Research Writing

As a person with a literary background, all of the examples of good writing that immediately sprung to mind for this week’s blog posting were from fiction.  I was actually a little disappointed that Prof. Galey beat me to suggesting the ending of James Joyce’s “The Dead” from Dubliners, as that would certainly top my list of the most simple and beautiful words ever written.  I’m so fond of that story that I insist on reading it aloud during long road trips.

But for the purposes of this course, I guess I should branch out a little bit.  If we can expand the term “research writing” to perhaps include the notion of “writing that helps people to learn things,” I would highlight whoever wrote the scripts for those Heritage Minute segments that used to air on CBC (for example: https://www.historicacanada.ca/content/heritage-minutes/agnes-macphail).  These were written incredibly simply and clearly, and were very short and concise, but they managed to summarize entire chapters in Canadian history in a way that (combined with the imagery) managed to stick with me for years.  I’ve always maintained that if I had been taught Canadian history with the aid of these Heritage Moments back in high school, I probably would have retained a lot more of that knowledge!

While our class centered largely around the importance of clear and simple writing, along with Orwell’s warnings against the use of metaphor and simile (1946), I’d like to point out that there are instances where the use of linguistic devices can drive home a point in ways that clear and simple writing could never hope to achieve.  A classic example of this is Jonathan Swift’s use of satire in his 1729 essay, A Modest Proposal.  Swift lived in Ireland during a time when English rule and trade restrictions left the Irish population starving and politically unstable.  Rather than writing a straightforward analysis of the situation, Swift chose to compose a pamphlet suggesting, in a grave and academic tone, that one possible answer to Ireland’s poverty would be to fatten up their children and eat them.  He even provides recipes for a stew.  While I have no sources to back up this claim, I’d be willing to wager that if Swift had just written a clear and straightforward polemic about the Irish political and economic climate, it likely would not have made its way into the pages of literary history books that A Modest Proposal occupies today.

References

Historica Dominica, Agnes McPhail, Heritage Minutes Collection.  Retrieved on October 16^th, 2013 from: https://www.historicacanada.ca

Orwell, G. (1946). Politics and the English Language. In A Collection of Essays. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Swift, J. (2009). A Modest Proposal and Other Writings. C. Fabricant (Ed.). New York, NY: Penguin. (Original work published 1729)