- Info
Elegant Writing – Report Number Two
| Elegant Writing |
CONFIDENTIAL
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| this year's Grand Prize for Baroque Bloviation. CIA has done some fine things, but nothing to compare with the following analysis which a Defense Department officer wrote about the wife of a government official in his country of assignment: |
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| | "She has a presentable personality with a modern posture, who is well versed in world affairs, where by modern standards she is considered to be a whole person." | |
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| Another non-CIA writer has been granted an honorable mention for excellence in Freudian Implications. He is a senior foreign service officer at one of our embassies, who informed his Washington office: |
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| | "The editor of a respected weekly called on me today to discuss the current political situation which he predicted would come to an end very soon." | |
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| It must be the golden dream, the cherished Nirvana, of our harried friends in the State Department-that moment when a political situation comes to an end.* |
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| In no other instance did I find our writers to have been bested by those of other agencies, although I do have an item of special interest from USAID which I shall present to you later in this report. Our writers are especially good in those constructions which separate vital sentence parts from one another and place high-class words between them, selected and arranged so as to give the reader many minutes of enchantment as he searches for the meaning. The first of these sentences also evokes folk-feelings of the ancient past, echoing the syntax of the Germanic Mother Tongue. |
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| | "He helped his daughter, with whom he is quite close, out financially." | | |
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| | "We feel that the university, while still an important target, is less so than it once was. Even if it were, the situation on campus makes the operation impossible." | |
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| The beauty of that last quotation at first seemed to me to lie in its antecedent anarchy, but upon closer examination I discovered that the anarchy is much more pervasive than a mere indiscipline of pronouns and their antecedents. Here it is entire thoughts which are launched from their pads and enter orbit without ever achieving rendezvous with sister components. |
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| Closely related to the foregoing examples of skillful disarticulation of sentence parts is the practice of redundancy. It is not difficult to be redundant, of course, and no special merit attaches to the mere repetition of a thought twice in several dozen words, but when you can express the same idea three times in five words you are in a class by yourself: |
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| | "That would make his estimated ETA on or about 5 July." | | | |
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| For technical excellence in tautology, that sentence is the best of the season, but for a symmetry which closely approaches poetry I think we would have to give the prize to this one: |
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| | "If Doe were arrested as soon as feasibly possible. . . " | | | | |
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| There are some sentences which mirror a truly and innately elegant soul-a writer who not only puts down elegant sentences, but whose thoughts are ele |
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| * The moment when a political situation reaches its zenith, on the other hand, has never been better described than by a State cable from North Africa in the mid-50's which may antedate Mr. Puderbaugh's research: "The seething cauldron is approaching the crossroad, and it is beyond the power of the French to get it back on the tracks." One sighs that these cables had no visual aids. [Editor.] |
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Posted: May 08, 2007 08:38 AM
Last Updated: May 08, 2007 08:38 AM
Last Reviewed: May 08, 2007 08:38 AM
