Present Imperfect

Front-Loading Pandas | August 23, 2004

Today on my way to work, the NPR announcer was doing a round-up of sponsors and mentioned an agency specializing in giant panda conservation. Living in California, with the state's prior energy crisis all too fresh in my mind, I kept wondering when she was going to say that you should keep your giant pandas off during the day, set your giant pandas at 68 degrees and not operate your giant pandas between the hours of 4 and 9 p.m.

Then the pandas reminded me of Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, that book I (sort of) blogged about earlier, and about Louis Menand's review in The New Yorker that kicks off by picking apart the grammatical and factual errors in Truss's book but gradually develops into one of the most eloquent compositions I have ever read about the art of writing. I mean, this paragraph alone is worth a thousand Eats, Shoots & Leaves:

One of the most mysterious of writing's immaterial properties is what people call "voice." Editors sometimes refer to it, in a phrase that underscores the paradox at the heart of the idea, as "the voice on the page." Prose can show many virtues, including originality, without having a voice. It may avoid cliché, radiate conviction, be grammatically so clean that your grandmother could eat off it. But none of this has anything to do with this elusive entity the "voice." There are probably all kinds of literary sins that prevent a piece of writing from having a voice, but there seems to be no guaranteed technique for creating one. Grammatical correctness doesn't insure it. Calculated incorrectness doesn't, either. Ingenuity, wit, sarcasm, euphony, frequent outbreaks of the first-person singular—any of these can enliven prose without giving it a voice. You can set the stage as elaborately as you like, but either the phantom appears or it doesn't.

I never intended to buy Eats, Shoots & Leaves, because any book with the words "zero tolerance" in the title is probably best avoided, but now I'm resolved to buy lots of Menand's books. For that, I think Lynne Truss has done me a favor.