economic/p1.htm) (28 November 2002).
Homer. The Odyssey of Homer. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Bantam, 1990.
Kristeva, Julia. "Word, Dialogue and Novel." The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 34-61.
Lee, Jonathan Scott. Jacques Lacan. Boston: Twayne P, 1990.
Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.
Ovid. The Metamorphoses of Ovid. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. San Diego: Harcourt, 1993.
Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar. 3rd ed. Ed. T.S. Dorsch. London: Methuen, 1977.
©
Mark Lamden 2002
Fair Dealing applies