The Rich Rewards Of Writing Well

By Eli Amdur

Each year, there is an event in Spain that deserves more notice than it gets, at least here in the States.

The Princess of Asturias Foundation presents annual awards – called, appropriately, The Princess of Asturias Awards – to individuals, entities, or organizations from around the world who make notable achievements in the sciences, humanities, and public affairs. It’s like the Nobel Prize, just smaller in scale but no lesser in substance.

In 2014, the Foundation presented one of its awards to the then 68-year-old Irish novelist and short story writer named John Banville. In accepting the award, one section of his comments stood out so starkly and was so profound that I copied it and saved it. I read it often.  It is beautifully simple and simply beautiful – and it also has profound implications. Said Banville:

“I regard the sentence as the greatest invention of humankind. It’s the greatest thing we’ve done. There have been civilizations – the Aztecs and the Incas – so many who didn’t have the wheel, but they did have the sentence. Because the sentence is what makes us human. We think in sentences, we speak in sentences, we devise ideas in sentences, we declare love, we declare war in sentences. This is a basic unit of our humanness, and here I am spending my days working with this basic unit of humanness. It’s a great privilege and a great pleasure, but of course it’s very hard work and very frustrating. But I wouldn’t exchange it for anything else.”

Reverence, Admiration, Respect, and Love

With notable – and appropriate – humility, Banville showed reverence, admiration, respect, and love for the fundamental element of what he does. And, if you’ll take a second look, you’ll see that not only did he say something profound; he said it so beautifully, artistically, and tenderly.

To that, we can and should aspire, whether we’re engaged in writing for literary value or business effectiveness. Yet, in my observation – plus according to credible data – we, in the aggregate, are going in the opposite direction.

My Observation

For 15 years (2003-2018) I taught two graduate courses in communication and leadership at FDU. I wish I had the foresight to set up some sort of longitudinal study to assess writing skills. I didn’t, but after having read nearly 4,000 papers submitted by students aged 22 to 62 at every career level and from 108 undergraduate programs across the country, what I did see was unmistakable: a consistent, not so trivial, across the board degradation of writing skills. Technique, mechanics, vocabulary, syntax, style – they all suffered. And it was not just me. Colleagues at FDU and other universities saw the same phenomenon.

Some telling data

According to BLS data, Americans 15 years and older spend 21 minutes per day reading for personal interest, and Datareportal reports that Americans spend 134 minutes per day on social media. That’s just out of whack.

Correlation

Great leaders are great readers, simple as that, and social media is not reading, no matter what’s on your screen. We learn to write well by – among other things – reading more, reading quality, and reading diverse matter. And prioritizing it.

What’s needed, what’s being cried out for, is a renewed love for the sentence. We will, like John Banville, return to doing “the greatest thing we’ve done.”