Non-Rules for Writing: An Interview with George Gopen

Hello and welcome to the latest

installment of Being Human from the

University of Pittsburgh.

This series is devoted to exploring

the humanities, their connections to

other disciplines, and their value

in the public world.

I'm Dan Kubis, assistant director of

the Humanities Center at Pitt.

My guest today is George Gopen,

Professor Emeritus of the Practice

of Rhetoric at Duke University.

Professor Gopen's career has spanned

several decades and crossed many

disciplinary boundaries.

He holds both a J.D.

and a Ph.D. in English and has

written multiple essays on

connections between literature and

the law.

He also has a long history as a

classical performer and composer

and has published on musical themes

in T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets.

But he's best known for his work in

the field of composition, where he

pioneered what he calls the reader

expectation approach to writing.

This approach is based on Professor

Gopen's belief that we teach writing

more effectively when we concentrate

on the reader instead of the writer.

"The fundamental question that

determines writing quality," he

says, "is whether the reader

understood what the writer was

trying to say." Good writing,

in other words, can't be determined

in a vacuum.

With this in mind, Professor Gopen

has developed a range of techniques

that allow writers in various fields

to communicate more effectively.

He teaches these strategies and

workshops across the country, almost

always to capacity crowds.

Our conversation took place after

one such workshop at Pitt in

November 2016.

I began our conversation by asking

Professor Gopen what changed for him

when he started concentrating on

readers instead of writers.

It was a complete change.

It was a sea change.

I used to talk about the literature

that I was assigning. That went

away. I used to teach

the rules in the books.

That went away.

I have reduced it all

except the rules of grammar.

I reduced all the other rules we

were taught about writing to a

single rule.

And that is "no rules."

That's my only rule, and

I have people memorize it.

Everything we've been taught about

how to write better,

I think, is at least

flawed or outright false.

Every single piece of major advice:

to write

it--to make it clearer, make

it shorter. No.

Wrong.

Number of words in a sentence

has nothing to do by itself with

quality. I can show you a 130-word

sentence that's clear as a bell and

a 13-word sentence that's totally

opaque.

Avoid the passive.

Single worst thing we

teach about the language, and we

teach it constantly.

You cannot write

sophisticated English about

complicated matters without

a complete control

and skillful usage

of the passive voice.

What does the passive do?

It changes

the position of the furniture in the

room. Jack loves Jill is active.

Jill is loved by Jack is passive.

Jill and Jack have changed

locations.

What is the principal concept in

back of the reader expectation

approach?

That 85% of our clues

for interpretation as readers

come not from

word choice or word meaning

but rather from the structural

location of words.

Where a word shows

up in a sentence will control

most of the use to which

it has been put.

So what I teach now,

and since those early days,

is what those locations are and what

those expectations are.

There are

five questions

that a reader has to have the

correct answer to at the end

of every sentence that they read

of yours in order

to make of that sentence.

Not some sense,

but the sense that you

intended. The five questions are:

what's going on here?

Whose story is it, or from

who or what perspective should we

see it?

How does the sentence I'm beginning

to read now link back to the

sentence I just finished reading?

How is this sentence that I'm

starting to come to at the end of

lean forward to where I might

go from here?

And the most important of the five:

which word or words in this sentence

should I be reading with extra

emphasis because they're the stars

of the show?

You get any one of

those five wrong, and you

do not get what the author intended.

You may be completely satisfied, but

you don't get what the author meant.

Yeah.

Listening to you describe this, it

occurs to me that when you talk

about a reader, you're talking about

any kind of reader.

This is a person who's reading, not

necessarily someone in an English

department or a lawyer or

a scientist or whatever.

Is that part of the reason why

you've been able to talk to so many

different people about it and be

successful?

Absolutely.

Any reader of English

know their expectations, I

suspect for every single language,

they cover how it functions.

The expectations of English, I am

convinced, are different than any

other language, and, indeed, it

changes a little bit from dialect

to dialect. You go to England.

It's a little different from New

York City.

I suspect South Africa

or Australia would also have

their special

variations.

But those five questions,

which must have the right

answers--the new breakthrough here,

with reader expectations, is

that all of those five questions

are answered primarily

by knowing where in

the structure of a sentence to

look for that answer.

Whose story is

it?

Well, go back to Jack and Jill.

Jack loves Jill.

Jill is loved by Jack. Almost every

English teacher in the country will

tell you that Jack loves Jill is a

better sentence than Jill is loved

by Jack because it's shorter

and it's active instead of passive.

The two things I mentioned moments

ago.

Well, I will tell

you absolute nonsense.

They are both fine sentences,

but they do different things,

and it depends

on what the context is.

Context controls meaning,

but it also depends on this concept

of reader expectation.

Jack loves Jill. Whose story

is that?

Most people will tell you Jack.

Jill is loved by Jack.

Whose story is that?

Most people will tell you Jill.

So if you're trying to tell Jill's

story, the longer

passive sentence is better.

Not okay, but better.

Tell me all about Jill.

Okay, Jack.

No, tell me about Jill.

Oh, I will. Be patient.

Jack loves-- no, tell me about Jill.

Jill is loved by Jack.

Thank you very much.

Well, another thing that

I was interested in looking back

on your career is your

long involvement in music.

Not only writing about music but

also performing it as a pianist and

as a singer and in various ways.

You've been the director of the

Chamber Arts Society of Durham since

2007.

I wonder if that

experience of yours also

fed into any of the

ways that you developed the reader

expectation approach.

It certainly did to the point that

I'm willing to say that it is the

single most powerful

influence on

me in all of this.

You've mentioned before how this

material spreads over

any number of professions, all

professions, anybody who is using

English to try to communicate.

One of the reasons it's so

ubiquitously applicable

is that it's basically formed on

musical principles, and music

is the international language.

I threw myself into classical

music at age three.

I spent a long

time every day

sitting on the floor next to my

little toy record player, which

worked fine, listening to

the lives of composers

made especially for kids.

And then,

hearing the little

pastiche moments of music

that they would give me, and then

find a record and listen to the

whole piece.

I knew these composers

more intimately than I knew my

friends or

my teachers, or anyone else

in my life.

And music started speaking

to me very early on.

Expanded that knowledge.

I continue to expand it today.

I mean, I own--records

and CDs put together--I think

my collection has now exceeded

19,000. It's

almost all classical music.

So it's the size of a small

college's music library.

And I keep learning new

music from it or new

interpretations of old

music from it.

What I eventually found out was

that the principles

I was trying to

develop about how a

reader makes sense of words

apply equally well

to how music

has meaning.

You're at a concert.

Since chamber music is my

thing, it's a chamber music concert.

String quartets.

And this quartet is

playing three words. We're in the

second half after the intermission

and playing the Beethoven piece, and

we're in the second movement there.

And in measure number 16

and the first beat of 16,

all four instruments have

a note to play. When

they play this note, it freezes

right there. At

that frozen moment in

time, every

listener

in that auditorium has

a unique set

of expectations

as to what the next

cord will bring.

Listener expectations.

Yes, listener expectations.

Now, everyone has a unique

set. Yes.

What is your expectation set

built upon?

How well do you know this piece?

If you don't know this piece, how

well do you know other quartets

or other pieces of Beethoven

or other pieces by people writing

at the same time?

All of your musical knowledge, or

lack thereof, affect your

expectations.

But then it expands beyond that.

How is this group doing

tonight? What do they sound like?

How have they, in the first

half of the concert, given you

expectations about what this group

might do?

And it goes beyond that.

How hot or cold is it in

the auditorium?

What did you have for dinner?

Did you have an argument with the

person to your left over

dinner? There are any number of

things which go together to make

your set of expectations unique,

not only from everybody

else in the room but unique

in this moment of time.

Because if you came back tomorrow

and heard the same concert

at this exact moment, your

set of expectations would

be changed, in part because

you heard the concert the night

before--now that plays in--all

right, now unfreeze.

The moment they play the next

chord, I say

that the meaning of that next

moment is the sum total

of all the ways in which your

set of expectations

were fulfilled and/or

violated.

So with music, you take where you've

been.

Have it create a present moment

of the briefest duration,

and it suggests where you might go

from here.

And then, meaning comes from whether

you go over here, or

you don't go over there, or

you go over this other place, which

you hadn't expected at all.

So your expectations--I

found the same is true of language.

Now you might say, "Well, hold on.

Words you can look up in the

dictionary.

Notes, you can't. You can't look up

A

sharp in a dictionary."

Well, I would say, "You say

A sharp to a composer, and the

composer might say, 'Oh, A sharp.

That means--" And

for most people who play music, A

sharp and B flat, which are the

same note, two different names for

the same note.

You say A sharp, they have a

completely different thing going on

in their head than when you say B

flat. It's remarkable.

Is the meaning that a composer might

get from that similar, then, to the

way that a word might be defined in

the Oxford English Dictionary, which

is the sum total of its usage to

that point? And a composer with

a sense of all the times

when this note has been used in

various places will have that a kind

of sense of what the meaning is?

Yeah, I think that's fair to say.

And I would add to it

that aside from

the dictionary, you get all the

metaphors ever built on it,

all the symbolic possibilities,

all the connotations, as well as the

denotation.

That's a really interesting connection.

So when you're reading words,

you can look them up in a

dictionary. It's not like notes

where there are no meanings.

There are too many meanings

when you look the word up in the

dictionary.

I mean, my favorite example

of that is the word horse.

Look it up in the huge Oxford

English Dictionary.

And in the paper version that

I own, it's 33

full-length columns of, I

don't know, 85 lines

per page. Three

columns for 11 pages

in the OED just on horse.

And you would think, well, it's

either a four-legged animal or it's

a piece of equipment in the

gymnasium.

But oh, no, they can tell you, "Oh,

boy, is there more to horse than

that?" So when you read the

word horse, you

can't possibly consciously

conjure up all of

those. 33 columns

is the size of a short novella.

You can't think of all of those

horses at the time.

How do you know which horse

or which category of horses

to allow into your mind?

And the answer is it's the context

of what came before the horse

that makes you choose.

If you're talking about the corral,

you think of the animal.

If you're talking about the gym, you

think of that horrid

thing you had to climb over when you

were a kid in school

and all the other horses

too--the horse named Charlie

and all the rest of them.

What comes before will

make it able to

function, and then what comes after

it might change

and further refine it.

So the notes and the words

really don't have

much difference in terms of

linearity of

experience. When you go from left to

right, and through time, through a

sentence, or through two measures

of music, the same forces

are working on you.

Where have I come from?

How am I--how do I know where I am

now? Where am I going?

And, oh, goodness, did I go there

or not?

Yeah. So it's this life experience

that kind of prepared you for--

And this brings you to phrasing

and writing.

This brings you to letting your

reader know how long you're going

to be doing this thing.

I mean, if you

have a sentence that says, "We can

explain this in one of two ways."

You're expecting two ways to come,

but you don't know at that point

where they'll come.

You hope the first one comes

immediately. You don't want to hear,

"We can explain this at one of two

ways, but first, a word from our

sponsor." You want it to come in.

Number one is going to come

immediately, but when's number two

going to come in?

The same sentence, the next

sentence, later on.

If you start the next sentence

with the word "either."

It informs the reader

that both will be in this sentence,

and the second one will start

immediately after the word

"or."

Information is created by the word

itself.

Yeah. So if you don't have the

"either," you read.

And at some point, you think,

"Oh, after this comma,

the second one's starting." Whereas

if you have "either" and "or,"

you know to read in a musical phrase

of either, or.

You have that expectation

beforehand.

And if you've written it so a reader

can do that

nicely and, if possible, can

even balance the length and the

rhythm of it.

Now we're talking about elegant

writing.

So you have a law degree

and also a Ph.D..

And you've talked in

interviews before about the fact

that you felt

that there was a connection between

the two early on.

But it took you a while to realize

how to talk about it and how to

think about what that connection

was. And it was your discovery of

the field of rhetoric that allowed

you to do that.

So I wonder, can you talk a little

bit about what it was

about that field that let you make

that connection?

Sure. I loved my first year at the

Harvard Law School,

but I got pretty depressed by the

second year because

I'd learned everything that was

interesting to learn in the first

year. And I realized I was sliding

down a slippery slope

to being a lawyer, and I'd had

an opportunity to

see some lawyers up close for a

while that did very

limited and dull work.

And I thought that's what all

lawyers did, and it was a mistake

of perception on my part, but still.

So I was getting depressed at the

idea of becoming a lawyer.

And on a bulletin board at Harvard,

one day, I saw a message that

said, "Anybody doing a J.D.:

We have a new program now.

You may do an M.A.

in anything the university offers

just for the asking.

You don't have to apply or argue

your way in. Just tell us

you want to do an M.A.

we're interested in broader,

educated lawyers."

Something inside me just

immediately said, "Oh, good, I want

to go do English." And I didn't have

any use for it.

There's nothing I was going to do

professionally.

I think I just wanted more time to

study some poetry.

And I said, "Good.

Me. English." And I signed up.

The English department was furious.

They'd never heard of this program.

What the hell did they want a law

student coming in the back door?

They wanted to be able to reject

people, and they couldn't reject me.

And the law school was furious.

They thought I was being frivolous

and abusing the privilege.

And they were so upset

that next year, they canceled

the whole program because of my

abuse of it. One of my enduring

contributions to the Harvard Law

School was that they got rid of

this wonderful program because of my

abuse. Now, the law

school called me in for

a talk, and they put to

me the question that you've

basically raised here.

What's the connection?

What's the connection?

Why are you doing this?

And my answer to them, I remember

quite clearly at the time, was,

"I cannot articulate what

the connection is, but I feel

the connection inside me.

There is--it does not feel like two

separate things or different things

or conflicting things or even

contrasting things.

I feel like my

passion for learning

things legally and

my passion for reading

poetry and poetic

drama come from

the same place, and I just

haven't got a word for it."

Well, off I went to the English

department and convinced them

that I should stay for the

Ph.D..

They weren't happy with that

concept, but

I was a young lawyer, and I knew

how to argue. So I argued them into

it, and they let

me stay. And it came time

for the

Ph.D. oral exam, and you had to

choose one of five

chronological periods

to do your major part of your

exam. And it was either medieval or

Renaissance or 18th century or 1800

to the present--all those

English, British--or

American, which covered three

centuries.

And then you would do your thesis

somewhere within

that field.

And I went to Professor and

asked,

"Could I split the fields?

Could I do my exams in 1800 to the

present but write my thesis

in medieval?

And he said, 'Well, yes, you'd be

allowed to do that, but I

assure you, you would never find

employment in

any university of any stature

whatsoever."

So I did do the split, and the

English department was again upset

with me for being frivolous.

I wasn't taking any fields.

But again, it made sense to me what

I was doing.

I was 39 years old

before the term

rhetoric appeared

on the academic stage

again, and that was

the word I had been missing all this

time.

What I did for

a living was rhetorical

analysis of...fill-in-the-blank.

It could be poetry. It could

be nonfiction prose.

It could be political

speeches in nonfiction

prose. And

it could be from the

14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, the

20th century, and

now 21st.

I had taught myself

along the way--since no one was

teaching any of this--I

taught myself along the way

to concentrate on the connection

between structure

and substance.

And the reader expectation

approach is based on

those two words and demonstrating

how that connectivity is made.

And at age 39,

when the word rhetoric suddenly

became available to me,

I was off reading all of classical

rhetoric and found

that my definition of rhetoric is

different from all

the great classical names.

Aristotle, Quintilian, Cicero,

they define rhetoric as

the power of persuasion,

or the ability to make a good

argument, because they

were thinking of rhetoric as

something that was delivered orally

in a public place.

And I was looking at a

written form in my definition

of rhetoric,

which a lot of smart people don't

understand. Stanley Fish himself

once called me to say, "What in the

world do you mean by this?

It sounds totally circular."

My definition of rhetoric is

everything in a text

that

persuades you, the

reader, to interpret

the text in the way

you've chosen to interpret it.

Well, and that actually reminds

me--all of this reminds me very much

of an essay that you wrote in 1984

called Rhyme and Reason: Why the

Study of Poetry is the Best

Preparation for the Study of Law.

And you argue in it, you say, "The

formalistic study of poetry

is the best preparation for the

study of law." And I wonder if you

can you say a little bit--I mean, I

think we have been talking about

this, but if you can say a little

bit more about what you mean there

when you talk about the formalistic

study of poetry.

Sure. Now, my

formalistic study of poetry.

I hesitate to use the word because

I don't agree with the formalists

of the early 1970s

who believe that they understood how

the human brain functioned, and

therefore we can take it from there.

Now, I think I know something about

what readers tend to expect, which

has to do with how the-- not how

"the" brain functions, but

our brains here, today,

now in our community.

So I tend in that direction.

But what I like about the term

formalist is that I think that the

form has

impact on the substance.

What I learned

as an undergraduate in poetry

classes, in Shakespeare classes,

was the method that was referred to

as the New Criticism, the start

of the 1930s and 40s,

and went strong until

it was displaced by theory in the

1970s.

And when one thing displaces

another, you have to kill it and

stomp it and bury it and hide it

so that nobody ever sees it again.

And it's been

now 40 years.

And although theory kind of died

maybe 10 or 15 years ago, in

some ways,

New Criticism and close textual

analysis of text for its own sake,

as opposed to the sake of

being anti-homophobic

or anti-anti-Semitic

or anti-misogynist

or whatever.

Instead of looking at it for

those purposes, I look

at text to see how the heck does

the text function.

My questions to students were

always, at

any given time, two: what does it

mean to you and what in the text

persuaded you

to have that as the meaning?

And I developed a whole

bag of rhetorical tricks for showing

people around poems

and how this kind of balance

or that kind of figures of speech

functioned on them, whether they

knew the name of the figure of

speech or even recognized it was

happening or not.

But how it controlled them.

What I then realized when I went to

law school, and why I adored that

first year, is that

law school was

constantly asking the question

that I was asked under New Critical

and that I teach to this

day.

I've been a New Critical teacher,

sort of, all my career.

And that question is:

here is a text, and how many

ways can it have meaning?

And the law teaches you:

I don't care what the law says.

It doesn't say anything.

It says what a good lawyer can make

it say. Well, this sounds an awful

lot like, ironically,

what theory brought to the table.

"Is There a Text In This Class?"

[1980 essay by the literary critic Stanley Fish] Does this mean

everything to everybody, or nothing

to nobody, or nothing to everybody,

or everything to nobody?

Hey, it all comes from the reader.

No, no.

It's the text, too.

It's the interaction of reader and

text. I just covered about 15

years of

the history of literary theory

in that sentence, that

run-on sentence.

I see the law asking

the question that

theory actually wound up

asking.

As a professional in law, we

want to teach you to turn around

and see this from 180 degrees

over there.

And do another 90 degrees

and look at it from over there.

Now take a slant view.

And now, take a three-dimensional

view.

How many different ways can you see

this? Because you're going to have

a client, and

your job is to represent the client.

And it's going to happen that you

don't yourself believe

in the client's innocence or lack

of liability or rights

under the contract or whatever it

is.

But if you've accepted the client,