When I was working on my master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania, one of my professors callously dismissed my writing as “non-native” and sent me to the Department of Disabilities. In essence, I felt he was sending me to a “dumb class” to learn basic English.
On the other hand, I criticized him for dereliction of duty, because he should have been teaching Yemeni scholars like me how to think and write better in English, but he seemed to think that was below his level. So, stuck, I decided to take on the challenge alone, and strive to become not only a competent but the best bilingual writer I could be.
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To do this, you will need to find a true teacher within yourself.
Having gone to an Ivy League university, I decided to start with an Ivy League publisher, the first of my kind being the University of Chicago. There, I stumbled upon the incredible work of Brian A. Garner, a world-class lexicographer and grammarian who has dedicated his life to teaching the art of language. His motto is, “Fall in love with language and language will love you back.”
Over the next few months, I devoured nearly all of his work, including the fifth edition of his magnum opus, Garner’s Modern English Usage (GMEU), which, at nearly 3,600 pages, is the longest book I’ve ever worked on. Garner cheerfully calls himself a “snoot,” a term he borrowed from his writer friend David Foster Wallace to describe a language lover or word expert: a language snob who obsesses over the minutiae of grammar, language, and style.
Wallace, of course, was famous for his exacting standards of prose: He introduced Garner to the late Justice Antonin Scalia, arguably the Supreme Court’s greatest stylistician, and Garner and Scalia published several books together, some of which, inevitably, dealt with the craft of prose.
As I read Garner’s work, I noticed that he mentioned his friend John Trimble many times, describing him as his “strong writing mentor,” so I tracked him down. I discovered that Trimble was a professor emeritus of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where Garner received his bachelor’s degree and his J.D.
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For decades, Trimble was known there for a notoriously tough seminar called “325M: Advanced Expository Writing,” a name he said suggested he’d taken three run-of-the-mill writing courses and combined them into one monster — hence the “M,” he often joked, standing for “masochism.”
Unfortunately, neither I nor Garner had the pleasure of working on 325M—I simply never attended the University of Texas, and Garner because of a scheduling conflict during his senior year of college—but we both learned a great deal about writing, especially from his famous “textbook-untextbook,” Writing with Style: Conversations on the Art of Writing, which is now in its third edition and has sold over half a million copies.
In addition to Garner and Trimble, I also found a third tutor: George Gopeng, professor emeritus at Duke University. I met Gopeng through reading; his approach to language has been described as revolutionary. Gopeng was kind enough to take me on as his student, and through him I learned the subtleties of English structure and syntax, as summarized in his magnum opus, The Sense of Structure: Writing from the Reader’s Point of View. It would be foolish for anyone aspiring to write to not also read this wonderful book.
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In fact, Psychology Today contributor Yellowley Douglas recently published a eulogy in praise of the Gopeng Method, titled “The One Way to Change Your Writing and All Your Students’ Writing,” in which she describes how Gopeng’s approach has been revolutionary for her and countless of her students. Douglas has just published a magnum opus, “The Reader’s Brain: How Neuroscience Can Make You a Better Writer,” with Cambridge University Press, offering science-based writing tips. Her approach is in line with the Gopeng tradition, and she suggests she was influenced by an article Gopeng co-wrote for The American Scientist, which she cites in her article.
So I now stand on the shoulders of three giants: Garner, Trimble, and Gopeng. I have devised my own approach by blending the best parts of their approaches. Garner is an expert on language, Trimble is an expert on style, and Gopeng is an expert on structure. All three are accomplished writers and teachers of writing.
Unfortunately, their pedagogical approach is conspicuously absent from higher education, at least in the U.S. universities I attended (University of Miami, University of Pennsylvania, University of Minnesota). I had to seek out Garner, Trimble, and Gopen on my own, and off campus. Douglas explained that the reason their work did not become mainstream was because (1) they ignored orthodox rules of writing, and (2) they were unable to connect their innovative approach to the scientific literature.
I don’t think you can claim to teach writing well without engaging with the work of these three scholars. And all three are alive and well today, leaving a legacy of teachings that are largely ignored in higher education. This is surely why so much academic writing is so hard to read. Scholars who say they value diversity but who seem to care about appearances end up adopting overly complex writing styles that effectively shut out others, especially non-native English speakers like me. But I have never struggled for even a minute to understand or appreciate the writing of Garner, Trimble, or Gopen.
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Instead, many academics have the arrogance to scold students for their poor writing, when they themselves can only write gibberish. I think we should say they are lazy and negligent, and a terrible example for students. If we want to talk about diversity and accessibility, we all have to care about writing clearly. Most academics simply don’t know how, and so they confuse mumbled speech with very good writing. That’s why I argue that academics themselves need to turn their students around again and learn about Garner, Trimble, and Gopen.