The Tao of Writing Poorly

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Photo by Rohma Abbas

By Charles Haddad

Riddle me this: What do the two passages below share in common?

- Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper which was very dangerous to all his men.

- Socrates was a famous old Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.

The answer to this riddle is twofold: Each of these passages was gleaned from the work of some of our best high school and college students. All of these students are practitioners of the Tao of Writing Poorly. This is the dark art of befuddling readers. The Tao represents practices honed through decades of trial and error.

Well, mostly error.

Mastering the Tao is not for the faint of heart. It requires an unswerving commitment to vagueness, passivity and bloviation. The Tao teaches its followers to favor the circular over the straight. It scorns all that's simple and direct. Exalted are the wooden, the unverified assumption and the cliché. A Tao master can stupefy any reader. His writing is as lively as a dead hamster.

A Taoist master knows that writing is nothing but thinking in its purest form. That’s why he tries so hard not to think. Rather, he strives to confuse complexity with comprehension, to confuse the quantity of his words with their quality. This is no small task, but luckily the Taoist is not alone. He has many high school and college professors to choose from as mentors. As one of my students recently put it, "Many professors are more impressed with quantity than quality."

Such professors encourage their students to practice the highest form of the Tao: the modern term paper. Considered the ugly duckling of modern prose, the term paper aspires to neither inform, challenge nor entertain. Rather, its primary function is to serve as filler. Term paper writing is designed to be read only by those, such as professors and writing coaches, who are paid to read it. After all, who would read such dreck without compensation?

Let's examine what un-distinguishes the Tao.

Taoists display a supreme self-confidence. Unclouded are they by introspection and doubt. Their lives are guided by a simple principle: "Always assume you're right." Such a concept liberates Taoists from the onerous duty of double checking facts, sources, spelling and grammar. They're free to write such wonderfully entertaining sentences as "Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world" and "mummies wrote in hydraulics." For the Taoist master, wikis, dictionaries and encyclopedias are for the weak; doubt is for sissies.

A Taoist boldly defies all grammar and syntax. Words are strung together willy nilly. Random is his punctuation or he doesn't deign to punctuate at all. Take your cue from this sentence from a young writer: "He has a sense of humor as well he wears a Ghostbusters uniform from time to time." He's well on his way to becoming a Taoist master.

The Tao teaches worship for the verb "to be." And little wonder. Reliance on it offers so many ways to hinder writing well. For one, it relieves a writer from the burden of building a large vocabulary of interesting and descriptive verbs. Verbs such as "galumph," "festoon" and "hector." Such descriptive verbs are the engines that drive a powerful sentence. But why bother with them if you intend to write sentences with all the oomph of a Smart Fortwo. Better to dull every sentence with "is, was, were, there's, to be" or "being." That ensures no one will ever accuse your work of challenging or entertaining readers.

Any true Taoist holds such bloviation dear to his heart. He strives to use three words when one would do. A committed Taoist would never just write "Mr. Jones said," but rather "Mr. Jones responded by stating." Nor would "Mr. Jones add." Instead "he would go on to say." See the difference? In each of these two examples, three words are doing the work of one. Think of it this way, as any good Taoist surely would: Words are used best as a smoke screen to conceal the fact that you have little or nothing interesting to say. The more the words, the better the cover.

When it comes to words, a good Taoist favors the wooden over the interesting or the descriptive. The best wooden words effectively deaden the music of any sentence or paragraph. Examples of wooden words include "implementation," "utilization" or "totalizing." Say these clunkers aloud and you almost hear the wood hitting the floor.

The most wooden words sound important while saying little more than a smaller one with the same meaning. Examples include "facilitate" for "ease"; "utilize" for "use" and my personal favorite, "conversate," for talking.

Many are his ways a Taoist has to feign insight and originality. He knows, for instance, how to belabor the obvious. This takes many forms. One is to re-inflate a cliché or tread worn idea like an out tire. Say, for example, the sun always rises in the East; Teenagers hate rising with the sun. Another involves taking credit for the obvious as your own insight. Consider the example below:

"Humans are creatures of habit, accustomed to their surroundings and sometimes a little uncomfortable to change their everyday routines. Urbanites are used to walking, hailing taxis and taking buses or subways."

I bet you never knew that.

A Taoist always favors complexity over comprehension. He knows how to hide the idea of a sentence or paragraph within a maze of detouring dependent clauses and non-sequiturs. Reading his work becomes a game of hide and seek. It takes a resourceful and determined reader to ferret out the meaning of a Taoist's words. Consider this beauty of obfuscation:

"The mythofucation of Abraham Lincoln was begun when, comfortably unaware of the danger that awaited him as he sat with his wife, Mary, at Ford's Theater, his life was terminated by assassin John Wilkes Booth, who, as a disgruntled Southern sympathizer, held Lincoln accountable for the Confederacy's inability to win its independence from the North."

What a magnificent blizzard of words; such detours in logic and sequence. I challenge anyone to find the main idea of this paragraph, let alone its subject. This paragraph also displays remarkable discipline. Not once does the writer stray into the active voice.

All those who aspire to befuddle readers: Let this paragraph serve as your guide. It represents Nirvana in the Dark Art of the Tao.

Charles Haddad is a professor at the Stony Brook University School of Journalism.