So You Think Writing's Easy, Eh?

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
of the editorial page staff
published by the StarTribune
December 20, 1964


   UNTIL MY DISQUIETING contact with a college-level English text the other day, I'd thought that writing was a simple and orderly recording of thought, in the process of which you gnawed pencils to shreds, bit your nails, or beat an anguished tattoo on the typewriter while dredging for pungent phrases.
   Writing is much more complicated than that, the book shows.   It is everything from semantics and rhetoric to the proper length of paragraphs.
   As a result of this enlightenment, I may give up writing altogether.  I don't know enough of the rules and am too old to catch on.
   Up to now, writing has seemed as much fun as work--something to be done not only at a desk but while waiting for a bus or sitting in a restaurant after ordering a grilled cheese and awaiting its arrival.

   UNFETTERED by restrictions and prohibitions, ignorant of the true function of paragraphs, and not knowing a topic sentence from a gerundive, I've broken all the rules, ignored construction, and been warmed the while by self-satisfaction born of ignorance.
   Now, hunched over the typewriter, I am mired in a procedural morass, wondering how in the name of heaven I ever got involved in a craft which seemed, at first blush, to consist in merely putting words together to convey impressions, characterizations, opinions, mood, description and atmosphere.
   Completely frustrated, I've decided to counterattack, to condemn the book as appallingly wordy, as a flayer of the obvious, and a standout example of academic devotion to minutiae.
   I had not heretofore known that there were so many kinds of paragraphs.  They may be classified as "(1) thesis or introductory paragraphs, (2) transitional or organizational paragraphs, (3) concluding paragraphs, and  (4) ordinary--expository or narrative--paragraphs."
   True enough, no doubt.  Anyone who's ever composed anything more complex than a grocery list has employed all four of them.  But I doubt that many folks wrestle with the classifications or are even aware of them.
   And the paragraph, it is pontifically noted, is not a mere handful of sentences.  You begin with a clear notion of the total idea you want to present.  Then your chances of writing something coherent are good.  Anyone who didn't learn this in grade school is in bad shape.

   SOMETIME OR OTHER during the academic years I must have had a brush with the topic sentence.  The book nailed it down in a manner clear to any Philadelphia lawyer:  "A topic sentence is to the rest of an ordinary paragraph as a thesis or introductory paragraph is to the rest of the theme and as a transitional or organizational paragraph is to the paragraph that immediately follows it"
   There you have it.  And nobody, the reader is told, should attempt a theme without first preparing an outline.  Otherwise organization suffers.  I'm willing to let organization go right ahead and suffer.  An outline, in my opinion, for anything within the 1,000-word range, means unnecessary toil and torment and gets in the way of creativity.
   It might be the wrong approach but it seems to me that the English student would profit by being granted a free hand to write themes in his own manner for a couple of weeks before having his head filled with rules, some of which closely resemble gobbledygook.


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