How to Say Nothing in Five Hundred Word Essay

capital of Minnesota McHenry Roberts (1917-1967) taught college position for over twenty eld, archetypic onlyy at San Jose State College and later at Cornell University. He wrote numerous books on linguistics, including dread Grammar (1954), Patterns of slope (1956), and Under houseing incline (1958). fledgling composition, standardized e truly amour else, has its sh ar of fashions. In the 195Os, when this condition was written, the al whatsoever popular argument rage among student look forists was the proposed abolition of college footb al wizard. With the greater amicable consciousness of the early 60s, the topic of the daylight became the morality of capital punishment. Topics may change, solely the core principles of undecomposed authorship live constant quantity, and this essay as buy the farawaym roughlything of a minor classic in informing them. Be concrete, says Roberts bum to the point express your opinions shotly. Re unspoiledingly, he even prac tices what he preaches. His essay is humorous, direct, and close to salty in summarizing the functioning habits that exclusively intimately prose sources must cultivate. Editors n sensation from JoRay McCuen & Anthony C. Winklers Readings for Writers , 3rd ed., Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980Its Friday after(prenominal)noon. and you ca-ca al about survived an early(a) week of classes. You ar retri uncompoundedlyive looking forward dreamfully to the weekend when the English teacher says For Monday you each(prenominal)ow foring telephone number in a cardinal century- articulate composition on college footb exclusively game game game game game. Well, that puts a healthy hole in the weekend. You jadet sire whatsoever strong views on college footb entirely wholeary elbow inhabit or the early(a). You find rather excited during the sequence and go to each the home games and disclose it rather often fun than non. On the early(a) hand, the class has b een reading Robert Hutchins in the anthology and peradventure Shaws Eighty-Yard Run, and from the class discourse you start reveal got the idea that the instructor deliberates college football is for the birds. You atomic number 18 no fool. You rear run into push through what typeface to fret. After dinner party you get out the portable type source that you got for naughty teach graduation. You efficacy as salubrious get it over with and enjoy Saturday and Sunday. 5 degree centi tally dustup is close to two double-spaced pages with normal margins. You put in a sheet of subject, think up a title, and youre rancidwhy COLLEGE FOOTBALL SHOULD BE ABOLISHEDCollege football should be abolished because its braggy for the shallow and to a fault for the shirkers. The carryers ar so busy practicing that they striket puzzle any cartridge h overageder for their studies. This, you feel, is a moguly beloved start. The entirely when trouble is that its only cardinal fetchress. You still lead cardinal ampere-second and sixty-eight to go, and youve pretty salutary wash up the subject. It practises to you that you do your demote(p) thinking in the aurora, so you put international the typewriter and go to the develop pictures. besides the conterminous morning you present to do your washing and close to math p purloinlems, and in the afternoon you go to the game. The English instructor turns up immoderately, and you wonder if youve use upn the proper(a) side after all. Saturday dark you hurl a date, and Sunday morning you engage to go to church. (You jakest let English assignments interfere with your religion.) What with unrivaled thing and a nonher, its ten oclock Sunday shadow onwards you get out the typewriter again. You shew a pot of coffee and start to reside out your views on college football. Put a little meat on the b wizards. wherefore COLLEGE FOOTBALL SHOULD BE ABOLISHEDIn my opinion, it come alon gs to me that college football should be abolished. The moderateness why I think this to be true is because I feel that football is handsome for the colleges in nearly every respect. As Robert Hutchins says in his article in our anthology in which he discusses college football, it would be ruin if the colleges had race horses and had races with bingle a nonher, because then the horses would not collapse to service classes. I firmly agree with Mr. Hutchins on this point, and I am sure that galore(postnominal) other students would agree besides. unitary reason why it seems to me that college football is bad is that it has become as nearly commercial. In the olden whiles when passel dictationed football further for the fun of it, possibly college football was all indemnify, scarce they do not play college football merely for the fun of it straight bearing as they used to in the old days. outrightadays college football is what you might vociferation a astronomic business.Maybe this is not true at all schools, and I applyt think it is peculiar(prenominal)ly true here at State, however acceptedly this is the case at most colleges and universities in America forthwithadays, as Mr. Hutchins points out in his very interesting article. actually the coaches and alumni go more(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal) or less(prenominal) to the in highschool spirits schools and walk the high school stars large salaries to come to their colleges and play football for them. in that location was one case where a high school star was offered a convertible if he would play football for a certain college. Another reason for abolishing college football is that it is bad for the players.They do not have while to get a college education, because they ar so busy playing football. A football player has to practice every afternoon from three to six and then he is so tired that he ratt concentrate on his studies. He just feels bid dropping off to s leep after dinner, and then the next day he goes to his classes without having studied and maybe he fails the sample. (Good ripe stuff so far, only when youre still a hundred and cubic decimetre-one linguistic process from home. One more push.)Also I think college football is bad for the colleges and the universities because not very some another(prenominal) students get to partici glib-tonguede in it. Out of a college of ten special K students only seventy- fiver or a hundred play football, if that some(prenominal). Football is what you might call a spectator sport. That delegacy that most people go to suck in it merely do not play it themselves. (Four hundred and fifteen. Well, you still have the conclusion, and when you retype it, you quite a little install the margins a little wider.)These be the reasons why I agree with Mr. Hutchins that college football should be abolished in Ameri merchantman colleges and universities. On Monday you turn it in, moderately hope ful, and on Friday it comes O.K. marked weak in capability and sporting a big D. This essay is exaggerated a little, not oft propagation.The English instructor lead recognize it as reasonably typical of what an assignment on college football impart bring in. He deals that nearly half of the class will contrive in five hundred wrangling to say that college football is in addition commercial and bad for the players. virtually of the other half will inform him that college football builds character and prep ars one for bread and exclusivelyter and brings prestige to the school. As he reads paper after paper all saying the resembling thing in almost the a handle course, all bloodless(prenominal), five hundred vocalizes dripping out of nobody, he wonders how he allowed himself to get trapped into teaching English when he might have had a happy and interesting life sentence as an electrician or a faith man. Well, you may ask, what can you do active it?The subject is one on which you have a couple of(prenominal) convictions and little information. force out you be evaluate to make a wash subject interesting? As a matter of fact, this is precisely what you argon expected to do. This is the writers essential task. all subjects, except sex, argon dull until someone makes them interesting. The writers job is to find the argument, the approach, the angle, the rallying crying that will call for the lector with him. This is seldom wanton, and it is particularly hard in subjects that have been much discussed College Football, Fraternities, Popular Music, Is valor Dead?, and the worry. You will feel that in that respect is zipper you can do with much(prenominal) subjects except repeat the old bromides. except there are some things you can do which will make your papers, if not throbbingly alive, at least less insufferably verbose than they might otherwise be.AVOID THE apparent CONTENT rank the assignment is college football. Say that youv e decided to be against it. Begin by putting down the arguments that come to your reason it is too commercial, it hook ons the students take solicitudes off their studies, it is hard on the players, it makes the university a kind of circus preferably of an bright center, for most schools it is financially ruinous. Can you think of any more arguments, just off hand? each right. today when you write your paper, make sure that you don t use any of the visible on this list. If these are the points that leap to your mind, they will leap to everyone elses too, and whether you get a C or a D may depend on whether the instructor reads your paper early when he is fresh and tolerant or late, when the judgment of conviction In my opinion, college football has become too commercial, inexorably repeated, has bought him to the brink of lunacy.Be against college football for some reason or reasons of your own. If they are penetrative and perceptive ones, thats splendid. hardly even if they are trivial or ill-judged or indefensible, you are still frontwards so long as they are not everybody elses reasons too. Be against it because the colleges dont spend enough coin on it to make it worthwhile, because it is bad for the characters of the spectators, because the players are forced to attend classes, because the football stars hogget all the beautiful women, because it competes with baseball and is therefore un-American and possibly communistic-inspired. there are lots of more or less unused reasons for being against college football. mosttimes it is a good idea to sum up and dispose of the trite and conventional points to begin with going on to your own. This has the advan taile of indicating to the lector that you are going to be incomplete trite nor conventional. nearlything like thisWe are muchtimes told that college football should be abolished because it has become too commercial or because it is bad for the players. These arguments are no suspect very cogent, plainly they dont authentically go to the cheek of the matter. Then you go to the soreness of the matter.TAKE THE LESS USUAL inclineOne rather simple way of acquiring into your paper is to take the side of the argument that most of the citizens will sine qua non to neutralise. If the assignment is an essay on dogs, you can, if you get, explain that dogs are faithful and loving companions, intelligent, efficacious as guardians of the house and protectors of children, indispensable in police work in short, when all is retain tongue to and done, mans best friends. Or you can suggest that those big brown look conceal, more oftentimes than not, a vacuity of mind and an hollowness of purpose that the dogs you have known most intimately have been mangy, ill-tempered brutes, incompetent of instruction and that only your nobility of mind and fear of arrest prevent you from kick the flea-ridden animals when you pass them on the street.Naturally individual(pren ominal) convictions will sometimes dictate your approach. If the assign subject is Is Methodism Rewarding to the Individual? and you are a pious Methodist, you have really no choice. But few assign subjects, if any, will fall in this category. some of them will lie in unsubtle areas of discussion with much to be say on both sides. They are intellectual exercises, and it is legitimate to argue now one way and now another, as debaters do in similar portion. Always take the that looks to you hardest, least defensible. It will almost never-failingly turn out to be easier to write interestingly on that side.This general advice applies where you have a choice of subjects. If you are to choose among The Value of Fraternities and My Favorite High tame Teacher and What I Think near Beetles, by all bastardlys break down for the beetles. By the time the instructor gets to your paper, he will be up to his ears in tedious tales about a French teacher at Bloombury High and assertions a bout how fraternities build character and prepare one for life. Your views on beetles, whatever they are, are echo to be a refreshing change. move intot worry too much about figuring out what the instructor thinks about the subject so that you can cuddle up with him.Chances are his views are no stronger than yours. If he does have convictions and you press him, his problem is to keep from grading you high than you deserve in order to showing he is not biased. This doesnt close that you should constantly cantankerously dissent from what the instructor says that gets tiresome too. And if the subject assigned is My court Peeve, do not begin, My pet nettle is the English instructor who assigns papers on my pet peeve. This was still funny during the state of war of 1812, simply it has sort of lost its bunt since then. It is in general good readiness to avoid someonealities.SLIP OUT OF synopsisIf you will study the essay on college football near the beginning of this essay, you will apprehend that one reason for its appalling obtuseness is that it neer gets down to particulars. It is just a series of not very glittering generalities football is bad for the colleges, it has become too commercial, football is big business, it is bad for the players, and so on. Such round phrases thudding against the contri only whenors brain are unbelievable to convince him, though they may well render him unconscious.If you fatality the reader to consider that college football is bad for the players, you have to do more than say so. You have to v auntieing the evil. Take your roommate, Alfred Simkins, the second-string center. Picture short old Alfy coming home from football practice every evening, bruised and aching, agonizingly tired, scarcely able to shovel the mashed potatoes into his mouth. Let us see him careen up to the room, getting out his econ textbook, peering desperately at it with his good eye, falling asleep and failing the interrogatory in th e morning. Let us section his unbearable tension as Saturday draws near. willing he fail, be demoted, lose his periodic allowance, be forced to return to the burn mines? And if he follows, what will be his fix? Perhaps a slight flap of applause when the thirdstring center re ordinates him, a s of elation in the locker room if the team wins, of despair if it loses. What will he look back on when he graduates from college? Toil and torn ligaments. And what will be his future? He is not good enough for pro football, and he is too obscure and weak in econ to succeed in stocks and bonds. College football is tearing the heart from Alfy Simkins and, when it finishes with him, will callously toss out the shattered hulk.This is no doubt a weak enough argument for the abolition of college football, provided it is a sight come apart than saying, in three or quartette variations, that college football (in your opinion) is bad for the players.Look at the work of any professional writer and notice how constantly he is move from the generality, the abstract statement, to the concrete example, the facts and habituss, the illustrations. If he is writing on juvenile delinquency, he does not just tell you that juveniles are (it seems to him) remiss and that (in his opinion) something should be done about it. He shows you juveniles being delinquent, tearing up movie theatres in Buffalo, stabbing high school principals in Dallas, smoking marijuana in Palo Alto. And more than likely he is go toward some specific remedy, not just a general wringing of the hands.It is no doubt possible to be too concrete, too illustrative or anecdotal, but few inexperienced writers err this way. For most the soundest advice is to be seeking always for the picture, to be always turning general remarks into seeable examples. take ont say, Sororities teach girls the well-disposed graces. Say, Sorority life teaches a girl how to carry on a conversation while gushing(a) tea, without slosh ing the tea into the saucer. Dont say, I like certain kinds of popular unison very much. Say, Whenever I hear Gerber Sprinklittle play Mississippi Man on the trombone, my socks crawl up my ankles.GET RID OF frank PADDINGThe student cranching away at his weekly English shank is too often tormented by a figure five hundred words. How, he asks himself, is he to achieve this staggering total? Obviously by never using one word when he can somehow work in ten. He is therefore seldom surfeit with a plain statement like Fast operate is dangerous. This has only four words in it. He takes thought, and the sentence becomes In my opinion, fast driving force is dangerous.Better, but he can do better stillIn my opinion, fast driving would seem to be rather dangerous. If he is really adept, it may come outIn my humble opinion. though I do not cl invest to be an expert on this complicated subject, test driving, in most circumstances, would seem to be rather dangerous in many respects, or at least so it would seem to me.Thus four words have been turned into forty, and not an particle of content has been added. Now this is a way to go about scope five hundred words, and if you are content with a D grade, it is as good a way as any. But if you aim higher, you must work differently. alternatively of grooming your sentences with straw, you must try steadily to get rid of the padding, to make your sentences lean and tough. If you are really working at it, your first draft will greatly kick the bucket the required total, and then you will work it down, thus It is thought in some quarters that fraternities do not conduct as much as might be expected to campus life.Some people think that fraternities contribute little to campus life. The reasonable doctor who practices in small towns or in the country must toil iniquity and day to heal the sick. Most country doctors work long hours. When I was a little girl, I suffered from coyness and embarrassment in the presence of others. I was a shy little girl.It is suddenly requirement for the person employed as a marine fireman to give the matter of move pressure his single(a) attention at all times.The fireman has to keep his eye on the steam gauge.You may ask how you can go at five hundred words at this rate. Simple. You dig up more real content. Instead of taking a couple of obvious points off the come up of the topic and then circling warily round them for six paragraphs, you work in and explore, figure out the details. You illustrate. You say that fast driving is dangerous, and then you prove it. How long does it take to stop a car at forty and at cardinal? How far can you see at night? What happens when a tire blows? What happens in a head-on collision at fifty miles an hour?Pretty soon your paper will be full of downcast glass and blood and headless torsos, and reaching five hundred words will not really be a problem.CALL A FOOL A FOOLSome of the padding in freshman themes is to be blamed not on anxiety about the word minimum but on excessive timidity. The student writes, In my opinion, the principal of my high school acted in ways that I believe every unbiased person would have to call foolish. This isnt merely what he involves. What he manner is, My high school principal was a fool. If he was a fool, call him a fool. besiege the thing about with in-myopinions and it-seems-to-mes and as-I-see-its and at-least-from-my-point-ofviews gains you nothing. Delete these phrases whenever they bootlick into your paper. The students inclining to hedge stems from a modesty that in other circumstances would be commendable.He is, he realizes, young and inexperienced, and he half suspects that he is dopey and fuzzyminded beyond the average. Probably only too true. But it doesnt inspection and repair to announce your incompetence six times in every paragraph. Decide what you want to say and say it as vigorously as possible, without apology and in plain words. Linguistic di ffidence can take various forms. One is what we call euphemism. This is the tendency to call a spade a certain garden implement or womens underwear unmentionables. It is stronger in some eras than others and in some people than others but it always operates more or less in subjects that are touchy or taboo death, sex, activatedness, and so on.Thus we deoxidize from saying He died last night but say sort of passed away, left-hand(a) us, joined his Maker, went to his reward. Or we try to take off the tension with a hoy clich kicked the bucket, cashed in his chips, handed in his dinner pail. We have found all sorts of ways to avoid saying mad mentally ill, touched, not quite right upstairs, feebleminded, innocent, simple, off his trolley, not in his right mind. Even such a now plain word as crazed began as a euphemism with the importee not healthy.Modern science, particularly psychology, contributes many polysyllables in which we can wrap our thoughts and blunt their force. To ma ny writers there is no such thing as a bad schoolboy. Schoolboys are maladjusted or unoriented or misunderstood or in the fill of guidance or lacking in celebrated success toward satisfactory consolidation of the temperament as a social unit, but they are never bad. psychology no doubt makes us better men and women, more sym water faucethetic and tolerant, but it doesnt make writing any easier. Had Shakespeare been confronted with psychology, To be or not to be might have come out, To continue as a social unit or not to do so.That is the personality problem. Whether tis a better sign of integration at the conscious level to queer a psychic tolerance toward the maladjustments and repressions bring forth by ones lack of orientation in ones environment or But juncture would never have finished the soliloquy. paternity in the modern world, you cannot whole avoid modern jargon. Nor, in an effort to get away from euphemism, should you salt your paper with four-letter words. B ut you can do much if you will mount guard against those roundabout phrases, those repeat polysyllables that tend to slip into your writing to rob it of its crispness and force.BEWARE OF PAT EXPRESSIONS opposite things being equal, avoid phrases like other things being equal. Those sentences that come to you whole, or in two or three sloppy lumps, are sure to be bad sentences. They are no creation of yours but pieces of common thought floating in the community soup.Pat expressions are hard, often impossible, to avoid, because they come too easily to be noticed and seem too necessary to be portion outd with. No writer avoids them altogether, but good writers avoid them more often than poor writers.By pat expressions we mean such tags as to all practical intents and purposes, the pure and simple truth, from where I sit, the time of his life, to the ends of the earth, in the twinkling of an eye, as sure as youre born, over my dead body, under cover of darkness, took the easy way out, when all is said and done, told him time and time again, parted the best of friends, stand up and be counted, gave him the best years of her life, worked her fingers to the bone. Like other clichs, these expressions were once forceful. Now we should use them only when we cant possibly think of anything else.Some pat expressions stand like a jetty between the writer and thought. Such a one is the American way of life. galore(postnominal) student writers feel that when they have said that something accords with the American way of life or does not they have exhausted the subject. Actually, they have stopped at the highest level of abstraction. The American way of life is the complicated enclothe of bonds between a hundred and eighty million ways. All of us know this when we think about it, but the tag phrase too often keeps us from thinking about it.So with many another phrase dear to the politico this great land of ours, the man in the street, our national heritage. These may pro ve our patriotism or give a tinge to our political beliefs, but otherwise they add nothing to the paper except words. chatoyant WORDSThe writer builds with words, and no builder uses a raw material more slippery and elusive and treacherous. A writers work is a constant struggle to get the right word in the right place, to find that particular word that will convey his meaning exactly, that will persuade the reader or soothe him or startle or amuse him. He never succeeds altogether sometimes he feels that he scarcely succeeds at all but such successes as he has are what make the thing worth doing.There is no book of rules for this game. One progresses through everlasting experiment on the basis of ever-widening experience. There are few useful generalizations that one can make about words as words, but there are perhaps a few.Some words are what we call colorful. By this we mean that they are calculated to produce a picture or induce an emotion. They are dressy instead of plain, s pecific instead of general, loud instead of soft. Thus, in place of Her heart beat, we may write, her heart pounded, throbbed, fluttered, danced. Instead of He sat in his chair, we may say, he lounged, sprawled, coiled. Instead of It was hot, we may say, It was blistering, sultry, muggy, suffocating, steamy, wilting.However, it should not be supposed that the fancy word is always better. Often it is as well to write Her heart beat or It was hot if that is all it did or all it was. Ages differ in how they like their prose. The nineteenth century liked it rich and smoky. The 20th has usually preferred it lean and cool. The 20th century writer, like all writers, is ceaselessly seeking the exact word, but he is wary of sounding feverish. He tends to skunk it low, to understate it, to throw it away. He knows that if he gets too colorful, the audience is likely to giggle. hitch how this strikes you As the rich, golden glow of the sunset died away along the eternal western sandwich hil ls, Angelas limpid blue eyes looked softly and trustingly into Montagues flare brown ones, and her heart pounded like a drum in time with the festal song surging in her soul. Some people like that sort of thing, but most modern readers would say, Good regret, and turn on the television.COLORED WORDSSome words we would call not so much colorful as colored that is, prankish with associations, good or bad. All words except perhaps building words have associations of some sort. We have said that the meaning of a word is the sum of the contexts in which it occurs. When we hear a word, we hear with it an echo of all the situations in which we have heard it before.In some words, these echoes are obvious and discussible. The word mother, for example, has, for most people, agreeable associations. When you hear mother you in all likelihood think of home, safety, love, food, and various other engaging things. If one writes, She was like a mother to me, he gets an effect which he wou ld not get in She was like an aunt to me. The advertiser makes use of the associations of mother by working it in when he talks about his product. The politician works it in when he talks about himself.So also with such words as home, liberty, dwelling, contentment, patriot, tenderness, sacrifice, childlike, manly, bluff, limpid. All of these words are preposterous with associations that would be rather hard to render in a straightforward definition. There is more than a literal going away between They sat around the fireside and They sat around the stove. They might have been equally warm and happy around the stove, but fireside suggests leisure, grace, quiet tradition, satisfying company, and stove does not. Conversely, some words have bad associations. Mother suggests pleasant things, but mother-in-law does not. Many mothers-in-law are heroically lovable and some mothers drink gin all day and beat their children insensible, but these facts of life are beside the point. The point is that mother sounds good and mother-in-law does not. Or consider the word intellectual.This would seem to be a complimentary term, but in point of fact it is not, for it has picked up associations of impracticality and ineffectuality and general dopiness. So also such words as liberal, reactionary, Communist, socialist, capitalist, radical, schoolteacher, motortruck driver operator, salesman, huckster, speculator. These convey meaning on the literal level, but beyond that sometimes, in some places they convey contempt on the part of the speaker. The question of whether to use loaded words or not depends on what is being written.The scientist, the scholar, try to avoid them for the poet, the denote writer, the public speaker, they are standard equipment. But every writer should take care that they do not substitute for thought. If you write, Anyone who thinks that is nothing but a Socialist (or Communist or capitalist) you have said nothing except that you dont like peop le who think that, and such remarks are effective only with the most candid readers. It is always a bad splay to think your readers more naive than they really are.COLORLESS WORDSBut probably most student writers come to grief not with words that are colorful or those that are colored but with those that have no color at all. A pet example is nice, a word we would find it hard to dispense with in casual conversation but which is no longer capable of adding much to a description. Colorless words are those of such general meaning that in a particular sentence they mean nothing. Slang adjectives like cool (Thats real cool) tend to stir up all over the language. They are apply to everything, lose their original force, and quickly die. listen also of nouns of very general meaning, like circumstances, cases, instances, aspects, factors, relationships, attitudes, eventualities, etc. In most circumstances you will find that those cases of writing which make up too many instances of wor ds like these will in this and other aspects have factors leading to unsatisfactory relationships with the reader resulting in unfavorable attitudes on his part and perhaps other eventualities, like a grade of D. Notice also what etc. means. It means Id like to make this list longer, but I cant think of any more examples.