Spunk & Bite: A Writer's Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style

Never having worked with book publishers, my love of books and literature led me to fancy that book editors were of a higher caliber than those encountered by lowlife scribblers like me. Then I happened on a copy of Arthur Plotnik’s Spunk and Bite: A writer’s guide to punchier, more engaging language & style. The first paragraph of Chapter Two reads:

'Readers love surprise. They love it when a sentence heads one way and jerks another. They love the boing of a jack-in-the-box word. They adore images that trot by like a unicorn in pajamas.'

I'm here to argue with Plotnik.

Fact is, readers do love surprise -- but if the writer surprises 'em too often, readers often get confused.

A sentence that heads in one direction and then jerks in another can be highly effective when it's used to strike an irony or in some other way emphasize a particular point. But there again, the sentence that heads one way and jerks another can just as easily confuse as amuse the reader. Moreover, such a sentence is like any other rhetorical trick: It is boring if it's used too often.

Finally, I tell you I've asked everybody in my hometown and nobody has ever seen a jack-in-the-box word or heard a word go boing. Nobody here can tell me how a unicorn trots when it steps out in pajamas. Wanting to be as thorough as possible, I woke up the town drunk and asked him -- but even he has never seen unicorns trot around in pajamas.

I don’t know if Mr. Plotnik wrote that paragraph of his own volition or if his editor made him write it. The question is irrelevant because, either way, it had to pass an editor’s scrutiny. Thus my faith in book editors is shattered. My faith in Strunk & White is restored. So far from being persuaded by Plotnik, I am swayed in the opposite direction.

Plotnik's argument in Spunk & Bite is a straw-man, anyway: he claims that Strunk & White is some sort of cast-iron straitjacket that stifles creativity. In fact, it just isn't so. Strunk & White both sparks and aids creativity by urging that writers should neither waste words nor mince them.

Every art form requires tools. At minimum, the sculptor has a hammer, a chisel and a file, which he or she uses creatively to make statues. The writer's toolkit includes brevity, frankness, and accuracy, which he or she uses creatively to craft words into text. Brevity, frankness and accuracy literally form a tripod upon which all good writing will stand.

Straw-man argument is a logical fallacy. Argument from a fallacy requires dishonesty or delusion on the part of the rhetorician. Sure enough: Plotnik's delusions trot across the pages of Spunk & Bite in several different places. Take, for example, Plotnik's contention that because Strunk & White is old it somehow loses its relevance.

Brevity, frankness and accuracy have been watchwords in rhetoric at least since the time of Plato and Socrates. They were watchwords when Strunk & White was first written. They remain watchwords to the present day. When we say of a person, seriously, that 'He is a man of few words,' that statement implies respect and admiration because listeners understand that such a man is a powerful and persuasive speaker.

Cartoonist Matt Groening (The Simpsons, Life in Hell, Futurama) once quipped that those who can't sing rock 'n' roll, sing it anyway. The oldest (and perhaps most perceptive) joke in the academy is that those who can't do, teach. And so it is, I think, with writers: often it is true that those who run out of ideas to write about write books that tell other writers how to write or how to do business as a writer.

A joke like that would not stick to E.B. White, who, after he revised Prof. Strunk's little old style guide, went on for many years composing some of the best essays and children's stories anybody ever wrote. Such a joke MIGHT stick to Mr. Plotnik, who inflicted this awful style guide upon us and who, it seems, never writes about anything else.

About Spunk & Bite, then, Deke Solomon sez: Go to the bookstore. Pick up a copy and see how it smells to you. I say it's a stinker but you're entitled to your own opinion if you've got $16.95 you have no better use for. ( )

You want to write a Blog, an article… oh anything in public in fact, well in the USA you have to deal with the style police. In Britain, they are known as the green ink grannies and are gently ignored; we don’t do earnest. Well we almost did with A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, by Henry Watson Fowler which suggested about the split infinitive that the

…English-speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; (2) those who do not know, but care very much; (3) those who know and condemn; (4) those who know and approve; and (5) those who know and distinguish.

Thankfully this was by the 80’s revised away from prescriptive American style policing so we are free to keep to the high standards of writing where expression is more important then style. Hmm, may have to come back to this.

But write in America and you judged by the book of truth, the book of righteous writing, the book correctness which all Americans know as The Elements of Style. Its roots go back to 1918 where William Strunk, Jr. wrote a 43-page booklet for the good students of Cornell University. And like all sensible guide for students was mainly ignored. But then in 1957, E.B.White, one of the top 20th century literary essayists (and yes author of Charlotte’s Webb) wrote a piece praising the now largely forgotten William Strunk defence of lucid English. This led to the first edition that originally detailed eight elementary rules of usage, ten elementary principles of composition, "a few matters of form," and a list of commonly misused words and expressions. By the 80’s and the 3rd edition, this had bloated up to Fifty-four pointers, along with a list of common mistakes concerning individual words: Eleven rules of punctuation and grammar; eleven principles of writing; eleven matters of form; and twenty-one reminders for a better style.

What Spunk and Bite by Arthur Plotnik (yes we get the pun but in Britain, you have now managed to create an embarrassed silence where we pretend not to have heard you) does is to challenge the prescription of dead white upper class Americans without arguing for do you own thing writing-see told you I would come back to it. To liven your writing, you need to know the rules, but then know when to break them. Be lucid but be fun and avoid at all times clichés except if they warm the cockles of your readers’ heart.

One of the tips I have taken up is to subscribe to various words of the day to build up my wordbank. Two of my rave faves are vindictivolence, the desire of revenging oneself, and pinkwashing. This is using support for breast cancer research to market products, particularly products that cause cancer. All in all it comes up with 30 tips to sparkle up your writing that range from inventing words, changing the grammatical function of a word , having strong openings and closings, use semi-colons and dashes to break up sentence but above keeping in mind that the writing needs to make the content interesting.

Let’s leave the final words to Arthur Plotnik:

Perceived correctness can be comforting to the reader, like a tidy house. But what distinguishes a piece of writing is the ambiance- the environmental mood- the language we create…tend to be judged on…aptness, inventiveness, colour, sound, rhythm…Spunk and Bite is our shorthand for such qualities… ( )

http://bookchronicle.wordpress.com/2008/04/25/spunk-and-bite-by-author-plotnik/ ( )