https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/03/27/part-2-whatever-hap
In Lee Child’s thriller Personal, his audacious hero Jack Reacher lays down the four attributes of good spycraft: hard work, attention to detail, lateral thinking (“outside the box,” as the phrase has it) and unconventional or creative adaptations to circumstance. These are precisely the traits that characterize the mindset and practice of the good writer in any field or genre. Apart from the pragmatic aspects of, let us say, writecraft, one may add, as Ernest Hemingway did in A Moveable Feast, a moral component as well. “All you have to do is write one true sentence,” Hemingway said. “Write the truest sentence that you know.” The rest follows.
Honesty of purpose in Hemingway’s terms and fidelity to craft in the Lee Child/Jack Reacher sense entail both the writer’s fealty to himself or herself and commitment to the reader. These are the qualities that are demonstrably missing, for instance, in propaganda, in hortatory manuals of self-improvement, in government reports, in social media’s verbal expulsions, in academic jargonfests, and in almost all contemporary journalism.
I have begun to notice that many Internet writers and even notable scholars whom I’ve long respected have begun writing ever shorter paragraphs, culminating in the forlorn, one sentence taglet, a sort of stichometry catering to the growing problem of attention deficiency. Moreover, these sentences are often pimpled with typos, attesting to an author’s lack of diligence—I recall one well-known writer who wrote “the Pubic wars” for “the Punic wars,” without noticing. Another common solecism is the jagged or wrenching transition from one sentence to another, obscuring the thought. Of course, everyone is prone to such errors, and this writer is not exempt—to err is human—but the question here is one of frequency, of an all too casual unawareness or lack of care. The best one can say of such writing is that it may be serviceable, but it does not stride on the page with athletic confidence. It exhibits neither grace nor muscle.
