Well Begun Comes Undone

"In the essay by the authors John Smith and Michael Jones is saying that men who have conversations with other men for joking and camaraderie but women conversate when they talk about relationships and emotions topics men can't discuss so they just offer advice."

The above is not an actual quote from a student essay, but we assure the Nation that it is a faithful attempt at verisimilitude, a taste of the kind of sentence that plunges us into an abyss of befuddlement.

The technical problem here is incoherence. Now, most people take offense if you tell them their writing is incoherent, but it's not an insult--it's a literal diagnosis: It means the piece of writing, either on the level of the sentence, the paragraph, or the entire piece, does not flow smoothly and/or logically from beginning to end.

In this case, the student is trying to say something like, "In the essay, John Smith and Michael Jones say men talk to other men because they enjoy the joking and camaraderie. Women talk to other women about relationships and emotional topics. Men often have trouble discussing emotions, so they may just offer women advice." Perfect? No. But at least a reader can follow these sentences from beginning to end.

What causes incoherence? We suspect some students simply lose track of what they are trying to say. Often, while agonizing over what to write, they stop midway through a thought to look for the "right" word. Not finding it, they simply pick up the sentence where they left off--perhaps forgetting that this was NOT the beginning of the sentence. It's tempting to blame our multi-tasking, shuffle-play, soundbite culture for this attention deficit disorder, but we know incoherence has been around longer than the internet.

What gets us is not so much the fact of incoherence, but its persistence. We understand why a student might write an incoherent sentence--we've been known to ramble off down a syntactical sidepath ourselves, leaving sentences behind us in a knotty mass of tangled words (and mixed metaphors). But we never let those sentences live to see confused eyes staring down at them. We read our sentences and recognize that what we have written is not, y'know, English. We don't understand why students seem unable to do the same thing.

Of course, some cynics will say that students don't bother to reread what they've written. In many cases, the cynics are right. But not in all cases. Sometimes, we point out a particularly egregious example of non-communicative prose, and students simply look at us, wondering what it is we want them to do. We say, "Look, what you've written here is 'A.' It's not clear what you mean. Can you tell me what you were trying to say?"

"Yeah, I was just trying to say 'B.'" More often than not, 'B' will be a straightforward statement using simple words.

"So, why didn't you just write 'B'?"

"Well, because that's how I talk."

Aha! Look, we know many writing teachers frown on "conversational" prose; they want students to master the polished phrasing of the academic world. But trust us, the more complicated the thought, the more necessary the need for simple words and straightforward sentences. As Kurt Vonnegut once pointed out, one of the most profound quotations in all of English literature--a sentence that encapsulates a fundamental dilemma of human free will--uses vocabulary familiar to a three year old: "To be or not to be, that is the question." No problem with coherence there.

As one who is constantly reminded of his own over-inflated vocabulary, the Solipsist would like to state emphatically that it is not the length of the words that matter, but the depth of the thought. Short, coherent sentences that build up an idea are always preferable to rambling monstrosities that aim to impress but serve only to bemuse.