The Stench of Turgid Prose, Part 3

Today's example comes from Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, a book not to be put down lightly, but (as Dorothy Parker would say) to be hurled with some force to a far corner of the room.

In Chapter 4 of The Da Vinci Code, we encounter:

Captain Bezu Fache carried himself like an angry ox, with his wide shoulders thrown back and his chin tucked hard into his chest. His dark hair was slicked back with oil, accentuating an arrow-like widow's peak that divided his jutting brow and preceded him like the prow of a battleship. As he advanced, his dark eyes seemed to scorch the earth before him, radiating a fiery clarity that forecast his reputation for unblinking severity in all matters.

Do angry oxen throw their shoulders back and tuck their chins hard into their chests? Maybe. I'll have to pay more attention, next time I'm around an ox.

We know what a widow's peak looks like. Is there really any need to say "arrow-like"?

If the widow's peak preceded him like the prow of a battleship, it must have been several yards long and quite heavy.

How do eyes seem to scorch something?

What precisely is a fiery clarity?

How does a clarity (fiery or otherwise) get "radiated"?

How does a fiery clarity forecast things?

Doesn't forecast mean predict? How does a clarity make predictions?

Does severity blink? Does it unblink?

Grade: D-minus. We get that Bezu Fache is ox-like, has a widow's peak, and has dark eyes. Fair enough. But please, don't tell us about eyes that seem to scorch things while radiating clarities that predict reputations for severity.

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The Stench of Turgid Prose, Part 2

In the novel Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood, by Angelica Garnet, we encounter this passage:

At first his appearance was unimpressive; without being fat he was short and fairly solid, almost stocky, usually dressed in unremarkable grey tweed. It was when he was seated that one became aware of the nobility of his forehead, completed by the curve of his aquiline nose, on either side of which was a pair of shrewd, hawk-like eyes.

Ms. Garnet, why are you telling us that someone's appearance was "unimpressive"? That's an editorial judgment on your part. Show the reader what the person's appearance was. Let the reader decide if it's unimpressive. (And BTW, the semicolon is wrong. It separates two complete sentences. Make them individual sentences, or else separate them with a colon, not a semicolon.)

"Without being fat, he was short": What does short have to do with fat?

"Fairly solid"? What does "fairly" mean here? For that matter, what does solid imply, in terms of appearance? A bowl of day-old Jello is fairly solid (arguably). A piece of modeling clay is fairly solid. What does it mean for a person to be fairly solid? I get no mental image from this at all.

What is "almost stocky"? Is that like "almost pregnant"? It seems to me someone is either stocky or not stocky. Almost stocky is like saying someone is almost tall. It means nothing.

"Usually dressed in unremarkable grey tweed": Why "usually"? You're telling us how he usually dresses?

And again, Ms. Garnet, you're editorializing with "unremarkable." Why are you telling us something is unremarkable when you should be showing the reader what the guy is wearing and letting the reader decide if it's unremarkable? Doesn't grey tweed say it all? No one has ever looked at grey tweed and said "Oh my God how remarkable! Look at that! It's grey tweed!" So stop editorializing.

I don't know what a noble forehead looks like.

I also don't know how a forehead is "completed" by a curved nose. And by the way, aquiline means "curved down like an eagle’s beak." Hence to say "the curve of his aquiline nose" is the same as saying "the curve of his curved nose." Stupidly redundant.

"On either side of which was a pair of shrewd, hawk-like eyes." Let me get this straight. On either side of his nose he had a pair of eyes? Wouldn't that mean he had four eyes?

"It was when he was seated that one became aware [of his appearance]": How does a person's appearance depend on whether the person is seated or standing? Specifically, how does being seated bring out the "nobility" of a person's forehead? Isn't your forehead your forehead, whether you're seated or not?

The passage comes down to this: We see a short, stocky man in grey tweed, with hawk-like eyes and a curved nose. That's all. Anything else the author was trying to say failed miserably.

I give a failing grade to the writer, the copy editor, the acquisitions editor, and any agent that was involved in signing off on this horrendously foul-smelling bit of verbal excrement. One hopes the same stench doesn't extend to the whole book. I won't be reading it to find out.

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The Stench of Turgid Prose, Part 1

In her book Elements of Fiction Writing - Beginnings, Middles & Ends, Nancy Kress cites a particularly egregious example of the kind of turgid writing that makes so many novels easily put-downable.

I feel certain that if you were to tie a prisoner of war to a chair and expose him to this sentence, you'd be committing a Geneva Convention violation of some sort:

He looked around the sparsely furnished room, spartan in decor, boasting only a dilapidated couch, a sawed-off bench, a crusty sofa, plus a few other knickknacks strewn about the otherwise bare and dusty floor.

First of all, if the room is sparsely furnished, why go on to say it's spartan in decor? Isn't that the same thing? (It's close enough that you should say one or the other. Saying both makes you look like a moron.)

Secondly, who's doing the boasting here? It could be "he" or it could be the sparsely furnished room. If it's the room, how does an inanimate object learn to boast? And if the room is spartan, what does it have to boast about?

Also, how is the sofa "crusty"? Was it beer-battered and deep-fried? Did someone order extra-crispy?

"A few other knickknacks" implies that the items listed previously were also knickknacks. How is a sofa (or a bench) a knickknack? I thought a knickknack was a curio or a tinket.

"Otherwise bare"? Why say that? You just told us the place was spartan. That means the floor is bare until proven otherwise.

So, but. How to fix this turd of a sentence? First of all, the stench of turgid prose can't be covered over with grammatical Lysol. Don't even try to polish a turd. Take it out back and bury it before it stinks up the office.

First things first. Always show, don't tell. When you tell the reader (explicitly) that the room is "sparsely furnished," that's telling. Specifying what's actually in the room is showing. Make the reader figure out that the room is sparely furnished. Say something like:

He surveyed the room. It contained a tattered sofa, a crude bench of some kind, and a spectacularly unremarkable throw rug. Plus dust. Lots of dust.

To me, "tattered" is a tad less vague (and less trite, if only slightly) than "dilapidated." I threw in the throw rug because it's something specific (rather than a bunch of nameless "knickknacks"), and just for fun I juxtaposed "spectacularly" with "unremarkable," to give the reader something to chew on. How can something be spectacular and unremarkable? Elephino. But it's more fun than just "unremarkable." Why be boring?

What if non-boringness were the main criterion for improving this passage? How creative would you be willing to get?

He coughed and winced when he entered the room. It was mostly dust, the accumulated dust of ten decades of neglect, contaminated only by a sofa, a crude benchlike thing, and several lumps on the floor.

Okay, that's over the top. But the author was clearly intent on describing a dusty, mostly empty room, remarkable for its spareness. Conceptually speaking, that's a tall order. How can a room be remarkable for what it doesn't contain?

He opened the door to the room and immediately wished he hadn't. The mere act of opening the door stirred up a blizzard of dust, an impenetrable fog of filth through which it was scarcely possible to make out the loveseat and bench that were the room's only contents.

This is far better than the original passage. We have the main character actually doing something: opening a door. We see dust not as something static (which it so often is) but as something disturbingly dynamic. "Sofa" is boring. Why not make it a loveseat? A little specificity never hurts.

Maybe there wasn't so much dust after all.

He opened the door to the room. The room was bare save for a badly discolored loveseat and a crude wooden bench that, like the broken flower vase on the floor, hid under a sad patina of dust.

All right, maybe patinas aren't sad. But you get the point. The original passage sucks major ass and can be made better with very little effort. It depends what you're trying to do. Are you trying to convey emptiness? Neglect? Loneliness? Repulsive filth? A place filled with forgotten memories? (Better get busy putting a dust-covered photograph on an end table.)

Let your imagination go bananas when writing a descriptive passage. Description is boredom, for readers, unless you go out of your way to enliven things.

Let's recap.

• Show, don't tell.
• Don't say something that's implicit in what's already been said.
• Don't commit a pathetic fallacy.
• Don't be trite.
• Don't be obscure. ("Crusty sofa.")
• Know your vocabulary. (Know what a "knickknack" is.)
• Don't be vague.
• Most of all: Don't be boring.

If you can do all that, you'll stay out of Nancy Kress's future books (and my blog), and your writing won't be the basis of any Geneva Convention violations. If you're lucky.

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On Being Open-Minded

You can cling tightly to your beliefs, or you can have an open mind. Decide which you want.

Clinging tightly to a belief is not a profitable strategy for learning new things. If you must cling to a belief, cling with a child's grip.

People who cling tightly to beliefs seal off their minds to input from others. That's basically what it comes down to.

The more firm beliefs you have, the more closed-off your mind is.

Clinging tightly to a belief makes the belief religious in nature, regardless of whether it involves God or not.

What are you religious about? Perhaps it's gun control, abortion, the death penalty, patriotism ("America is the greatest country on earth"), deficit spending, taxation, evolution, global warming.

If you have religious beliefs about non-religion topics, it means you have a closed mind. Never a good idea.

Why are you defending your own religiosity? Do you not see how that makes you look? How it makes you sound?

Having religious beliefs about non-religious things is absurd.

Having religious beliefs about religious things might also be absurd. Are you even open to that possibility?

"I don't have an open mind about certain things" is the hallmark of  a stunted mind.

Everything you know is wrong until proven otherwise. Proven, as with facts. Not with beliefs.

Don't be so defensive.

Take your mind out of the root cellar and let it breathe.

If you're confident in your beliefs, you can allow fresh ideas in without being defensive.

If you feel strong emotions (like anger) when debating a given topic, you're not being rational. Just admit it. Out loud. To yourself. To others.

Get off your high horse. You don't know half as much as you think you do.

"Doctrinaire" is a variant of "jerk."

Don't be a jerk.

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What's mediocre about America?

Umair Haque has written an article bemoaning the mediocrity of America. Some excerpts:

[W]hat is America still the best at? 

Consider this thought experiment. If you were really, really, really rich — say, not just part of the routinely opulent 1%, but a card-carrying member of the eye-poppingly decadent .01% — what part of your life would be American? If you had the money, I'd bet you'd drive a German car, wear British shoes and an Italian suit, keep your savings in a Swiss bank, vacation in Koh Samui with shopping expeditions to Cannes, fly Emirates, develop a palate for South African wine, hire a French-trained chef, buy a few dozen Indian and Chinese companies, and pay Dubai-style taxes. 

Were to you have the untrammeled economic freedom to, I'd bet you'd run screaming from big, fat, wheezing American business as usual, and its coterie of lackluster, slightly bizarre, and occasionally grody "innovations": spray cheese, ATM fees, designer diapers, disposable lowest-common-denominator junk made by prison labor, Muzak-filled big-box stores, five thousand channels and nothing on but endless reruns of Toddlers in Tiaras — not to mention toxic mega-debt, oxymoronic "healthcare," decrepit roads, and once-proud cities now crumbling into ruins. Sure, you'd probably still choose to use Google on your iPhone to surf the web — but that's about far as it'd go.

Well...

Snarky response #1: "This list is totally cherry-picked. It was probably written using American-made software on an American-made operating system running on a (possibly American-brand) computer with an American-designed and American-made microprocessor, making use of American cloud-computing resources. It was written for an American magazine produced by an American university, to which the author will most likely want to send his kids. And if he really feels like splurging, he'll fly them there on an American-made private jet, which will navigate using American GPS satellites. His kids, of course, will dream of starring in American movies made with American digital cameras, and driving American-made electric sports cars. If they happen to crash those cars, they'll be treated by American surgeons. Etc. etc. etc."

Snarky response #2: "OK, so if America's government launched a massive project to make sure that our country made the highest-quality, fanciest, most expensive cufflinks in the world, then we'd get a spot on Haque's list right next to British shoes and Italian suits, and so avoid the whole line of criticism?"

Snarky response #3: "British shoes??? Ha ha. Ha. Somebody has a sense of humor."

OK, but enough snark. In all seriousness, I just don't think that making niche brand-name luxury goods for the super-rich is an appropriate measure of greatness. By definition, the 0.01% of which Haque speaks are very rare; even in a world as unequal as ours has become, the middle classes spend most of the money. That's why Toyota is the world's #1 carmaker and Ferrari doesn't even crack the top 20.

In other words, a country doesn't necessarily get rich by catering to the rich. Nor is capturing the adulation of the 0.01% the only measure of a business' technical acumen and quality. Sure, it takes quality workmanship to make a nice luxury shoe. But how much more quality workmanship does it take to make thousands and thousands of Boeing jumbo jets that fly thousands upon thousands of times with a nearly perfect overall safety record? Sure, the super-rich probably turn up their noses at Boeing and fly on Gulfstream private jets (another American company, btw). But Boeing is the higher-tech, more impressive company, because successfully catering to all those middle-class masses is hard. Similarly, Wal-Mart has cheap products and ugly stores, but absolutely amazing logistics. And Caterpillar's machines may dig unglamorously in the dirt, but they are a marvel of engineering compared to even the nicest Italian suit. As for spray-cheese, well, just ask a 5-year-old kid whether she prefers that or a nice glass of South African wine.

Still - and I wouldn't have written this blog post otherwise - I think Haque does make a very good point. America does have a serious problem with our acceptance of bland mediocrity.

It's not our businesses or our products that are mediocre, it's our institutions. Our infrastructure, health care system, schools, and cities are, with a few exceptions, disgustingly mediocre. Haque mentions most of these. He makes a very good point.

Take a trip to Japan, and you'll be stunned at how easy it is to get anywhere. The train system is quiet, clean, comfortable, amazingly convenient, and runs on time. Even if you're out in the boonies and need to take a bus, those are much nicer than their American cousins. And it's nice to be able to use a bullet train to get from Osaka to Tokyo in three hours, without wasting two hours waiting for an airplane. (Note that these trains cater to the middle class, not the super-rich.)

Now, much of America is spread out, so it makes more sense to use care rather than trains in many areas. But our auto infrastructure, once the world's best, is decaying, and we're not spending the money to replace it. Meanwhile, in places where a Japan-style train system would make sense, I'm stuck paying $38 for a round trip to New York City on a train that averages about 30 miles per hour and uses old-fashioned paper punch cards. A better system would cost money that we are not willing to allow our government to spend. And it would require systemic reforms that we are not willing to allow our government to carry out.

Meanwhile, one has only to look at the international education rankings to know where we stand. A few simple reforms, like year-round school, increased teacher pay with more stringent qualification requirements, longer school hours, fewer vacation days, and increased ability to fire bad teachers, could probably bring us way up in the rankings. But we do not do these things. These things cost money that we are not willing to allow our government to spend. And they require systemic reforms that we are not willing to allow our government to carry out.

Our health care system, in contrast, is reknowned for its waste. In the case of health care, although the super-rich can enjoy the world's top surgeons, the average American gets worse health outcomes than Europe for a much higher price tag. We're willing to spend the money on health care, but we're not willing to bring in government to control costs.

And don't even get me started on urban blight. Just look at pictures of Detroit.

America's mediocrity does not stem from the failure of its companies. It stems from the failure of its governments - federal, state, and local. If we want to become an excellent country in all respects - if we really decide that we've had enough of mediocrity - it is our government which we must focus on improving.

...Oh, and guess what. America does make the world's fanciest cufflinks. What up now, Britain??

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The Power of Simple Prose

Sixty years ago this year, Nature published a trio of landmark papers in its April 25 issue. All three were concerned with the structure of DNA, which until then had not been elucidated.

The authors of one of the papers, Watson and Crick [1], won the Nobel Prize, even though their work was based on the efforts of the authors of the other two papers.

Molecular bond structure of DNA. The
pentagonal structures are ribose
moieties. The rungs of the ladder
are purine-pyrimidine pairs.

Few people now remember the papers of Franklin [2] and Wilkins [3], whose work made possible the famous Watson and Crick paper.

Maurice Wilkins began research on the structure of DNA in 1947, at King's College, London. Rosalind Franklin moved to King's four years later to work on the same problem. There was friction, however, between Wilkins and Franklin. Ultimately, Wilkins chose to discuss his frustrations—and laboratory findings—with Cambridge University's Francis Crick and Crick's charismatic young collaborator, James Watson.

On a January 1953 visit to King's, Wilkins showed Franklin's x-ray crystallography data to Watson (without Franklin's knowledge). Rosalind Franklin's work provided incontrovertible evidence of a helical structure for DNA, although (interestingly) she herself didn't believe her results required such a structure.

After meeting with Wilkins, Watson made some quick sketches in the margin of a newspaper, which he later showed to Crick. Four weeks later, Watson and Crick proposed their now-famous model for the structure of DNA.

Ironically, neither Watson nor Crick had worked directly with DNA, and their Nobel Prize winning paper described no lab work. It contained speculations based on the experimental findings of Wilkins and Franklin, and the unpublished work of a number of others.

Rosalind Franklin, whose work
made possible the Watson and
Crick paper, died of ovarian
cancer in 1954, possibly due
to exposure to x-rays in
her laboratory.

When it came to presenting their theories, Watson and Crick had a powerful secret weapon, something completely overlooked by Wilkins and Franklin: good writing.

The Watson/Crick paper was and is a model of exemplary scientific writing. It's brief, clear, simple, and to the point. In fewer than 900 words (half the number used by either Wilkins or Franklin in their papers), Watson and Crick made clear the salient chemical and three-dimensional features of deoxyribonucleic acid, leaving no doubt as to how the double strands of DNA are held together, saying: "The novel feature of the structure is the manner in which the two chains are held together by the purine and pyrimidine bases," and "only specific pairs of bases can bond together. These pairs are: adenine (purine) with thymine (pyrimidine), and guanine (purine) with cytosine (pyrimidine)."

Franklin wrote things like:

For a smooth single-strand helix the structure factor on the nth layer line is given by:

where Jn(u) is the nth-order Bessel function of u, r is the radius of the helix, and R and ψ are the radial and azimuthal co-ordinates in reciprocal space; this expression leads to an approximately linear array of intensity maxima of the type observed, corresponding to the first maxima in the functions J1, J2, J3, etc.

Wilkins wrote things like:

Third, if the nucleotide is extended as an arc of a circle in a plane at right-angles to the helix axis, and with centre at the axis, the intensity of the system of Bessel function layer-line streaks emanating from the origin is modified owing to the phase differences of radiation from the helices drawn through each point on the nucleotide.

Franklin and Wilkins got bogged down in prolix descriptions of their laboratory findings without emphasizing, in spare and elegant fashion, the importance of their findings.

The first paragraph of the Wilkins paper has 74 words contained in three sentences. Franklin's paper starts with 110 words in six sentences. By contrast, the first paragraph of the Watson/Crick paper is just two sentences long:

We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.

Watson and Crick thus laid the groundwork for one of the most important scientific papers of all time in just 25 words.

Watson and Crick also knew the value of short paragraphs. Their 843-word paper had 14 paragraphs, total. The papers by Franklin and Wilkins each had 18 paragraphs, but those papers had twice the word count of the Watson/Crick piece.

The secret of genetic reproduction is, of course, implicit in the double-helix structure of DNA, and one would think the implications of this might warrant special discussion in any paper announcing the breaking of the genetic code. What do Watson and Crick do? They throw in a simple one-sentence paragraph: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."

Talk about understated. Talk about minimalist.

Three papers; three different approaches. One Nobel Prize.

Is there any better proof of the power of simple, direct language?



References

1. Watson, J.D., Crick, F.H. A structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid. Nature 1953;171:737–738.[PDF]

2. Franklin, R.E., Gosling, R.G. Molecular configuration in sodium thymonucleate. Nature 1953;171:740–741. [PDF]

3. Wilkins, M.H.F., Stokes, A.R., Wilson, H.R.. Molecular structure of deoxypentose nucleic acids. Nature 1953;171:738–740. [PDF]


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What do econ blog audiences like to read?

People often ask me: "Noah, what kind of blog posts get lots of pageviews?" To which I reply: "I don't know, try asking Tyler Cowen, his blog gets 10 times the pageviews mine gets." But in any case, now that Noahpinion is wrapping up its second year (in its incarnation as an econ blog), I do have a little bit of data to share. So share it I shall. The information wants to be free!

First, here are my top 10 most popular posts so far:

1. EconoTrolls: An Illustrated Bestiary
A send-up of econ blog commenters, in the style of the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual.

2. Do property rights increase freedom? (Japan edition)
A reflection on what it would be like to live in a place where you have to pay for every little thing, all the time.

3. Niall, the British Empire is over. Accept it.
My small contribution to the Great Niall Ferguson Smackdown of August 2012.

4. In which John Quiggin intellectually pulpifies Steve Williamson
Me "taking the piss" out of Steve Williamson, as an Australian (like John Quiggin) would say.

5. Seven principles for arguing with economists
Another silly list, this time of rhetorical devices employed by econ bloggers (and probably by everyone else).

6. How Zero Hedge makes your money vanish
Me beating up on Zero Hedge, probably unfairly, as an excuse to talk about some cool results by behavioral economists.

7. College is mostly about human capital, not signaling
Advancing some rarely-discussed ideas about how college adds value.

8. How I survived the Econ Job Market
A few practical tips and some ruminations on the job market itself.

9. Money is just little green pieces of paper!
A debate about what "fundamental value" should or shouldn't mean.

10. What I learned in econ grad school
The post that really started it all, in which I recount the dissatisfaction and disaffection I felt in my first-year macro class.


So what kind of generalizations can I draw? Well, I'm not sure, but here are some guesses.

A) Cleverness and humor are gold, if you can get them to work. This is a tricky thing, because most of the time when we think we're being clever, we're not; I'd say about 10% of the things I write that sound clever to me get any sort of positive response from other human beings. In fact, most of my jokes never even get noticed...like when I called Art Laffer a "dead economist" in the EconoTrolls post (I still get people "correcting" me on that). But for those of you out there who are possessed of more natural wit than I...use it!

B) Blog fights are good if done intelligently. Let's face it: the average reader loves to see smart people go at it. Heck, I love it too. So when there is some contentious issue being hotly debated in the blogosphere, and you see some point that someone has missed, feel free to jump in and supply the missing argument. Of course, don't just charge in and write "Hey Greg Mankiw, you suck you suck you suck!!1!", or whatever. No one's going to take that seriously. Instead, focus on adding something valuable to the debate.

C) Lists of things seem to be popular. I suppose point-by-point lists are easier to read and digest than long-form essays. Hopefully that means people will find this post helpful.

D) People like insider stories. Everyone wants to know "what it's like". In my case, that meant what it was like to be an econ grad student. Or in the case of this post, etc.


Then again, drawing 4 conclusions from 10 observations is probably a massive exercise in overfitting. Look at other bloggers' most successful posts, and you'll probably see completely different things. Also remember that everyone has a different audience niche. For example, I don't post a lot of charts, but other bloggers do, and people seem to like it.

Also, note that I didn't mention the traffic sources. My top source of pageviews (by far) was Google, and Twitter is #2, but after that, my biggest chunks of traffic have come from being linked by three other bloggers: Mark Thoma, Paul Krugman, and Tyler Cowen. Also, Matt Yglesias, Barry Ritzholtz, Greg Mankiw, FT Alphaville, Andrew Sullivan, and the folks at Crooked Timber have provided a fair bit of linkage. But in particular, Mark Thoma and Tyler Cowen serve as the main "aggregators" of the econ blogosphere.

But also note that being linked by top bloggers is not the be-all and end-all of getting pageviews. Most of the posts in that Top 10 list were linked by a diverse array of people, often going "viral" on Twitter, Reddit, etc. The best way to get people to read your stuff, in the end, is to write stuff that people like to read...

Anyway, 2012 was a great year, and thanks to everyone who dropped by Noahpinion. Happy 2013, and happy blogging!

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