I still remember the performance evaluation I received in the mid-1970s when I was a reporter for the Delaware State News. I was two years out of journalism school and struggling with writing news.
I had a “way with words,” my editor wrote.
I couldn’t have been more pleased, so much so that the next sentence didn’t even sting. “But his copy is a desk editor’s nightmare.”
“A way with words” sounded sweet to my ears because I saw it as recognition that I was a writer, a goal since I was 12 years old.
As a young reporter, I was convinced that to be a good writer, you needed a “way with words.”
In the years since, I’ve come to see that the dig at my admittedly sloppy copy wasn’t as significant a sign of trouble as much as the praise bestowed on my prose.
More important than a “way with words,” I believe, is “a way with thoughts.” Great writers are great thinkers.
They know, as Washington Post sports columnist Thomas Boswell once put it: “It’s one thing to be given a topic, but you have to find the idea or the concept within that topic. Once you find that idea or thread, all the other anecdotes, illustrations, and quotes are pearls that hang on this thread. The thread may seem very humble, the pearls may seem very flashy, but it’s still the thread that makes the necklace.”
They know, as N. Don Wycliff of the Chicago Tribune said after he won the1997 Best Newspaper Writing Award for editorial writing: “You can’t write clearly unless you think clearly … Think long; Think hard .”
They know, as does David Marannis, Washington Post writer-editor and best-selling author: “The one ingredient that’s often left out of the whole process is not the writing or the reporting, but the thinking. … Take a few minutes to think about the theme and images before you start writing.”
These and many other writers have taught me over the years that a “way with thoughts” matters more than “a way with words.”
So it was with intense pleasure that I came across, in “Team of Rivals: The Politicaal Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” by Doris Kearns Goodwin, a reference to the value of words vs. thoughts in the writing process. (The entire book is captivating.)
On Sept. 3, 1863, Republican President Lincoln wrote a public letter to curb rumors circulated by a wing of the Democratic Party (they called themselves Peace Democrats, but were better known as “Copperheads,” after the pennies some wore as badges) that he had secretly rejected peace proposals with the South.
Lincoln dismissed the Copperheads’ claims, but did see a day of victory coming, though one tinged with racial hatred. To appreciate his prose I’d recommend reading it aloud.
To some readers the letter was on a par with the Emancipation Proclamation. On Sept. 7, The New York Times was one of several Northern papers to heap praise on the letter and its writer, Goodwin writes.
” ‘The most consummate rhetorician never used language more pat to the purpose. And still there is not a word in the letter not familiar to the plainest plowman,’ the Times wrote.”
Goodwin continued: “While ‘felicity of speech’ was usually linked to high culture … [Lincoln] in his own ‘independent, and perhaps we might say, very peculiar,’ way exhibits ‘a felicity of speech far surpassing’ stylistic preference.”
A way with words.
But the Times also said, Goodwin writes, that Lincoln “possesses a far more valuable ‘felicity of thought,’ which, ‘invariably gets at the needed truth of the time, hitting the very nail of all others which needs driving.’ “
A way with thoughts.
Yet another reason why I wish I could rewrite that 32-year-old evaluation. No doubt I’d still be slammed for messy copy, but what greater praise could I hope for if it had instead said, “He has a way with thoughts.”
