Revised Essay

            The piece of advice that really stuck out to me while reading Kurt Vonnegut’s “How to write with style” was to keep it simple. The reason this piece struck a cord with me is because basically all of my English teachers taught me to write long, flowery, detailed sentences, and I was never once told to keep it simple before reading it in Vonnegut’s article.

            Ernest Hemingway once said, “My aim is to put down on paper what I see and I feel in the best and simplest way.” I feel that everyone should approach writing with this same goal in mind. If you set out to just get your ideas on the page rather than trying to write for the “A,” you’ll most likely be better off and have a much more enjoyable experience writing. It will also be a more pleasant read for whoever your audience may be. Vonnegut writes about how William Shakespeare and James Joyce, while they were most definitely able to “put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra,” kept it simple for some of their most famous lines. The phrase, “She was tired,” was able to get Joyce’s point across better than any long, detailed sentence ever could. Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be,” is only a string of four different words, yet it is one of the most memorable and well-known pieces of dialogue in all of literature.

Every single one of my English teachers wanted these long, complex, detailed sentences, when I was usually able to get my point across to my audience in half the amount of words. It ended up hurting my work rather than helping it. I would usually end up trying to fit an entire dictionary’s worth of words in one sentence that easily could have been stated with no more than ten. My English classes basically became a competition between the students to see who could have the most flowery writing possible. Writing became less like writing and more like using an online thesaurus to beef up my sentences. It became even more of a chore than it already was. My distaste of writing began to show in my work, too. I was bored reading through my own writing, so I can only imagine how uninteresting it came across to my audience.

One of my high school English teachers particularly loved the combination of the phrases “not only” and “but also,” so as students, we made it a point to include that combo as much as we could throughout the entire year’s worth of essays. That’s not to say he was a bad teacher; in fact, he’s one of the best I have ever had, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t some flaws in his teaching. While he was one of the first teachers I had that actually taught me how to construct a long, detailed sentence coherently so that it made sense and flowed with whatever I was writing instead of the usual, “Oh, just throw in some adjectives here and an adverb there,” he pushed these long, detailed sentences like no other teacher I had before or after him. It was these types of sentences one after another and while they read wonderfully when separated, they become a jumbled mess when put together in an essay.

“Antigone and Ismene are speaking amongst themselves, and Antigone begins to tell of how Creon has buried their brother, Eteocles, with military honors and give him a soldier’s funeral, but Creon is letting their other brother, Polyneices, rot in the fields to be devoured by birds without a burial.” This is the opening sentence of an essay I had to write about the Prologue of Antigone during my sophomore year of high school. Simply put, the sentence is a mouthful. Had I kept it simple, I could’ve easily made it flow much better than it currently does. “Antigone and Ismene are discussing the burials of their two brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices. Creon is giving Eteocles a soldier’s funeral while allowing Polyneices rot out in the fields,” is a much simpler way of putting it while not losing any of the details in the original version. It’s much easier to read and comprehend, and it doesn’t drag on and on like the first seems to.

            Now if I had heard Vonnegut’s advice to keep it simple several years ago, I feel as if my writing would have been better off and I would be more interested in writing in general. While there is nothing wrong with the detailed sentences my past English teachers wanted from me, the problem lies in the fact that they wanted these sentences for every single line of the paper. If I was able to have these long, complex sentences in combination with the short and to the point sentences, I believe my work would have been stronger and better received by my audience. Variation is key in this case. Balance between the simple and the complex is needed, and if that balance is nowhere to be found, you can bet on your essay being nearly unreadable. Keeping it simple, which is one of the most useful pieces of writing advice I have ever been given, would have also made writing easier and a much more enjoyable experience. I will definitely be taking it into account in the future.