The backdrop: yesterday’s posting “Days of grief and anger”. Lise Menn’s comment on it:
— LM: Wonderful writing; may the message reach some new ears.
And my response:
— AZ >LM: Thank you; I hope so. As for the writing, that took hours, of revisions ranging from the minute to the global, with a lot of weeping, but stoked by rage that had to be crafted to present itself as an passionate outpouring of spontaneous feeling, complete with an urgent comma splice. So it pleases me to have it my craft recognized and appreciated; I’ve been working on it for almost 75 years now, but here it’s crucial that I not come off like a splenetic geezer.
Yes, I was a kid 75 years ago, and I was already honing my craft as a professional writer and editor, going on to edit my high school newspaper (and write a humor column for it), finally getting paid for my writing at the age of 17, when I began four years of work at the Reading (PA) Eagle newspaper (one of the jobs that got me through Princeton). All those years later I’m writing, every day of the year, essays — academic entertainments, as I think of them — for this blog.
I am a facile writer — first drafts are a lot of fun — and I have plenty of material to work with, but most of the work of writing is revising, rewriting, reframing, polishing, and editing. It can take stunning amounts of time.
So now I bring you two writing stories, the first about Geoff Pullum and me, writing a one-page abstract on Auxiliary Reduction in English for a 1997 Linguistic Society of America conference paper, an abstract offered to the program committee at the time; the second about E. B. White, writing a single paragraph for William Shawn (the New Yorker editor from 1952 through 1987) on the 1969 moon landing. Pullum & Zwicky had 25 versions labeled as drafts, with of course an enormous amount of churn during each of those revisions (and still at least one typo survived in the published version); White’s piece had 6 versions labeled as drafts, with, again, lots of churn during each revision (but at least the magazine’s staff ensured that the published version was flawless).
The G&P LSA abstract. The abstract is notable in having won a kind of prize; it was later selected as an exemplar of abstract-writing (in syntax and semantics) and reproduced in LSA literature along with a textual analysis and commentary on its organization.
Geoff and I were especially pleased with the paper, which looked at a much-studied phenomenon and brought fresh data, from everyday English, to bear on it, to reach a conclusion of considerable theoretical consequence. From
the LSA model abstract, for the 1997 Linguistic Society of America meeting: “Licensing of prosodic features by syntactic rules: The key to auxiliary reduction” by Geoffrey K. Pullum and Arnold M. Zwicky:
Auxiliary reduction (e.g. she’s for she is) is well known to be blocked before sites of VP ellipsis (*She’s usually home when he’s), pseudogapping (*It’s doing more for me than it’s for you), wh-movement (*I wonder where he’s now?), etc. Most analyses connect this to empty categories. We show that this is incorrect. …
Getting everything assembled well in a single page would have been enough of a challenge, but we were aware that the abstract had to be written so as to conceal our involvement with it; we were conspicuously outside the dominant syntactic frameworks of the time, and GKP was infamous as a corrosive critic of them. Our association with the abstract would almost surely have doomed it. So 25 drafts for a single page was a lot, even for us.
In any case, we succeeded, the actual paper went well, and I’m still proud of it.
The EBW paragraph. From the most recent New Yorker issue (9/1&8/25, on-line on 8/24/25), Nathan Heller on E. B. White’s 7/26/1969 paragraph about the moon landing:
writing a lead piece fell to White. What could measure up to the occasion? His idea was both simple and audacious: a single perfect paragraph.
… By his sixth draft, White was making small, startling refinements … With these adjustments, the paragraph fell into focus: it sounded, all at once, like the mind and soul of E. B. White. … it opened the magazine that week.
I have read countless paragraphs about the moon landing — hundreds, I’d guess. White’s is the only one I can recall. It does not read like something written by a gray-haired man born in the eighteen-hundreds [EBW, 1899-1985]. It reads like a piece that could have run last week.
The published paragraph:
The moon, it turns out, is a great place for men. One-sixth gravity must be a lot of fun, and when Armstrong and Aldrin went into their bouncy little dance, like two happy children, it was a moment not only of triumph but of gaiety. The moon, on the other hand, is a poor place for flags. Ours looked stiff and awkward, trying to float on the breeze that does not blow. (There must be a lesson here somewhere.) It is traditional, of course, for explorers to plant the flag, but it struck us, as we watched with awe and admiration and pride, that our two fellows were universal men, not national men, and should have been equipped accordingly. Like every great river and every great sea, the moon belongs to none and belongs to all. It still holds the key to madness, still controls the tides that lap on shores everywhere, still guards the lovers who kiss in every land under no banner but the sky. What a pity that in our moment of triumph we did not forswear the familiar Iwo Jima scene and plant instead a device acceptable to all: a limp white handkerchief, perhaps, symbol of the common cold, which, like the moon, affects us all, unites us all.
It comes in two parts: the first framed as playfully off-hand; and then, in one sentence, it shifts gears, opens up onto a vast landscape of universal humanity, to be appreciated in the simplest of gestures (a limp white handkerchief):
It is traditional, of course, for explorers to plant the flag, but it struck us, as we watched with awe and admiration and pride, that our two fellows were universal men, not national men, and should have been equipped accordingly.
A remarkable effect, to go in a flash from light-hearted to deeply moving (while hanging on to that symbol of the common cold).
(I note that, despite EBW’s advice to writers in Strunk & White, The Elements of Style (which many have deprecated and GKP has savaged), his own prose style was admirable.)
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