The motion picture
English Writing for german speakers – part 4
In the last few posts, I have emphasized how good writing in English can be quickly and effortlessly visualized. I gave you the basics of verbal style, the writing tradition upheld in English for decades if not centuries. This week, I want to further explore the cognitive effect of using lots of rich verbs.
Let's warm up with some good writing:
The pinpoints of starlight we see with the naked eye are photons that have been streaming toward us for a few years or a few thousand. The light from more distant objects, captured by powerful telescopes, has been traveling toward us far longer than that, sometimes for billions of years. When we look at such ancient light, we are seeing—literally—ancient times. (Brian Greene, New York Times)
Here, the physicist Brian Greene begins to describe something that is remarkably complex: the history and evolution of the universe. But he does it in a way that immediately generates a mental scene that looks and feels something like...
...this...
...or maybe this...
Greene does this by using character subjects like pinpoint of starlight, light, and we, and action verbs like stream, travel, look, and see. Greene describes the logic-defying concept of space-time relativity as it it experienced by everyday stargazers like you and me: “When we look at such ancient light, we are seeing—literally—ancient times.”
Greene is a fantastic writer because he makes his grammar correspond to the reality that we see and experience. To illustrate this point, let's try out the opposite. Here is Greene's main idea in the most boring, dry, and pedantic style I can come up with:
The transiting of photons between two points in space is such that the moment of a photon's detection at one point may be displaced in time from the initial moment of said photon's emission by a duration of time proportionate to the distance separating the two points.
Believe it or not, people publish sentences like this all the time. (If you don't believe me, enjoy a few winning passages from the short-lived Bad Writing Contest.) Needless to say, this sentence in no way evokes the majesty of the night sky or the thrilling prospects of space travel. The reason is simple: the grammatical subjects are not characters and the grammatical verbs are not dynamic actions.
Don't paint a picture, make a film
What does this have to do with your writing? You might be an engineer, a project manager, a lawyer—what can you learn from the writing of an astrophysicist? I chose this dramatic example for the sake of illustration: even the most complex topics can be made understandable to the reader, in a way that is quick, clear, and even enjoyable.
Forget the cliché about "painting a picture in the reader's mind." A movie is the right metaphor. Vivid writing stimulates a sequence of scenes in the reader's mind—a "motion picture," as they used to say. This movie feeling comes through using lots of character subjects and action verbs. In the paragraph below, an engineer at a US Government agency writes in this movie-like style to describe earthquakes in California:
Scientists have learned that the Earth's crust is fractured into a series of "plates" that have been moving very slowly over the Earth's surface for millions of years. Two of these moving plates meet in western California; the boundary between them is the San Andreas fault. The Pacific Plate (on the west) moves northwestward relative to the North American Plate (on the east), causing earthquakes along the fault. The San Andreas is the "master" fault of an intricate fault network that cuts through rocks of the California coastal region. The entire San Andreas fault system is more than 800 miles long and extends to depths of at least 10 miles within the Earth. [...] Many smaller faults branch from and join the San Andreas fault zone. (US Geological Survey)
As I read this passage, it triggers a documentary film reel in my mind—first we're interviewing scientists on the edge of an excavation site and then panning the California landscape from a drone's-eye view. This feeling comes from the many short clauses with character subjects and action verbs:
Scientists have learned
Earth's crust is fractured
"plates" that have been moving
Two of these moving plates meet
an intricate fault network that cuts through
The entire San Andreas fault system [...] extends to depths
Many smaller faults branch from and join
You'll notice that the verbs are what syncopate the text, pushing the mental film along. Since the verbs always come early in the sentence, the action of each scene starts right away. The verb is like the clapper thing in the movies.
If we wrote this in nominal style, it would feel like the clapper never drops and the scene never starts:
The fracturing of the Earth's crust into a series of "plates" and their slow movement apart over millions of years has been observed...
The English-speaker's brain short-circuits when we have to wait so long before the verb. There is a time and place for these kinds of noun-driven sentences, but this is not it. Come back next week to learn when this nominal style is the best choice.
