Voices: Flash Essay Workshop

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“Omit needless words.” Professors Strunk and White’s phrase has ruled my literary life since I was ten. Actually, I was a slave to the Professors’ credo before I ever knew it existed. My devotion to concision peaked in the second grade when I was told to write an account of the Mayflower’s landing. My essay ran: On December 11, 1641 the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. It was the worst day of their lives.” Unfortunately, I was never again to attain the degree of brevity which caused my teacher to remark, “Sarah” (named changed) does not have a lot to say for herself.

But I do. I love English, and every aspect of it, written and spoken, fascinates me. My ambition is for my writing to be concise, yet at the same time sensitive and personal. My dilemma is that, although I admire the pithiness of sharp prose, I cannot resist indulging myself in the languorous luxury of multisyllabic verbiage. These indulgences increase my vocabulary but obscure my writing.

Most of my writing is done to satisfy the voracious appetites of my secondary school’s English and History Departments. I enjoy these assignments because English is beautiful, and writing it is gratifying. On my own, I dabble in poetry, playwriting, prose, and puns. In all these forms, although my goal is the Search for Simplification, I am constantly titillated and tempted into the use of a particularly pompous part of speech. My unconventional vocabulary pleases me, although my inability to pronounce most of it can be embarrassing. Moreover, these Baroque linguistic forays run completely counter to the Puritan writing ethic I struggle to attain.

The translation of my thoughts into a form which may be shared is frightening. I am my perceptions. As my writing becomes more precise these perceptions become more obvious. I hope that my love of English will lead me to overcome my fear of personal rejection ad give me the courage and skills necessary to achieve my goal: Less Is More.

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This essay, written by a high school student, demonstrates a sophistication with words few achieve in a lifetime. Why?

The cliché about show don’t tell certainly shows up here (pun intended).  The essay itself is short, relatively speaking, for a college essay. It therefore demonstrates that she has taken her advice to heart.

More importantly, she has the ability to use words to demonstrate she knows what she is doing. Actually, I would say she knows what she is playing with. Words are tools (for philosophical backing of this, read Heidegger and Wittgenstein) or toys. She has erected a model for all of us to admire.

For example, the sentence that begins “although I admire” shows she has taken a trip down the two main tributaries that lead to the river we call English: Latin and Anglo-Saxon.

The use of alliteration and hard single syllables and the awareness of the oomph it takes to say the letter ‘p” makes this sentence start in the ancient world that comes from Beowulf.

     An Arrow from the bow

     of the Geat chief got one of them

     as he surged to the surface: the seasoned shaft

     stuck deep in his flank and his freedom in the water

     got less and less. It was his last swim.

     (Beowulf, l, 1432-1435, translation by Seamus Heaney)

Heaney makes the Anglo Saxon live again by using the hard ‘g’ sounds. The alliterative snake of the ‘s’ sounds help to tie the monster to the biblical serpent too.

The second half of the student’s sentence places us in the wandering mazes of the Latinate roots of English. She implies the labyrinth of sonorous and mellifluous may be both misleading and ultimately threadless.

She has fun with the same ‘p’ sounds again and adds ‘t’ alliteration too to complete her Baroque artifice: “I am constantly titillated and tempted into the use of a particularly pompous part of speech.”

This writer knows how to play with words and the result in a wonderful and poetic essay. But it is more than an artistic triumph. Underneath all the pyrotechnical skill there is the admission of vulnerability. The fear of rejection is what drove one of our greatest poets, Dickinson, to hide in her house for most of her life.  The admission of vulnerability is subtle and anything but self-promoting. Instead, she has set herself on a course of creating exactly what she has, in fact, created. A less is more essay that stands as an example to all of us that sometimes a few well chosen words say far more than an endless tome.