Second Thoughts

Maybe all simple writing isn’t good writing. In keeping with the post above, I decided to test a section from the King of Simple Writing, Ernest Hemingway. (The New York Times said Hemingway’s prose was “lean, hard” and “athletic.”) Here’s the first paragraph of The Sun Also Rises:

Robert Cohn was once a middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton. There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who was snooty to him, although, being very shy and a thoroughly nice boy, he never fought except in the gym. He was Spider Kelly’s star pupil. Spider Kelly taught all his young gentlemen to box like featherweights, no matter whether they weighed one hundred and five or two hundred and five pounds. But it seemed to fit Cohn. He was really very fast. He was so good that Spider promptly overmatched him and got his nose permanently flattened. This increased Cohn’s distaste for boxing, but it gave him a certain satisfaction of some strange sort, and it certainly improved his nose. In his last year at Princeton he read too much and took to wearing spectacles. I never met any one of this class who remembered him. They did not even remember that he was middleweight boxing champion.

Here are the scores:

Flesch Reading Ease Score:  68.9

Percentage of passive sentences: 15%

Grade-level: 7.8

So, apart from having a few too many passive constructions, Ernest met all of my criteria for simple – and therefore “good” – writing. However, I found this book to be the most pointless book I’ve ever read. (I did finish it, though, which was better treatment than All the Pretty Horses received. See post above.) But, the guy won the Nobel Prize, for Pete’s sake. Once again, what do I know? I should be shot for even standing in judgment against the guy.

I just know what I like.

Simpler is Better

Relative to my post above, is “good” writing really simple writing? My Mighty Brain objects, “No way! I’m too smart to write simple prose!” But, maybe simpler is better.

To wit:

Recently, I’ve been reading Cormac McCarthy – at the suggestion of a writing buddy. I read The Road and No Country For Old Men  and loved them both. The writing was, well, simple – and satisfying. Now, one of my rules is that when I find a new author (new to me, at least), try to consume three of his/her works before passing judgment on the quality of the writing. Well, the third McCarthy book I picked up was All The Pretty Horses. I hated it! In fact, I put it down after about 10 pages (and you should know that one of my other rules is that I never stop reading a book I’ve started). I did more than put it down. I put it in the garbage. No joke. So . . . I thought: I wonder how All the Pretty Horses scores on my readability stats listed in the post above. Here’s a section from All the Pretty Horses:

In the evening he saddled his horse and rode out west from the house. The wind was much abated and it was very cold and the sun sat blood red and elliptic under the reefs of bloodred cloud before him. He rode where he would always choose to ride, out where the western fork of the old Comanche road coming down out of the Kiowa country to the north passed through the westernmost section of the ranch and you could see the faint trace of it bearing south over the low prairie that lay between the north and middle forks of the Concho River. At the hour he’d always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life and the women and children and women with children at their breasts all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only. When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses’ hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys  naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and footslaves following half naked and sorely burdened and above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail in the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives.

Here are the scores for this section:

Flesch Reading Ease Score:  30.5

Percentage of passive sentences: 25%

Grade-level: 25.5

Now, I don’t even think there is a 25^th grade. Well, maybe for my brother-in-law the liver transplant surgeon. That guy was in school until he was about 35. Anyway, All the Pretty Horses won the National Book Award, so what do I know? I know what I like, and it’s simple writing.

What Makes Good Writing "Good"?

Ask five writers and you’ll get five different answers. It’s so subjective. (I was reminded of this recently at a critique group. I had just shared a piece of my writing that I was particularly proud of, and one of the people in the critique group said, “I don’t want to offend you, but that’s so bad, I can’t even talk about it.” Yow! I’d hate to hear what he would say when he was trying to offend me! ) Objective measures do exist, though. Here’s what I’ve developed over the years:

Flesch Reading Ease Score:  56 or higher. Rudolf Flesch designed this readability formula in the 40s. It measures the average sentence length in words and the average word length in syllables. The higher the score, the easier something is to read. The Gettysburg Address is a 65. The average insurance policy is a 10.

Percentage of passive sentences: Single digit. Perhaps it’s impossible to totally eradicate passive construction from your writing (particularly if you’re writing for a corporate audience, which I am during work hours). But you can get close!

Grade-level: 8^th grade or lower. Now, I know what you’re thinking. “I’m smarter than an 8^th grader!” No doubt. Consider this: The average adult reads at a 9^th-grade level and most popular fiction is written to a 7^th grade level.

The good news is that you can easily check how your writing matches up to these standards. In Word, use the “Spelling and Grammar” check under Tools. When the software is done analyzing your writing, it will give you a grade in Flesh Reading Ease, passivity and grade level.

Give it a try!