'A Few Good Sentences'

Much of my working life was spent among writers indifferent to the precision, clarity and stylishness of what they wrote. They flung words on the page (or screen) the way a bored child throws mud at the wall to see what sticks. They were abetted by editors concerned only with meeting deadlines and avoiding libel. These practices permitted a sort of reverse snobbery to thrive in the newsroom. A concern with writing good prose – not fancy, not “poetic,” just clear, accurate and cliché-free -- was judged effete. I haven’t worked fulltime as a journalist in more than twenty years, but all of this came back to me when I found this sentence on the Eric Hoffer Book Award site: 

“If anybody asks me what I have accomplished, I will say all I have accomplished is that I have written a few good sentences.”

 

No source is given but it sounds like Hoffer (1902-83). I credit him with inspiring me to become a newspaper reporter and learn to write clearly. His “Reflections” column was syndicated in U.S. newspapers, including The Cleveland Press, from January 1968 to April 1970 – my high school years. I read the columns, clipped them and pasted them in a scrapbook, then moved on to Hoffer’s books, beginning with his first and most influential, The True Believer (1951). What moved me and still moves me were Hoffer’s commonsensical ideas, his lack of pretentiousness and snobbery, the clarity of his prose, his gift for aphorism, his hatred of Communism and other tyrannies, his pro-Israel sentiments and his working-class origins. Not that I could necessarily have identified any of those qualities when I was sixteen.

 

I no longer read newspapers but I see the same indifference to good writing, simple clarity, online. Clarity in prose implies clarity of thought. If I don’t understand something, if I’m confused or just plain ignorant, I can orient myself by writing about it. The simple act of arranging words sensibly contributes to understanding. If it doesn’t, I should probably keep my mouth shut until it does.   

 

The “longshoreman philosopher” had a brief notoriety in the late 1960s. He worked the docks in San Francisco for more than 30 years. He never went to college. He credited a volume of Montaigne’s essays, found in a second-hand bookstore, with inspiring him to write. This is what appealed to me about Hoffer. I was the first in my family to go to college. My father and his brothers were ironworkers. All of my mother’s brothers were housepainters. I had no models for being a writer, a lover of ideas, an intellectual – a term Hoffer detested. But a working-class guy who read Montaigne and Tolstoy and formulated his thoughts in memorable words made sense to me and still does.