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1 " That’s why people use terms like flow or effortless to describe writing that they regard as really superb. They’re not saying effortless in terms of it didn’t seem like the writer spent any work. It simply requires no effort to read it — the same way listening to an incredible storyteller talk out loud requires no effort to pay attention. Whereas when you’re bored, you’re conscious of how much effort is required to pay attention. "
― David Foster Wallace , Quack This Way
2 " If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers—not all of whom are modern . . . I mean, if you are willing to make allowances for the way English has changed, you can go way, way back with this— becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It’s like eating candy for the soul. So probably the smart thing to say is that lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn’t mean, you know, church stuff, but it means you’re just never the same. "
3 " Reading is a very strange thing. We get talked to about it and talk explicitly about it in first grade and second grade and third grade, and then it all devolves into interpretation. But if you think about what’s going on when you read, you’re processing information at an incredible rate.One measure of how good the writing is is how little effort it requires for the reader to track what’s going on. For example, I am not an absolute believer in standard punctuation at all times, but one thing that’s often a big shock to my students is that punctuation isn’t merely a matter of pacing or how you would read something out loud. These marks are, in fact, cues to the reader for how very quickly to organize the various phrases and clauses of the sentence so the sentence as a whole makes sense. "
4 " DFW: Isn’t verbosity, the term itself, pejorative? Is this not a loaded question? Verbose is not neutral. BAG: Why is it bad to have extra words in a sentence? DFW: Doesn’t extra, itself, imply . . . It’s very . . . I don’t think verbosity, in terms of using a lot of words, is always a bad thing artistically. In the kind of writing that we’re talking about, there are probably two big dangers. One is that it makes the reader work harder, and that’s never good. The other is that if the reader becomes conscious that she’s having to work harder because you’re being verbose, now she’s apt not only to dislike the piece of writing; she’s apt to draw certain conclusions about you as a person that are unfavorable. So you run the risk of losing kind of both your logical appeal and your ethical appeal. "
5 " There’s a Poe thing, right? “One out of one hundred things is discussed at great length because it really is obscure. Ninety-nine out of one hundred things are obscure because they’re discussed at more length than they need to be. "
6 " Let me stop you. I don’t remember your entry on buried verbs. Is that what’s wrong? BAG: Yeah, I think they’re unduly abstract. DFW: But sometimes, obviously, if you’re referring to litigation, you’ve got to use the buried verb. BAG: Right, you can’t always say litigate. DFW: Then there’s always the—what do you call it?—buried nouns, like, “We need to dialogue about this,” “You gifted me with this,” which make my stomach hurt even more than the buried verbs. I guess those, a lot of those are more vogue words. BAG: Linguists call it functional shift, where you press a noun into service as a verb. Some kinds of functional shift are not so bothersome—using a noun as an adjective, “We’ve got a room problem here,” you know, that kind of thing. "
7 " Let me stop you. I don’t remember your entry on buried verbs. Is that what’s wrong? BAG: Yeah, I think they’re unduly abstract. DFW: But sometimes, obviously, if you’re referring to litigation, you’ve got to use the buried verb. BAG: Right, you can’t always say litigate. DFW: Then there’s always the—what do you call it?—buried nouns, like, “We need to dialogue about this,” “You gifted me with this,” which make my stomach hurt even more than the buried verbs. I guess those, a lot of those are more vogue words. BAG: Linguists call it functional shift, where you press a noun into service as a verb. Some kinds of functional shift are not so bothersome—using a noun as an adjective, “We’ve got a room problem here,” you know, that kind of thing. DFW: But you’re right, yeah, the noun-to-verb thing is more annoying in a vogue-word sense. But you’re right. Buried verbs are a quick way to turn a clean, elegant, simple clause into a clotted nightmare. "
8 " DFW: One answer is the fact that people, unless they’re paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority. For me, I’ve noodled about this a fair amount because a lot of this sort of language afflicts me. My guess is this: officialese, as spoken by officials, is meant to empty the communication of a certain level of humanity. On purpose. If I’m delivering a press release as an official, I’m speaking not as David Wallace. I’m speaking as the deputy assistant commissioner in charge of whatever. I’m speaking with and for some sort of bureaucratic entity. My guess is one of the reasons why we as a people tolerate, or even expect, this officialese is that we associate it with a different form of communication than interpersonal—Dave and Bryan talking together. That the people who are speaking are in many senses speaking not as human beings but as the larynx and tongue of a larger set of people, responsibilities, laws, regulations, whatever. And that is probably why, even "
9 " That’s why people use terms like flow or effortless to describe writing that they regard as really superb. They’re not saying effortless in terms of it didn’t seem like the writer spent any work. It simply requires no effort to read it—the same way listening to an incredible storyteller talk out loud requires no effort to pay attention. Whereas when you’re bored, you’re conscious of how much effort is required to pay attention. Does that make sense? "
10 " though it’s dreadfully ugly to the ear and why if you think hard about it, “Keep your personal belongings in visual contact at all times” is actually likely to be understood by a smaller percentage of people than, “Please keep an eye on your stuff at all times.” Nevertheless, there are imperatives behind using the language that way. And some of it is to be antihuman. "
