Writing Well

Is rarely taught in college

Joshua Reynolds, Garrick Between Tragedy and Comedy, 1760

“You write well,” she said. “I bet you didn’t learn that here.”

The year was 1981, the place Yale College. The woman who spoke well of my work was a “writing coach,” one of a dozen or so people who had recently been hired to help undergraduates improve their ability to put pen to paper.

Like her colleagues, my writing coach owed her position to a large and growing body of complaints, made by both employers and professors at graduate schools, that people who had earned bachelors degrees at Yale could not write properly.¹

My own experience led me to agree with this sad experience. Few of the people who had critiqued my papers, whether in high school or at college, had themselves been competent writers. Thus, the comments scribbled in haste on the margins rarely offered much of value. Indeed, over the course of four decades of writing for publication, I have learned that a good deal of the writing advice I was given was not merely superfluous, but downright wrong.

Once, for example, a teaching assistant took me to task for connecting two sentences with “by the same token.”² In response, I dutifully purged that phrase from my active vocabulary, thereby denying myself the use of an expression which, I discovered in the course of writing this post, had been good enough for Shakespeare.³

I am happy to report that the red pencil marks of unlettered critics failed to dampen either my love for writing or my desire to write well. By the same token, however, they did little, if anything, to help me with either of those things.

1. See, among others, Claudia Warrell “Undergraduates Can’t Write: Visiting Faculty Discuss Trend” Yale Daily News 5 November 1979

2. It would be churlish to point out that, though forty-five years that have passed since this incident, the teaching assistant in question has yet to publish an article, let alone a book.

3. “By the same token, you are a bawd.” (Troilus and Cressida)