Failure Week: Circumlocutions

Authenticity made my mentor who he was, and it was one of his most important lessons. He railed against overcomplicated words and prose constantly. He’d write rants to the newspaper every week. I earned much of his mentorship by cutting out all those letters because he had cerebral palsy and couldn’t do it himself. That means I read an awful lot of irritation about pseudointellectuals. He hated what Generation X was doing to writing. He hated the pretentiousness and the cliches. Most of all, he hated the misuse and abuse of language. He wanted us to use words because they were the right words, and not because they were the most impressive ones.

My mentor taught me that we, as writers, are in the business of reaching out to others in the hope that we can deliver some measure of understanding. We’re in the business of affirming the human fact. We’re in the business of communicating. Writing’s primary goal is to reach into the isolate and touch someone. This needn’t be heavy or dark. We can connect over lightness, too, but both alternatives require the writer to have unpretentious goals.

It’s my mentor’s fault that I harp on about pretentiousness so much, but he is gone, so there’s nobody to send your complaint letters to, I’m afraid.

Lionel complained bitterly about redundancies, infinitives, and circumlocutions. Here’s an example of all three:

Owing to the fact that at the present time it’s necessary to consume a baked cupcake.

Lionel would have preferred, “Let’s eat a cupcake,” but hey, what did he know? He was just one of the most influential people in South African literary history.

In short, don’t use words unless you have to. The more diluted your writing becomes, the less power it wields, so get into the habit of being straightfoward about your word choices. Grammarly can help you with this. So can the Hemingway Editor You’ve used it before. You should use it again—every day, in fact. Do it until you’ve internalised these lessons.

We fail when our goal is to impress, so find a new goal. It’s January, after all.

Exercise

We're prone to being flowery when describing landscapes, so please write one or two paragraphs describing a landscape in a way that's undiluted and sparse.