{"id":2466,"date":"2010-01-22T18:47:26","date_gmt":"2010-01-22T18:47:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/\/?p=2466"},"modified":"2010-01-22T18:47:26","modified_gmt":"2010-01-22T18:47:26","slug":"is-good-writing-a-matter-of-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/is-good-writing-a-matter-of-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"Is “Good Writing” A Matter Of Culture?"},"content":{"rendered":"
By William Zinsser<\/div>\n
A talk to the incoming international students at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, August 11, 2009<\/div>\n
Five years ago one of your deans at the journalism school, Elizabeth Fishman, asked me if I would be interested in tutoring international students who might need some extra help with their writing. She knew I had done a lot of traveling in Asia and Africa and other parts of the world where many of you come from.<\/div>\n
I knew I would enjoy that, and I have\u2014I\u2019ve been doing it ever since. I\u2019m the doctor that students get sent to see if they have a writing problem that their professor thinks I can fix. As a bonus, I\u2019ve made many friends\u2014from Uganda, Uzbekhistan, India, Ethiopia, Thailand, Iraq, Nigeria, Poland, China, Colombia and many other countries. Several young Asian women, when they went back home, sent me invitations to their weddings. I never made it to Bhutan or Korea, but I did see the wedding pictures. Such beautiful brides!<\/div>\n
I can\u2019t imagine how hard it must be to learn to write comfortably in a second\u2014or third or fourth\u2014language. I don\u2019t think I could do it, and I admire your grace in taking on that difficult task. Much of the anxiety that I see in foreign students could be avoided if certain principles of writing good English\u2014which nobody ever told them\u2014were explained in advance. So I asked if I could talk to all of you during orientation week and tell you some of the things my students have found helpful.<\/div>\n
So that\u2019s why we\u2019re here today.<\/div>\n
I\u2019ll start with a question: What is good writing?<\/div>\n
It depends on what country you\u2019re from. We all know what\u2019s considered \u201cgood writing\u201d in our own country. We grow up immersed in the cadences and sentence structure of the language we were born into, so we think, \u201cThat\u2019s probably what every country considers good writing; they just use different words.\u201d If only! I once asked a student from Cairo, \u201cWhat kind of language is Arabic?\u201d I was trying to put myself into her mental process of switching from Arabic to English. She said, \u201cIt\u2019s all adjectives.\u201d<\/div>\n
Well, of course it\u2019s not all adjectives, but I knew what she meant: it\u2019s decorative, it\u2019s ornate, it\u2019s intentionally pleasing. Another Egyptian student, when I asked him about Arabic, said, \u201cIt\u2019s all proverbs. We talk in proverbs. People say things like \u2018What you are seeking is also seeking you.\u2019\u201d He also told me that Arabic is full of courtesy and deference, some of which is rooted in fear of the government. \u201cYou never know who\u2019s listening,\u201d he said, so it doesn\u2019t hurt to be polite. That\u2019s when I realized that when foreign students come to me with a linguistic problem it may also be a cultural or a political problem.<\/div>\n
Now I think it\u2019s lovely that such a decorative language as Arabic exists. I wish I could walk around New York and hear people talking in proverbs. But all those adjectives and all that decoration would be the ruin of any journalist trying to write good English. No proverbs, please.<\/div>\n
Spanish also comes with a heavy load of beautiful baggage that will smother any journalist writing in English. The Spanish language is a national treasure, justly prized by Spanish-speaking people. But what makes it a national treasure is its long sentences and melodious long nouns that express a general idea. Those nouns are rich in feeling, but they have no action in them\u2014no people doing something we can picture. My Spanish-speaking students must be given the bad news that those long sentences will have to be cruelly chopped up into short sentences with short nouns and short active verbs that drive the story forward. What\u2019s considered \u201cgood writing\u201d in Spanish is not \u201cgood writing\u201d in English.<\/div>\n

\"feda2\"

Five years ago one of your deans at the journalism school, Elizabeth Fishman, asked me if I would be interested in tutoring international students who might need some extra help with their writing. She knew I had done a lot of traveling in Asia and Africa and other parts of the world where many of you come from.<\/p>\n

I knew I would enjoy that, and I have\u2014I\u2019ve been doing it ever since. I\u2019m the doctor that students get sent to see if they have a writing problem that their professor thinks I can fix. As a bonus, I\u2019ve made many friends\u2014from Uganda, Uzbekhistan, India, Ethiopia, Thailand, Iraq, Nigeria, Poland, China, Colombia and many other countries. Several young Asian women, when they went back home, sent me invitations to their weddings. I never made it to Bhutan or Korea, but I did see the wedding pictures. Such beautiful brides!<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t imagine how hard it must be to learn to write comfortably in a second\u2014or third or fourth\u2014language. I don\u2019t think I could do it, and I admire your grace in taking on that difficult task. Much of the anxiety that I see in foreign students could be avoided if certain principles of writing good English\u2014which nobody ever told them\u2014were explained in advance. So I asked if I could talk to all of you during orientation week and tell you some of the things my students have found helpful.<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s why we\u2019re here today.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll start with a question: What is good writing?<\/p>\n

It depends on what country you\u2019re from. We all know what\u2019s considered \u201cgood writing\u201d in our own country. We grow up immersed in the cadences and sentence structure of the language we were born into, so we think, \u201cThat\u2019s probably what every country considers good writing; they just use different words.\u201d If only! I once asked a student from Cairo, \u201cWhat kind of language is Arabic?\u201d I was trying to put myself into her mental process of switching from Arabic to English. She said, \u201cIt\u2019s all adjectives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, of course it\u2019s not all adjectives, but I knew what she meant: it\u2019s decorative, it\u2019s ornate, it\u2019s intentionally pleasing. Another Egyptian student, when I asked him about Arabic, said, \u201cIt\u2019s all proverbs. We talk in proverbs. People say things like \u2018What you are seeking is also seeking you.\u2019\u201d He also told me that Arabic is full of courtesy and deference, some of which is rooted in fear of the government. \u201cYou never know who\u2019s listening,\u201d he said, so it doesn\u2019t hurt to be polite. That\u2019s when I realized that when foreign students come to me with a linguistic problem it may also be a cultural or a political problem.<\/p>\n

Now I think it\u2019s lovely that such a decorative language as Arabic exists. I wish I could walk around New York and hear people talking in proverbs. But all those adjectives and all that decoration would be the ruin of any journalist trying to write good English. No proverbs, please.<\/p>\n

Spanish also comes with a heavy load of beautiful baggage that will smother any journalist writing in English. The Spanish language is a national treasure, justly prized by Spanish-speaking people. But what makes it a national treasure is its long sentences and melodious long nouns that express a general idea. Those nouns are rich in feeling, but they have no action in them\u2014no people doing something we can picture. My Spanish-speaking students must be given the bad news that those long sentences will have to be cruelly chopped up into short sentences with short nouns and short active verbs that drive the story forward. What\u2019s considered \u201cgood writing\u201d in Spanish is not \u201cgood writing\u201d in English.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the rest of the speech here at theamericanscholar.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

William Zinsser discusses how “good writing” is a matter of cultural difference. Here’s what he said in a talk to the incoming international students at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism on August 11, 2009:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11959,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,78],"tags":[25,26,935,27,28,30,31,936,937,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,938,41,939,42],"class_list":["post-2466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-random-thoughts-pop-culture-political-movie-television-blog","category-writing-tips-tricks-advice-help-script-screenplay-screenwriting-blog","tag-character","tag-characters","tag-culture","tag-emotional-toolbox","tag-etb","tag-film","tag-films","tag-journalism","tag-language","tag-laurie-hutzler","tag-movies","tag-nine-character-types","tag-screenplay","tag-screenplays","tag-screenwriting","tag-script","tag-scripts","tag-scriptwriting","tag-spanish","tag-tv","tag-william-zinsser","tag-writing"],"acf":[],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/30710870_10211699141895539_4496568718662303744_n.jpg",960,720,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/30710870_10211699141895539_4496568718662303744_n-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/30710870_10211699141895539_4496568718662303744_n-300x225.jpg",300,225,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/30710870_10211699141895539_4496568718662303744_n-768x576.jpg",768,576,true],"large":["https:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/30710870_10211699141895539_4496568718662303744_n.jpg",960,720,false],"ttshowcase_normal":["https:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/30710870_10211699141895539_4496568718662303744_n.jpg",125,94,false],"ttshowcase_small":["https:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/30710870_10211699141895539_4496568718662303744_n.jpg",75,56,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/30710870_10211699141895539_4496568718662303744_n.jpg",960,720,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/30710870_10211699141895539_4496568718662303744_n.jpg",960,720,false],"Image Size 500x500":["https:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/30710870_10211699141895539_4496568718662303744_n.jpg",500,375,false],"woocommerce_thumbnail":["https:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/30710870_10211699141895539_4496568718662303744_n-300x400.jpg",300,400,true],"woocommerce_single":["https:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/30710870_10211699141895539_4496568718662303744_n-600x450.jpg",600,450,true],"woocommerce_gallery_thumbnail":["https:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/30710870_10211699141895539_4496568718662303744_n-100x100.jpg",100,100,true]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"Laurie Hutzler","author_link":"https:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/author\/admin\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"William Zinsser discusses how \"good writing\" is a matter of cultural difference. Here's what he said in a talk to the incoming international students at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism on August 11, 2009:","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2466"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2466\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}