Micheal Erard
>Elusive Words
>Tony Judt, suffering from a neurological disorder and is “fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them,” writes in The New York Review of Books on his love of words and longs for the lost art of articulate, crafted writing: “Today “natural” expression—in language as in art—is preferred to artifice. We unreflectively suppose that truth no less than beauty is conveyed more effectively thereby. Alexander Pope knew better. (“True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest, / What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest.” —Essay on Criticism, 1711) For many centuries in the Western tradition, how well you expressed a position corresponded closely to the credibility of your argument. Rhetorical styles might vary from the spartan to the baroque, but style itself was never a matter of indifference.”
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| “Apollo and the Artist” by Cy Twomby |
At The Millions, Deanna Fei details the haunting voice of her grandmother in her struggles to write fiction: “I was aware that Chinese censorship is real and crushing. But I’d never expected it to manifest itself in the voice of my own grandmother—who, if she chose, could certainly tell her own negative tales about China.”
And when is writing a crime? At The Morning News, Micheal Erard returns to confront a former student who plagiarized and essay and rethinks the ways writing is policed. “Then it was my turn: I told Haley a bit about how her plagiarism had affected me. How I took it personally, and trusted students a little less; I made sure that assignments were plagiarism-proof. But what she couldn’t know was how I became more confident in spotting an opportunity to instruct, and less interested in policing boundaries—which were, after all, mine to teach.”
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