De-WOWing 'wow' words

"If you want to find the old battalion,
I know where they are, I know where they are, I know where they are
If you want to find the old battalion, I know where they are,
They're hanging on the old barbed wire,
I've seen 'em, I've seen 'em, hanging on the old barbed wire.
I've seen 'em, I've seen 'em, hanging on the old barbed wire."

Those lines form the final verse of a soldiers' song from the First World War. It's a - mostly - sarcastic protest song that recounts the safe location of all the officers and ends with this, the location of all the privates, the regular soldiers. (You can read the whole of it here or listen to it here.)

Where does the impact come from in this song? What is the 'wow' word?

That question - well, without the word 'wow' - was put to me more than 30 years ago by the headmaster of my school as his test of whether I could actually understand how writing works or whether he was wasting his time. (It was part of the six hours of preparation he gave me for the Cambridge entrance exam, a thing never previously encountered in my school.) It was a good test, and one that should be set for the champions of 'wow' words.

That paragraph was just to put some distance between the question and answer so that you could think about it. The answer is 'old'. The entire song hinges on it. Its first use is slightly ambiguous: 'old', as in ex? Or 'old' to communicate familiarity and affection, as in 'my old mate'? It turns out to be both. It also links the battalion with the barbed wire. The familiarity, the normality implied by the word, when encountered again in 'old barbed wire', brings with it all the pathos and tragedy of that war, of the young lives wasted on the barbed wire of northern France. The horror of the corpses hanging on the wire is redoubled by the application of the affectionate, familiar 'old'. This is the soldiers' normality. In a life and landscape so devastated and devoid of comfort, the desperate need for something to engage with locks onto the familiarity of the barbed wire: the 'old barbed wire.'

It doesn't need me to point out that 'old' is not what the Education Secretary would consider a 'wow'-word and yet that's how it functions here. This is how literature - writing - works. Not by bringing in a flashy word to do the work for you, but by employing the real, ordinary words of our language to do the work together. The tricky bit must be done by the writer, in choosing, combining, juxtaposing, even missing out, the words that are just right. It's not clever to use an unusual word. It's clever to use ordinary words in a new way.

Impact is an emergent property. It comes from making the words spark off each other, producing more than the sum of their parts by drawing on all they have going for them - associations, connotations, their sound, the way they feel as you say them or the way they look on the page. Wordsworth knew that. In the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1801), he pleads for poets to use the “language really used by men” rather than the esoteric, arcane language and often bombastic posturing that characterised much of the writing of the eighteenth century - or "inane phraseology" as he put it. The philosopher Wittgenstein, one of the most influential authorities on language of the twentieth century, declared that we need to “bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.” (Philosophical Investigations, 1953). Have we lost sight of this soon?

Effective writing is not about studding the page with sparkly words. It's about making something spectacular out of the ordinary stuff of language, just as sculpture is about making art from a lump of rock or wood, not about sticking some diamonds on a rock. Of course, it's much harder to make words work together to produce something startling. That takes some teaching. But that's the case with most things that are worth doing.

The practice of writing a piece and then adding some 'wow' words recalls making a cake and then adding coloured sugar sprinkles on top. If the cake is good, the sprinkles add little and if the cake is bad the sprinkles disguise it only for seconds. Also like cake sprinkles, wow-words are for children. As soon as the kids get to university, we have no end of work in unpicking the damage and teaching them to write concisely and clearly. Maybe we'd all be more streamlined if we ditched both sprinkles and wow-words.

I will leave you with another poem in ordinary language, this one probably about 600-700 years old, though the oldest surviving text is from 1530:

Westron wynde, when wylt thow blow
The smalle rayne downe can rayne?
Cryst yf my love were in my armys
And I yn my bed agayne.

The 'wow' is in all the words working together, as it should be. (But I guess that's a bit too socialist a principle for Conservative education ministers. They'd rather have a top-hatted wow-word lording it over the ordinary words and collecting its bonus as the one that makes the piece work. Which, of course, it doesn't. The wow-word often impoverishes the rest...)

Anne Rooney
Latest book: Flashpoints in Science, Bounty, January 2016

SCHOOL'S OUT! Or is it . . . ? by Anna Wilson

In January I wrote about the joys of giving children notebooks and letting them run riot with their story ideas. Since then I have met many teachers and parents who have done just this. They have told me how wonderful it is to see this space being used. The freedom to write or draw whatever the child wants has fed into stories she or he has often then gone on to polish in class in structured writing time. (This has not, of course, always been a direct result of my post – many teachers and parents were already giving their children the chance to explore their writing in this way.)

I would not be blogging about this again, were it not for something I witnessed on a long train journey last week; something which had me thinking again about how constraining we can be in our approach to our children’s education and the damage that can be done when pleasure is forsaken in favour of ticking boxes and getting things ‘right’. And, perhaps more importantly, when this approach leaks into home life.

A mum got on the train with her two small daughters, whom I guessed to be about five and six, and her son, who, I thought, looked about eight. They settled into their seats and the mother brought out some pens and pencils, paper and notebooks.

The little girls immediately clamoured, ‘I want my notebook!’ ‘I am going to write you a story!’

How lovely! I thought. What a great way to spend a few hours on the train.

‘Yes,’ said the mother. ‘You each have twenty minutes to write a beautiful story, and then I will read it and check it. Now – remember I want to see “wow” words, good punctuation, proper spelling, neat handwriting and lots of interesting verbs and adjectives—’

The boy groaned loudly (or was it me?) and put his head in his hands. ‘I don’t WANT to write a story!’ he complained. ‘I don’t like writing stories and I am no good at them.’

His mother placated him with promises of chocolate biscuits if he would only ‘be good like the girls and write for twenty minutes without making a fuss’. His sisters were indeed already scribbling away and reading aloud what they had written, eager to share it with their mother. She praised them and told them to keep going for the full twenty minutes.

What is it with this twenty minutes thing? I thought. Maybe she is desperate for a bit of peace and quiet. Don’t judge! You were in this situation not so long ago yourself: long train journeys with young children are tiresome and they have to have things to do otherwise you go crazy and so do they.

The boy then handed over his story. His mother, glancing at it, said, ‘Well, that’s not very interesting, is it? You haven’t used good connectives, there are no “wow” words, your handwriting is messy and you just haven’t made an effort.’

Pretty harsh, I thought.

Then came the killer blow.

‘You really have got to start making an effort with your writing, you know,’ the mother went on. ‘Next year you will have to write for twenty minutes and put all these things into your stories. You have been on holiday for a week already and you have done no writing. You must promise you’ll concentrate on this for another twenty minutes, or you will be no good at this next year.’

I must confess that, at the time, I wanted to lean across and engage the boy in conversation. I wanted to ask him if he liked reading and, if so, what kind of stories did he like best? What about his favourite films? I wanted to get him chatting about his likes and dislikes and encourage him to scribble them down, to use this precious ‘writing time’ as a chance to let his brain go wild. I wanted to tell him that it was OK to do that, and that afterwards he could go back over his story and concentrate on the connectives and the punctuation and the neat handwriting. I wanted to say that all those things his mother was talking about were indeed important, but that perhaps the reason he hated writing so much was that he was struggling with remembering the rules; that if he could forget the rules to start with, he would then perhaps find he loved writing stories, and that he had piles and piles of them to tell. I might perhaps have added that, as a published writer, I would be paralysed if I had to write a clean first draft from the off which obeyed all the rules of Standard English . . . 

Of course I didn’t. I did not want to upset his mother – after all, it was none of my business. In any case, on reflection, it was not her behaviour with her children that upset me the most, rather the fact that she clearly felt anxious that her son was not up to scratch with his English. Indeed, she was so anxious that he improve that she was insisting he work on it over the summer holidays, and work on it in the exact same way he is required to at school. She was armed to the hilt with educational jargon and was turning this terrifying arsenal on her weary son.

I was an editor before I was fortunate enough to develop my career as a writer. I know as well as anyone the importance of good grammar and correct punctuation. I appreciate clean, clear writing and a well-structured plot. I know good dialogue when I see it. My own children will roll their eyes and tell you that I am the first person to howl at the misuse of the apostrophe on a street sign or restaurant menu. Of course I can see why we have to teach these things and why parents should care about their children’s level of competence in English.

However, it makes me extremely upset that an obsession with such technicalities has the potential to wreck a child’s love of their own language. When you are as young as that little lad, creative writing should be fun, shouldn’t it? Leaving aside the dubious value in making your child work over the summer holidays in such a joyless way, I found it heartbreaking that the mother seemed not to see the potential for fun in giving her son a notebook and letting him run riot with his imagination before giving him guidance and advice on how to hone his ideas. Even more heartbreaking, though, was the thought of how anxious the woman seemed to feel about her son attaining certain targets in the academic year to come. She cannot be alone in feeling this.

I only hope that, come September, her son will find himself fortunate to have one of the many inspirational teachers we have in this country who are still in love enough with their subject to occasionally throw out the rulebook and teach from the heart instead.

www.annawilson.co.uk