My friend and teaching partner, Don Fry, recently sent this e-mail message to Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman:
Dear Ms. Goodman:
I have long been a fan of your columns. As a writing coach, I often hold them up as models of clarity and force for opinion writers. But today you published the best paragraph I’ve ever read with your name on it:
That paragraph should be turned into plaques and posted in every room in the White House and the Pentagon. Congratulations and thanks.
I have long been a fan of your columns. As a writing coach, I often hold them up as models of clarity and force for opinion writers. But today you published the best paragraph I’ve ever read with your name on it:
In the global village, lasting, peaceful victory depends in large part on who wins the struggle over the moral story line, over right and wrong, innocence and guilt. War itself, with innocent victims, collateral damage and inevitable chaos, tilts that story line. War may recruit more enemies than it kills.
That paragraph should be turned into plaques and posted in every room in the White House and the Pentagon. Congratulations and thanks.
That’s high praise from an influential writing teacher, so I thought it would be instructive to ask Don what he was thinking when he read Goodman’s column.
ROY: What motivated you to send this message to Ellen Goodman?
DON: I was struck by how she cut through all the sentimental blither on the anniversary of 9/11 and got to the heart of the matter: Bush’s squandering of the moral high ground by invading Iraq, and the administration’s failure to understand (or care about) global public opinion. In a cowardly age of journalists treating the President as a divinity, she tells the truth, as is usual for her. Ellen Goodman never wears kid gloves.
ROY: What is it about the paragraph that makes it remarkable?
DON: The key paragraph (“In the global village … than it kills.”) develops the last phrase in the previous paragraph (“a failed strategy”). Goodman ties the idea of manipulating a “story line” for political purposes to America’s traditional noble intentions, now largely perverted. And the story line metaphor points toward her conclusion on the continuing “failure of imagination.”
ROY: Are you responding to form? To content? Both?
DON: I responded to form in the shapely paragraph that builds to its devastating last sentence. I responded to the content in its flash of truth suddenly realized. And I responded to the power of Goodman’s writing strategy that saved that truth until the reader was ready to take it full strength. Timing isn’t everything; timing and powerful intelligence are.
ROY: How would you characterize the distinctive voice of Ellen Goodman?
DON: Voice is a collection of stylistic devices used consistently to create in the readers the sense of a personality speaking to them from the page. Ellen Goodman’s persona seems intelligent, confident, experienced, wise, and concerned. She creates this persona mostly by clarity, simple sentences, flowing wording and recognizable emotions. People who know her say her voice is sincere.
The most helpful strategy here is embedded in Don’s definition of “voice”: Voice is a collection of stylistic devices used consistently to create in the readers the sense of a personality speaking to them from the page. Those of us who want to create such a voice must begin to think of those “devices” — call them Writing Tools if you wish — that create the illusion of speech on the page.
— Roy Peter Clark, vice president & senior scholar
