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Key points
- New studies show that writing is as much a science as an art.
- They demonstrate that the best way to learn writing is by understanding how readers read.
- Garner, Trimble, and Gopen are a trio of extraordinary teachers of writing.
When I was pursuing my master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania, one of my professors archly dismissed my prose as “nonnative” and referred me to the Office of Disability. In essence, I felt, he was sending me to the “stupid class” to learn basic English.
I, in turn, accused him of dereliction of duty, for he was surely supposed to help teach people like me—a Yemeni scholarship student—how to think and write better English. But he apparently considered it beneath him. So, stalemated, I decided to embrace the challenge alone and sought to become not just competent but the best bilingual writer possible.
For this, I would need to find myself some true teachers.
Having made it to the Ivy League, I decided to start with Ivy League presses. First on my list was the University of Chicago. That’s where I happened upon the brilliant writings of Bryan A. Garner—world-class lexicographer and grammarian—who has devoted his life to teaching others the language arts. His motto? “Fall in love with the language and it will love you back.”
Over the next months, I devoured virtually the entire corpus of his scholarship, including the fifth edition of his magnum opus, Garner’s Modern English Usage (GMEU), which runs nearly 3,600 pages, the longest book I have ever tackled. Garner smilingly calls himself a “snoot,” a coinage borrowed from his writer-friend David Foster Wallace that denotes a language-lover and word connoisseur—indeed, a language snob totally invested in the minutiae of grammar, language, and style.
Wallace, of course, was renowned for his exacting standards of prose. Wallace introduced Garner to the late Justice Antonin Scalia, reputedly the supreme stylist on the U.S. Supreme Court. Garner and Scalia jointly published a few books, some of which inevitably address the craft of writing.
While reading Garner, I found he kept mentioning his friend John Trimble, describing him as a “comforting mentor of writing"—whereupon I hunted Trimble down, too. Trimble, I learned, is a Distinguished Teaching Professor of English Emeritus at The University of Texas at Austin, where Garner gained both his BA and JD.
For several decades there, Trimble was renowned for his notoriously formidable seminar titled “325M: Advanced Expository Writing.” The “325M” designation, he says, alludes to the fact that he had taken three semi-normal writing courses and collapsed them into one monster. The “M,” therefore, he liked to joke, stands for “Masochism.”
Alas, neither I nor Garner had the fun of tackling 325M. I did not simply because I never attended UT, and Garner did not only because of a scheduling conflict his senior year. But both of us learned a ton about writing from Trimble, especially from his celebrated “non-textbook textbook,” Writing with Style: Conversations on the Art of Writing, now in its third edition and with over half a million copies sold.
In addition to Garner and Trimble, I also managed to acquire a third tutor, George Gopen, Professor of the Practice Emeritus of English at Duke University. I met Gopen through my readings, where his approach to the language has been aptly described as “revolutionary.” Gopen has graciously apprenticed me, and through him, I got to study the subtleties of English structure and syntax, summed up in his magnum opus The Sense of Structure: Writing from the Reader’s Perspective. Anyone contemplating a career in writing would be crazy not to read that splendid book, too.
In fact, Yellowlees Douglas, a contributing author for Psychology Today, recently published a tribute, lauding the Gopen method. It is titled, “The One Method That Changes Your—and All Students’—Writing,” in which she explains how revolutionary the approach of Gopen proves to be for herself and her countless scores of students. Douglas published a magnum opus with Cambridge University Press—The Reader’s Brain: How Neuroscience Can Make You a Better Writer—where she provided science-based tips for writing. Her approach aligns with the tradition of Gopen, suggesting she has been influenced by the article that Gopen co-published in The American Scientist, which she cited in her article.
Hence I stand on the shoulders of three giants now—Garner, Trimble, and Gopen. I devised my approach by melding the best of their three approaches: Garner, the expert on words; Trimble, on style; Gopen, on structure. All three men are brilliant writers—and teachers of writing.
Unfortunately, their pedagogical approaches are conspicuously absent in higher education, or at least in the schools I have attended in the U.S. (the University of Miami, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Minnesota). I had to hunt down Garner, Trimble, and Gopen independently and off campus, too. Douglas explained why those scholarships failed to become mainstream: (1) because they flouted orthodox rules of writing; and (2) because they failed to tie their revolutionary approach with scientific literature.
I do not think that someone could claim to teach writing well without engaging with the scholarship of this trio. And all three of them remain alive and well, leaving a legacy of teaching that, alas, is largely ignored in higher education. That doubtless explains why so much of academic writing is downright unreadable. Academics, who purport to care about diversity, but who seem to care even more about looking impressive, end up adopting a very convoluted style that effectively shuts out others, especially nonnative English readers like me. But I have never had a minute of trouble comprehending, and savoring, the prose of Garner, Trimble, and Gopen.
Instead, many academicians have the hubris to scold students for bad prose when they seem content to produce only gobbledygook themselves. I conclude that they are lazy and derelict, not to mention lousy examples for their students. If we want to talk about diversity and accessibility, we must all make it a point to write clearly. Most academics simply do not know how, thereby confusing mumble speak with impressively good prose. This is why, I argue, they need to turn students again themselves and go to school on Garner, Trimble, and Gopen.
