A Writing Exercise Brings Back a Bad High School Memory

And also brings back a good memory from when I wrote regularly for Fortune.

Georgetown University philosophy professor Jason Brennan posted the following on Facebook (and gave me permission to quote him.)

Try this as a 2-part writing exercise in your classes:

Part 1: Write a very mundane, trivial, platitudinous statement on the board, such as "Sometimes, things change." Ask the students to rewrite the sentence, but to compete in making it as long-winded and as high-falutin' as they can. They will all succeed, but they will likely produce a horrible paragraph that reads like typical academic writing. [DRH note: And, as a bonus, they will find their inner Kamala Harris.]

Part 2: Give them a complicated paragraph, and ask them to rewrite it in a way an 8th-grader can understand. Half won't be able to do it.

For me, this helps sell the idea that bad writing that sounds fancy is easy, but writing that is rigorous yet engaging and clear is hard. It also helps them realize many of their professors are faking it.

Although I’m an emeritus professor and, therefore, no longer in the classroom, I second Jason’s proposed exercise.

As soon as I read Jason’s post, I remembered a problem I had in high school. As a Type A but also as someone who mainly loved school, I strived to get all A grades. But when I was in Grade 11 and Grade 12 (that’s how we said it in Canada), my English grades started slipping. In Grade 12, they fell to C.

I didn’t understand why. My father, a high school teacher although never my teacher in class, had done a good job of teaching me trig, physics, and French. (We went through 4 trig teachers in Grade 12, something I write about in the education chapter in The Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Odyssey.) So I went to him for help on my writing.

These were his words, as far as I can remember: “Your writing is clear enough. You’re answering the questions clearly. But you need to make it more flowery.”

Even then, at age 16, I found this advice absurd. Why forsake clear writing for flowery writing? Isn’t the purpose of writing to communicate clearly?

I didn’t take his advice.

In Grade 12 in Manitoba in 1967, all students in the University Entrance program took the same exact exam at the same hour on the same day. Then the exams were graded anonymously in Winnipeg in early July. The grades came out in late July and they mattered for scholarships. I got all 90s in my other 4 courses (with a 99 in Math, or, as we said in Canada, Maths), and a 59 in English. That English grade was going to hurt.

So when I was in Winnipeg in early August, I went to a government education building to pay my $5 to get a regrade. Coincidentally, my sister, April, was working behind the counter in a summer job. She said, “You’re applying to get the Math regraded, right?” She liked the idea of a perfect 100. That made no sense to me, for reasons that should be obvious. “No,” I said, “I’m applying to get the English regraded.” The odds seemed good that my grade would rise a little and that it was unlikely to fall.

I turned out to be right. My grade was raised to 63. It might have got me an extra $50 in scholarship money. That was a large amount in 1967, especially to me, who, at age 16, was using the money I’d saved plus the amount my father had saved plus earnings to pay my way through a 3-year degree with no debt. (I succeeded, by the way.)

Fast forward to 1987, when I was writing regularly for Fortune. My editor and mentor, the great Dan Seligman, was out sick during that cycle and another editor was assigned. Although I can’t remember his name, I think it was Charles Holt. We were going over a particular paragraph on the phone and he said it was unclear. Then he added, “The three rules for good writing are clarity, clarity, and clarity.”

I realized that that’s what Dan Seligman had been teaching me bit by bit, without his ever having said it so, um, clearly.

That lesson has served me well.