Category Archives: Rhetorical Mastery

delaware river at Frenchtown

Living in the National Piñata

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This is an area where too many of the deer and antelope play, where wild turkeys travel in sullen gangs, and official cautions about bears are not just an academic exercise.

We were at a party a few weeks ago when I happened to pick up a fragment of the conversation just in time to hear a visitor from North Carolina offer the opinion that “the only good thing about New Jersey is Bruce Springsteen.” She was sorry she couldn’t get a ticket to see his show in New York. The nearby host demurred and said something to the effect that “we love him, but there’s more to the state than Bruce.”  I wish I’d been fast enough to have thrown in a little Jersey attitude as well, perhaps the coda: “and we’re prepared to break the legs of anyone who disagrees.”

The comment was a red flag. It seems rude for a party guest to be critical of the host’s state. That’s the job of people who live in it, and we do it well.  It was even more ironic that this was said in a beautiful New Jersey home on it’s “west coast,” near the Delaware River. The house sits in the kinds of woodlands that cover over 40 percent of the Garden State. It’s next to conservation district filled with trees and pastures, and across from a trout stream. Locals swear that Vermont tourism officials once came to this spot to take pictures of “their” countryside. It’s also an area where too many of the deer and antelope play, where wild turkeys travel in sullen gangs, and official cautions about bears are not just an academic exercise. Lovely villages hug the shores of the East’s most impressive “wild and scenic river,” the Middle and Upper portions of the Delaware. Both sides of its wooded banks as scattered with historic inns, including one in Stockton memorialized in the Rogers and Hart standard, “There’s a Small Hotel.”

I won’t run down the list of backward ideas that seem to catch the fancy of many in the Tar Heel State. I will just say that from a Garden State perspective, some of our friends to the south still seem to still be fighting old culture wars, to the detriment of women, gay Americans and Muslims.

Residents here tend to be more forward-looking. People in New Jersey actually vote to increase their taxes to preserve farms and open space.  The corollary is the right to complain about the higher cost of living.  And other supposed bargain states might take note: New Jersey is near the top in the performance of its tax-funded public schools, average household income, residents with advanced degrees, sane gun laws, and standards for the treatment of animals.

As befits a state that still believes in communities and their governments, the geographically compact state has over 500 of municipal bodies . All these big and little school districts, towns and boroughs are expensive to support. But they suggest that many residents are engaged. Live in a small town, and you will be asked to serve a stint on the Planning Board or Shade Tree Commission. Even the state’s bigger cities on it’s east coast seem to be on a roll of newfound civic activism.

I’ve lived in California, Colorado, Great Britain and Pennsylvania, and liked them all.  But New Jersey seems to be the most open to ethnic and religious differences. In a recent flight from Florida to Trenton I was proud of the overcrowded plane with the diversity of a United Nations gathering.

So a word of warning: Please don’t use the Garden State as the national piñata. There is so much more to New Jersey than the Turnpike and Newark/Liberty Airport. And to our friends from the south, be sure there are human assets to claim for your state beyond notable landmarks like the grand Biltmore Estate, the nation’s largest private home. Anyway it’s just possible that one day Bruce may buy the place and move it to Rumson.

writing

Everyone Needs an Editor

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Who hasn’t read something, including this blog, only to find a sudden and apparently unplanned descent into verbal mayhem?  Perhaps the author didn’t notice his elbow resting on the keyboard. Perhaps the four-legged family member decided to add a few keystrokes.

Creating sentences on paper or with pixels poses lifelong challenges.  Even accomplished writers usually demur if you tell them they are masters of their craft. Most will admit to writing in drafts that number in the double digits, and most share the almost universal experience of re-reading old material with the nagging feeling that it could have been better. Writing is one skill that is rarely mastered.  Full literacy is a lifelong project. Even so, an occasional stray word left in the wrong neighborhood is not the largest problem. Difficulties arise at the other end of the continuum, where what appears “finished” to a novice is only a pale version of what could be.  Early drafts deserve to be thoroughly marked up.

Everyone needs an editor. Two sets of eyes will improve almost any text.  And why not? Academic presses often send a manuscript out to three experts for review before they green-light a book. Good surgeons often welcome another set of eyes to review scans and x-rays.  Playwrights do workshop readings to discover dead passages or weak third acts.  And advertisers use illustrators to ‘mock up’ storyboards for television commercials before they commit to a full-scale film shoot.  Rare is a  writer like John McPhee, who is so thorough in his research and phrasing that an editor seems unnecessary.

Everyone needs an editor. Two sets of eyes will improve almost any text.

I plead with my students to try out their work on others they know. This is perhaps the single best reason to have a college roommate.  But I still get projects that describe Washington and Jefferson as “too pivotal presidents,” or analyses of “communication problems that defy easy remededeys.”  And woe to folks who count on being bailed out by a computer spell-check program.  My computer was fine with the word “dissent” in the original pull-quote at the top of this piece.

These cases may sound like this need is limited to professionals. But recall the last time you read a family’s holiday letter that revealed more about one of its members than better judgment would allow. Johnny may not want everyone to know that he’s been “challenged” to complete his remedial math course. Such a letter should have been vetted by someone else with a more protective instinct.

The need for an outsider’s input is also apparent for missives that come from a manager who says too much or includes too little.  For example, it would be helpful to know the day and time for that important meeting that she has just announced. And every person mentioned in such a piece has the right to expect that their name will be spelled correctly. Smart managers will usually welcome a second pair of eyes on a document planned for wide distribution.  But certainly not all. The most insecure may not appreciate being saved from errors by more literate underlings.

Who hasn’t read this blog only to find passages where the best explanations for the sudden disintegration of a sentence is that the writer experienced an errant brain synapse?  It’s the curse of blogging that pieces are let loose in the world too soon, with the equivalent of seams gaping open, buttons missing and tags still attached.

Sorry about those slip-ups.  I need an editor.