If A Literary God Wrote An Appellate Brief . . .

What would his sentences be like? Would they read like his prose, if the prose that he wrote read like this?

“It was this look on the face that (slowly) turned left to look at her from the ambulance–a face that in the very most enuretic and disturbing way both was and was not the face of the husband she loved — that galvanized Jeni Roberts awake and prompted her to gather every bit of her nerve together and make the frantic humiliating call to the man she had once thought very seriously of marrying, an associate sales manager and probationary Rotarian whose own facial asymmetry — he had suffered a serious childhood accident that subsequently caused the left half of his face to develop differently from the right side of his face; his left nostril was unusually large, and gaped, and his left eye, which appeared to be almost all iris, was surrounded by concentric rings and bags of slack flesh that constantly twitched and throbbed as irreversibly damaged nerves randomly fired — was what, Jeni decided after their relationship foundered, had helped fuel her uncontrollable suspicion that he had a secret, impenetrable part to his character that fantasized about lovemaking with other women even while his healthy, perfectly symmetrical, and seemingly uninjurable thingie was inside her.” (Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, “Adult World (I),” p.153.)

Scary? Sure, if you’re the appellate justice’s long-suffering clerk. You might wonder, then, why legal writing guru Bryan Garner took the time to interview said Literary God–David Foster Wallace–about persuasive legal writing, before the LG’s untimely death by suicide in 2008.

Well, wonder no longer. As highlighted in a recent article by Garner himself in the ABA Journal, it turns out that, although his fiction is often . . . er . . . challenging, DFW has something to say about persuasive writing, not only from the perspective of an innovative novelist, but also as both an essayist and an academic. Among the things he said:

“So when I teach nonfiction classes, I spend a disproportionate amount of my time teaching the students how to write transitions, even as simple ones as however and moreover between sentences. Because part of their belief that the reader can somehow read their mind is their failure to see that the reader needs help understanding how two sentences are connected to each other—and also transitions between paragraphs.

I’m thinking of the argumentative things that I like the best, and because of this situation the one that pops into my mind is Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” If you look at how that’s put together, there’s a transition in almost every single paragraph. Like: “Moreover, not only is this offense common, but it is harmful in this way.” You know where he is in the argument, but you never get the sense that he’s ticking off items on a checklist; it’s part of an organic whole. My guess would be, if I were an argumentative writer, that I would spend one draft on just the freaking argument, ticking it off like a checklist, and then the real writing part would be weaving it and making the transitions between the parts of the argument—and probably never abandoning the opening, never letting the reader forget what the stakes are here. Right? Never letting the reader think that I’ve lapsed into argument for argument’s sake, but that there’s always a larger, overriding purpose.”

I’m looking forward to the book that contains the fruits of this interview, Quack This Way: David Foster Wallace & Bryan A. Garner Talk Language and Writing. Royalties from the book will apparently support the David Foster Wallace literary archive housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

2 Comments

  1. Anonymous

    Faulkner was a literary god. Hemingway was a literary god. Kerouac was a literary god. The person you mention was at best a Double A player.

    • If we’re going to split hairs, then I suggest that Kerouac, whom I also greatly respect, was also a Double A player on his very best days. Of course you probably wouldn’t have bothered to read anything entitled “If a Literary Double A Player Wrote An Appellate Brief . . .”

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