The Clunk Clunk Clunk Read
Dear Reader,
All writers write clunkers at some point. A line that just doesn’t quite land—the intended idea not quite captured; the sonority turned to an unintentional cacophony. The line peters out with a clunk clunk clunk.
Shakespeare is even regarded to have had a few clunkers. I don’t know which they are—I’m not a Shakespearean scholar; nor do I collect writerly foibles for fun—but I’ve heard that it’s so. With Shakespeare, however, the clunkers are mentioned as noteworthy because they are the exception, not the norm.
Some writers, however, just dwell in the clunk clunk clunk realm. And it’s painful to read.
Sometimes the error is that of register: a writer trying to be artistic in a how-to guide, e.g. I remember the preface to Jeff Dondero’s Throwaway Nation just absolutely clunking in its preface with its ugly alliteration. In fact, I made a note of it and “ugly alliteration” is now one of my least-favorite things to find out in the wild.
Alliteration is tricky. It can bind a piece of writing together; it can be heavy-handed; or it can make the writer seem amateurish. In Throwaway Nation, the alliteration appeared to be intended for “stylistic grace,” but it clunked so blatantly that it made the stylistic pretentions of the author rather embarrassing. (The ugly alliteration aside, the book’s all right. It would have been better had it stuck to its theme of garbage and not attempted to include time-wasting as a form of American trash. In the broadest sense, sure, but the book neither earned that broadness nor made good use of the extra pages.)
Alliteration, I should also note, is unavoidable. Words, you know. Only so many sounds in English and some initializing sounds are more common than others. But alliteration can become a very precious thing. A wordsmithing thing. And while some occasions of inexpert wordsmithing happen naturally, many of them happen when the writer is trying their darndest.
The descriptor for such inexpert wordsmithing, the error of the try-hard as it were, is sophomoric. In an actual college sophomore, not embarrassing, a college professor’s cutting remarks aside. But in a professional writer, oh dear.
Here’s the thing about the clunk clunk clunk read, particularly of the bad alliterative variety: almost all readers recognize it for what it is. Ugly alliteration isn’t something understood by an elite class of tastemakers alone. Ugly alliteration bugs just about every reader. Not every reader recognizes why they aren’t enjoying a particular read, but that hazy sensation of “something’s not right here” is often produced by the clunk clunk clunk of crappy alliteration.
(You’re either welcome, or I’m very sorry. Once you’ve observed ugly alliteration for what it is, you can confirmation-bias your way into finding it everywhere. I will note that most off-putting alliteration is usually just the heavy-handed variety, and thus innocuous. Ugly alliteration is jarring.)
The king of ugly alliteration has to be Steven Pinker, whose writing calls such ostentatious attention to its own alliteration that it literally “clunks” rather than sliding by as it should. The best alliteration smooths the read, glides the reader along. Ugly alliteration calls attention to itself.
And Steven Pinker is ugly alliteration’s greatest showman. Whatever his theories on linguistics, I can’t get into them because the sheer arrogance of his sophomoric alliteration makes me what to put nails through my eyeballs. I can’t finish his books because the writing is just so comically bad.
Sometimes you read a line and it dances around in your head, you hear the lyricism of the words—poetic, musical, magical. With Pinker’s writing, you do your best to never let the words get that deep. Because no one likes dancing with someone who has two left feet. Get that trash out of my head.
You might wonder why I’ve bothered to dwell so long on Steven Pinker. No, it isn’t an attempt to cut into his authority as a way of undermining side projects of his like Enlightenment Now. I’ll leave that to those more expert, though I sadly have to read that monstrosity for my own research at some point. Can’t wait to do that ugly alliteration dance, let me tell you. (Yes, I’ve already planned out three books to read immediately afterwards as “palate cleansers,” because woof.)
My reason for dwelling on the king of ugly alliteration so long is that he had the audacity to write a book titled, and I kid you not, The Sense of Style. It’s a book on how to write well, and how to, uh, scientifically develop a sense of style. Or produce one in your writing. Or something.
If there was ever a time for “physician, heal thyself,” this is that moment.
(Although Pinker’s greatest sin is his sophomoric clunk clunk clunking—and imagining it to be sonorous prose—he also attempts to spin off as science what is merely platitudinous.
When, say, in physics you describe the mechanics of lift and it upends our understanding of flight, demonstrating a counterintuitive reality, then you have something noteworthy in science. When you describe the limitations and promise of certain academic practices—say, exposing underlining as a “low utility tool”—that reconsideration of a (somewhat recent) pedagogical tool elucidates understanding and invites further reflection. Still the realm of useful science.
But when you produce an observationally defeasible description of a phenomenon that has been observed and presented in defeasible warnings since at least the dawn of professional rhetoric in ancient Greece—and I think there’s evidence this was understood in oral traditions even before—what you have produced isn’t science in any meaningful sense, but rather platitudes. Put another way, sample sizes of thousands of years and thousands of researchers are not made more scientific when replaced by sample sizes of hundreds with new “scientific” names. (Admittedly, those names aren’t worse than the parade of Greek rhetorical terms we still insist are relevant while we teach literally no other Greek to the general populace, but that’s a conversation for another time.)
Combine the sophomoric writing skill, the loftily titled book, and the assembly of platitudes dressed up as scientific insight, and my-oh-my that’s a clunker of a read. And no, I will not be including Pinker’s book on writing among the sample texts when I write about reading books on writing, though I may link back to this piece.)
Not every clunk clunk clunk read comes from ugly alliteration. Sentences can be too long. Sentences can be too short. Transitions might lead to nowhere, or their absence might lead to strange places. Consonance and assonance matter, and so do the length and rhythm of words.
A read can clunk for you because, as mentioned earlier, the register is off for the genre of the read. I don’t want poetry in my how-to manuals, unless it’s a how-to guide on writing poetry. And even then, I’d rather the explanatory parts were comprehensible prose, simplified for little minds like my own.
Of course, reads can feel like clunkers because we disagree with them, but those are more likely to be letdown reads or grinding reads or hate reads. Or a read can feel like a clunker because we aren’t ready for it yet, there’s a maturity we need to develop or some background we need. There the clunking is on us, as readers.
To fewer clunks,
Kreigh
P.S. Yes, as I already acknowledged that I can produce letdowns, I recognize here that my own writing can clunk. I’d rather not have written today’s piece, as I realize the immediate sample is my own writing. But clunkers are part of the reading life, and I’d have done you a disservice not to mention the experience. I myself produce fewer of them in pieces that I have ample time with, but it still happens. And as this is the case, I most definitely will not be writing a how-to guide on writing any time soon…