Americans’ speech habits that most use from cradle to grave follow a consistent pattern that often impedes them from writing well crafted sentences. For example, if someone says:
“Kay shaved her hair.”
In the above sentence ‘Kay’ is the subject, ‘shaved’ the verb, and ‘her hair’ the object: S-V-O. This is what we call a speech pattern that emulates the trite “John hit the ball.”
When people write (whether they write a letter, a simple note, or even writing autobiography), they bring their speech habits into their writing. That is why so much of the English newspaper articles, essays, journals, legal briefs, and fiction that we read today are so boring (if not soporific), even though the topics might be interesting. Just imagine your reading a long paragraph full of these S-V-O sentences. How many times have you, as a reader, found yourself setting a book down for good? Countless times no doubt. And all because many writers tend to write in the same way they speak. Humans -stubborn that we are– in general are unwilling to give up life-time habits, even knowing that they have to be abandoned. Are you a writer that clings to the S-V-O pattern of writing? If so, you aren’t alone for sure, you are in the company of armies of writers who do just that.
The Greek philosopher Socrates -who by the way never wrote a book-decried writing as a deceptive invention, and used to spend countless hours at the agora (the local market) yakking, arguing, and speechifying until his wife Xantippe would send someone to fetch him. Being a garrulous fellow, Socrates’ fear was that wisdom would ultimate reside in books rather than in mouth and the mind or in live dialectics. So he favored speech over writing. In contrast, Plato-Socrates disciple-was a writer, and his Platonic Dialogues are writing at its best.
In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, the god Thoth, the inventor of writing, is accused of encouraging mental laziness: ‘a sure receipt for memory and wisdom.’ Thoth was a terrible god! This is myth lore invented by Socrates and Plato to privilege speech over writing, for according to them, only speech and dialectics point to true knowledge.
Because Francis Bacon- the great Elizabethan courtier -thought that writing was the way to true knowledge, he went on to write many books. In the end, however, gossip and false testimony (speech), much to his ill-fortune, gained him a year in the London Tower; an incident that confirmed Bacon’s thesis that speech may be distorted more easily than writing.
As it is, today we realize that writing and books have become the depositories of wisdom. It is with the written word –essay writing tips– that new knowledge is created, preserved, and enlarged in the different levels of human endeavor. Even symbolic logic and mathematics need the written word to secure exact meanings. Scientists use written language to put forth their discoveries, their insights, and to falsify or verify them empirically. To wit: Galileo Gallilei’s Dialogues. Philosopher Jacques Derrida sees in writing-in-general an entire system that nourishes the human race-archi-écriture.
Should we write in the manner in which we speak? Absolutely not!
By writing in the same way that we speak, we take the easiest path to writing -the path of least resistance, which is really laziness- and end up overusing the soporific pattern “John hit the ball.” There’s neither beauty nor fairness in boring and disrespecting readers with the S-V-O pattern. Follow this excerpt:
She would not tell me what I wanted to know if she had wanted to. She would not take the time to even verify his date of birth. She was wide-eyed, blond haired, in her mid twenties, and obviously bored at the job. Her friends had nicknamed her ‘Bambi.’ I gathered that much, because she greeted my every request with the haunted look of a deer caught in the headlights. She said no to everything. I finally gave up.
How long can a patient reader take this abuse? There’s no sentence variation at all! In Mary Duffy’s Toolbox for Writers textbook you’ll find
