The BUSKLAW Newsletter

  Having just read  Stephen King's Fairy Tale in time for Halloween, it's appropriate to examine his asides on poor writing included in the book. (BTW, Fairy Tale is a good read with King's typical well-executed character development, plot, and a great finish to the story. But you have like the whole Grimm fairy tale genre before you read his take on it.)  Stephen King doesn't tolerate anything less than crisp prose. When the story's hero, Charlie Reade, tries to read a book about the origins of fantasy and its place in the world matrix ("what a mouthful"), he can only scan it because: It was everything I hated about what I thought of as "hoity-toity" academic writing, full of five-dollar words and tortured syntax. Maybe that's intellectual laziness on my part, but maybe not. Later on, Charlie tries to focus on a particular chapter in the "origins of fantasy" book about the story of Jack and the Beanstalk but is put off by "t...

In last month's newsletter, we gave three examples of wordy, unclear, racist, pompous, and dull writing: as an opening sentence to a Bizarro-World version of Stephen King's The Gunslinger , as the beginning of a typical "big law firm"-drafted contract, and bureaucratic (including political) statements. We then compared these monsters of prose to their plain-English versions. But so what? Is poor literary, legal, business, and government writing merely a mote in the eye or something more sinister?  Let's start with bureaucratese . The Trump Administration didn't invent it but surely has taken this dark art to new heights (or depths). And their penchant for typographical errors is a new twist. In this recent  Business Insider article , 84% of 1,043 people surveyed said they would be less likely to trust the government if its communications contained spelling or grammatical mistakes. Specifically addressing Trump's notorious tweets containing such gems ...