Wordsmithing

Wordsmithing Badge

Wordsmithing

WHAT IS WORDSMITHING?

For our purposes, we are using this word to refer to the work writers do as they fine tune and polish their writing. Wordsmithing is similar to proofreading, as most writers embark on this process once they have the content of their text well developed, but it is about more than just striving for correctness.

WHY DO WE WORDSMITH?

Wordsmithing is the activity of playing with your writing — trying to express an idea in a new way, reworking a sentence that just doesn't sit well, rethinking the words you build your sentences around — while you think about your purpose as a writer. So, wordsmithing means paying careful attention to the craft of your writing while you consider the situation and context that frame the work you are doing. Instead of trying to write the perfect sentence, you try to construct the perfect opening for your reader and purpose. Really, when you engage in wordsmithing, you are working to be rhetorical, to get things done with your writing that in ways that best fit your writing situation. As a result, you will consider the following:

For some situations, you will want to take great care to observe the rules, many of which are explained in the textbook Everyone's An Author (especially in chapters 29 "How to Write Good Sentences," 32 "Checking for Common Mistakes," and 26 "What's Your Writing Style") and on many websites, including Grammar Girl and the Purdue Online Writing Lab. But a focus on correctness becomes troubling when writers, especially student writers, start to see their choices only as right or wrong. Instead, we want you to see that there are almost infinite appropriate ways to convey an idea.

WHAT DOES WORDSMITHING LOOK LIKE?

Take this sentence from the last paragraph:

But a focus on correctness becomes troubling when writers, especially student writers, start to see their choices only as right or wrong.

I, as the writer of this badge, could have expressed that idea in a variety of ways. Look at these possible revisions:

A focus on correctness becomes troubling when writers become preoccupied with notions of right or wrong.

A focus on correctness becomes troubling when writers emphasize a false binary between right and wrong.

Student writers can be stymied by a focus on correctness when they start to see their choices as right or wrong.

If we only fixate on correctness, we may limit our choices to right and wrong.

A focus on correctness is a kind of binary thinking — writing is either right and wrong — which can limit our choices as writers.

Writers (and readers) sometimes think writing is merely right or wrong — a way of thinking that limits our choices in troubling ways.

Those who think of writing as merely "correct" or "incorrect" give up the opportunity to make richer choices.

Effective writing is not just "correct," but some writers seem to think that right and wrong is the end of the story.

If you focus only on what's correct, you lose the chance to write something really valuable.

A person may think of morality in terms of right and wrong, but writing involves a much broader range than simply "correct" or "incorrect."

Right and wrong may be black and white, but good writing involves a whole spectrum of possible colors.

Not all correct sentences are good, and not all good sentences are correct.

The correct is sometimes the enemy of the beautiful.

When we inadvertently break rules, we can very easily lose our audience. The song "Word Crimes," released by "Weird Al" Yankovic in the summer of 2014, was a viral sensation in part because it expressed this very frustration.

Like many songs using rhyme, "Word Crimes" contains wordsmithing galore. But as a comic song (it parodies Robin Thicke's smash hit "Blurred Lines"), it also contains special kinds of wordsmithing. For example, Yankovic humorously rhymes words that seem to come from completely different kinds of language (educate ya and nomenclature), and creates surprise and humor by not rhyming at all (as when he name-checks the musician Prince). Although "Weird Al" scolds people for violating what he considers "proper English," he violates rules in the service of his own wordsmithing.

Rules, as the saying goes, are meant to be broken — and "Word Crimes," clever as it is, may scold too much. In fact, the singer's attitude about language, one that values correctness over all else, is widely shared and somewhat problematic. Lauren Squires writes about this in her piece "25 Questions for Teaching with 'Word Crimes'" on the Language Log. She writes in this post, which she also shared on Facebook:

While "grammar nerds" are psyched about Weird Al's new "Word Crimes" video, many linguists are shaking their heads and feeling a little hopeless about what the public enthusiasm about it represents: a society where largely trivial, largely arbitrary standards of linguistic correctness are heavily privileged, and people feel justified in degrading and attacking those who don't do things the "correct" way. What's behind linguists' reactions are at least three factors.

First, while Weird Al talks about "grammar," most of his prescriptions do not pertain to what linguists consider the "grammar" of English, and this reflects a widespread divide between the use of the term "grammar" in everyday language and "grammar" by linguists. This divide frustrates linguists, because it makes them feel like everyone misunderstands the very substance and nature of their field of study.

Second, a little rumination on Weird Al's violent reactions against "bad grammar" raises deep and longstanding questions of social equity regarding class, education, race, age, ethnicity, gender, and how these relate to languages, dialects, and social registers. There is ample research on these issues (which any sociolinguist could point you to), but the upshot is that the notion of "Proper English" typically serves to prop up the already-privileged speakers whose native language variety it is (sort of) based on. This puts speakers whose native language variety does not approximate "Proper English" at an immediate disadvantage in society, the same way that privileging Whiteness puts those who are not White at an immediate disadvantage in society. It is not the linguistic differences themselves that do this (just as it is not the racial/ethnic difference themselves that determine privilege), but the *attitudes* about them. This is why many linguists are having a hard time laughing with Word Crimes: to do so feels like complicity in an ongoing project of linguistic discrimination that intersects with class, race, and other kinds of discrimination.

Third — and the motivation for this post — is that the view of "grammar" as "you must learn the rules or else be ostracized" just makes grammar no fun at all! Studying language — really digging into it, uncovering its remarkably complex yet orderly structure, investigating what makes it different across speakers and communities — is SUPER FUN! Giving people a list of rules of things to do in order to not be criticized is NOT FUN! I want my students to think language is FUN, and to have FUN thinking about language!

So as a teacher, I want to say: Weird Al can think what he wants about language, and you the audience can laugh along or not, depending on your views on language or taste in music or whatever. But please do not mistake the video itself for an educational video. It will not teach students about language. It will not teach students about grammar. I've seen many comparisons to Schoolhouse Rocks, but would any student who didn't already know what a "preposition" was leave Weird Al's video understanding it? No. Rather, on its face, this video teaches people that there is a right way to speak/write, and if you don't do things that way, you're a bad person (or a sewer person? or a person with a disability?) who should not breed. Nothing about how language works, or why these "rules" are what they are.

So, the bottom line is, while you don't need to obsess about correctness, you should consider your readers' ideas about language. While many linguists and compositionists couldn't agree more with Squires, others still value the rules over content, even if such an emphasis is problematic.

What we want to stress here, though, is that correctness is not king; writers don't just want their writing to be correct. They want their writing to feel polished, tended to, well designed. Getting your text to read in such ways takes time and attention. Sure, proofreading is a part of this, but as a college writer, you should strive for more.

Wordsmithing, unlike proofreading, involves a process similar to play; it entails trying things out and seeing what works. It involves generating a lot of options and considering which approach — which word, which sentence construction, which rhythm — works best for a particular rhetorical situation, as you will write for a physics class differently than you would an email home to your parents. This process, which we will call critical play, is a bit messy, but should help you consider a full set of options as you consider how to engage a particular audience.

OKAY, SO HOW DO I WORDSMITH?

So, what are you to do? As the title of this badge suggests, you should think about the craft of your writing — about the words you select, about the ways in which you design your sentences, about how you address a particular audience — as you consider the many options you have as a writer.

When you wordsmith, you rewrite a sentence that doesn't seem to work in your text to create a rich sense of options. Then, you reflect on those options and consider the kinds of questions provided below:

This helps create a rich sense of the possibilities.

For citation, use:

Coastal Carolina University, Department of English, First-Year Writing Program. "Wordsmithing." Coastal Composition Commons, 24 August 2017, https://ccc.coastal.edu/task/wordsmithing-2/. Accessed xx xxxxxx xxxx.