My favorite pieces of literature

Litertaure is the body of written work produced by scholars or researchers. When does a piece of work, or a technical research paper, or a letter to a friend or a written music become a piece of literature. I think its all about being recognised. And when a lot of work by a writer is recognised by a lot of people, then the writer becomes a scholar and his work becomes the literature. I cant think of a better explaination. Some of my favorite pieces of literature that I like to read or listen to again and again:

Daffodils
Dasht-e-Tanhai
Sonnet 18 - Darling buds of May
Funeral Blues
Har ek baat pe
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
On good writing
Taj Mahal
The Three Musketeers
Thorn Birds
Will you be there

The poet William Wordsworth was born in 1770. By the time of his death in 1850 he had produced some of English poetry’s greatest works and influenced future generations of poets. Daffodils was composed in 1804, two years after he saw the flowers walking by Ullswater on a stormy day with Dorothy. His inspiration for the poem came from an account written by Dorothy. In her journal entry for 15th April 1802 she describes how the daffodils:" tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind, that blew upon them over the lake;".

Daffodils
I wandered lonely as a Cloud
That floats on high o'er Vales and Hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:-
A poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company:
I gazed-and gazed-but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude,
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the Daffodils.


Faiz Ahmed Faiz was born in Sialkot in 1911, educated in Pakistan with a double Masters in English Literature and Arabic Literature. He lectured in India and Pakistan both and also joined British India Army as a Lt. Colonel. He moved to Pakistan in 1947. Faiz was an avowed communist and was associated with Communist Party in Pakistan. Faiz spent much of the 1950s and 1960s promoting the cause of communism in Pakistan. During the time when Faiz was editor of The Pakistan Times, one of the leading newspapers of 50s, he lent editorial support to the Communist Party. He was also involved in the circle lending support to military personnel who promised that in case of a successful military coup the CP would be allowed to function as a legitimate political party like any other party and to take part in the general elections. This involvement with CP and a coup plan lead to his imprisonment later. Some circles believe that it was his efforts for communism in Pakistan which led to him receiving the Lenin Peace Prize in 1963. He was also nominated for Nobel Prize, just before his death in 1984.

dasht-e-tanhaai mein, ai jaan-e-jahaan, larzaan hain
In the desert of my solitude, oh love of my life, quiver
teri avaaz ke saaye,
the shadows of your voice,
tere honthon ke saraab
the mirage of your lips

dasht-e-tanhaai mein,
In the desert of my solitude,
duri ke khas-o-khaak tale
beneath the dust and ashes of distance
khil rahe hain tere pehlu ke saman aur gulaab
bloom the jasmines and roses of your proximity

uht rahi hai kahin qurbat se
From somewhere very close,
teri saans ki aanch
rises the warmth of your breath
apani khushbuu mein sulagti hui
smouldering in its own aroma,
maddham maddham
slowly, bit by bit.

dur ufaq par chamakati hui
far away, across the horizon, glistens
qatra qatra
drop by drop
gir rahi hai teri dil daar nazar ki shabnam
the falling dew of your beguiling glance

is qadar pyaar se hai jaan-e jahaan rakkhaa hai
With such tenderness, O love of my life,
dil ke rukhsaar pe
on the cheek of my heart,
is vaqt teri yaad ne haath
has your memory placed its hand right now

yun guman hota hai
that it looks as if
garche hai abhi subah-e-firaaq
(though it's still the dawn of adieu)
dhal gaya hijr ka din
the sun of separation has set
aa bhi gaye vasl ki raat
and the night of union has arrived.


William Shakespeare (born and died on the same date, 23 April, 1564-1616) was an English poet and playwright widely regarded as the greatest writer of the English language, and as the world's preeminent dramatist. He wrote approximately 38 plays and 154 sonnets, as well as a variety of other poems. He is often considered to be England's national poet and is sometimes referred to as the "Bard of Avon" or the "Swan of Avon". Sonnet 18 is perhaps the best known and most well-loved of all 154 sonnets. It is also one of the most straightforward in language and intent. The stability of love and its power to immortalize the poetry and the subject of that poetry is the theme. Interestingly, not everyone is willing to accept the role of Sonnet 18 as the ultimate English love poem. As James Boyd White puts it: "This 'love poem' is actually written not in praise of the beloved, as it seems, but in praise of itself. Death shall not brag, says the poet; the poet shall brag. This famous sonnet is on this view one long exercise in self-glorification, not a love poem at all; surely not suitable for earnest recitation at a wedding or anniversary party, or in a Valentine." While 26 of Shakespeare's sonnets are adressed to an already married women "My Dark Lady", 126 are adressed to a young man, "Fair Lord".
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Sonnet 18 - Darling buds of May
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

The paraphrase would go like this:

Shall I compare you to a summer's day?
You are more lovely and more constant:
Rough winds shake the beloved buds of May
And summer is far too short:
At times the sun is too hot,
Or often goes behind the clouds;
And everything beautiful sometime will lose its beauty,
By misfortune or by nature's planned out course.
But your youth shall not fade,
Nor will you lose the beauty that you possess;
Nor will death claim you for his own,
Because in my eternal verse you will live forever.
So long as there are people on this earth,
So long will this poem live on, making you immortal.


English - born poet, Waystan Hugh Auden, whose world view developed from youthful rebellion to rediscovered Anglo-Catholicism. In his work Auden reconciled tradition and modernism. Auden is widely considered among the greatest literary figures of the 20th century. For most of his life, Auden's friends uniformly described him as funny, extravagant, sympathetic, generous, and, partly by his own choice, lonely. He was obsessively punctual in his habits while choosing to live amidst physical disorder. In groups he was often dogmatic and overbearing in a comic way; in more private settings he was diffident and shy except when certain of his welcome. Many of his poems were inspired by unconsummated love, and he summarized his emotional life in a famous couplet: "If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me". Auden was himself homosexual, In 1935, Auden married Erika Mann, the daughter of the German novelist Thomas Mann. It was a marriage of convenience to enable her to gain British citizenship and escape Nazi Germany.
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Funeral Blues
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.


Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan (27 December 1796 — 15 February 1869), was a renowned classical Urdu and Persian poet of the subcontinent. He is considered to be the most dominating poet of the Urdu language. Ghalib's early education has always been a matter of confusion. There are no known records of his formal education, although it was known that his circle of friends in Delhi were some of the most intelligent minds of the time. Around 1810, he was married into a family of nobles, at the age of thirteen. He had seven children, none of whom survived (this pain has found its echo in some of Ghalib's ghazals). There are conflicting reports regarding his relationship with his wife. She was considered to be pious, conservative and God-fearing while Ghalib was carefree, unconventional without any scruples, and arguably not very religious, in the strict sense of the word. Ralph Russel says, "If his (Ghalib’s) language had been English, he would have been recognised all over the world as a great poet long ago". One of the verses, "Bandagi men bhi vuh azada o khud-bin hain ki ham Ulte phir ae dar e kaba agar va na hua", translated by Ralph as, "We serve You, yet our independent self regard is such, we shall at once turn back if we would find the Kaba closed"

Har ek Baat pe
har ek baat pe kehte ho tum ke 'too kya hai' ?
tumheeN kaho ke yeh andaaz-e-guftgoo kya hai ?

na shole meiN yeh karishma na barq meiN yeh ada
koee batao ki woh shoKH-e-tund_KHoo kya hai ?
[ barq = lightning, tund = sharp/angry, KHoo = behavior ]

yeh rashk hai ki wo hota hai ham_suKHan tumse
wagarna KHauf-e-bad_aamozi-e-adoo kya hai ?
[ham_suKHan = to speak together/to agree, aamozee = education/teaching, adoo = enemy ]

chipak raha hai badan par lahoo se pairaahan
hamaaree jeb ko ab haajat-e-rafoo kya hai ?
[ pairaahan = shirt/robe/cloth]

jalaa hai jicm jahaaN dil bhee jal gaya hoga
kuredate ho jo ab raakh, justjoo kya hai ?

ragoN meiN dauDte firne ke ham naheeN qaayal
jab aaNkh hee se na Tapka to fir lahoo kya hai ?

woh cheez jiske liye hamko ho bahisht azeez
siwaay baada-e-gul_faam-e-mushkaboo kya hai ?
[ baada = wine, gul_faam = delicate and fragrant like flowers, mushkaboo = like the smell of musk ]

piyooN sharaab agar KHum bhee dekh looN do chaar
yeh sheesha-o-qadah-o-kooza-o-suboo kya hai ?
[ KHum = wine barrel, qadah = goblet, kooza/suboo = wine pitcher ]

rahee na taaqat-e-guftaar, aur agar ho bhee
to kis ummeed pe kahiye ke aarzoo kya hai ?

bana hai shaah ka musaahib, fire hai itaraata
wagarna shehar meiN 'GHalib' kee aabroo kya hai ?


Ghiyath al-Din Abu'l-Fath Omar ibn Ibrahim al-Nisaburi Khayyámi, born: May 31, 1048 in Nishapur, Iran (Persia) – died: December 4, 1131), was a Persian poet, mathematician, philosopher and astronomer. Omar Khayyám is famous today not only for his scientific accomplishments, but for his literary works. He is believed to have written about a thousand four-line verses (rubáiyát meaning "quatrains"). In the English-speaking world, he is best known for The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in the English translations by Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883). Some assert that it is unclear whether he believed in the existence of God, but he objected to the notion that every particular event and phenomenon was the result of divine intervention. Nor did he believe in any Judgment Day or rewards and punishments after life. Instead he supported the view that laws of nature explained all phenomena of observed life. Religious officials asked him many times to explain his different views about Islam. Khayyám eventually was obliged to make a hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca in order to demonstrate that he was a faithful follower of Islam. Ludmila Zhuravlyova, a Ucraniana Astronomer, who discovered a series of asteroids, on 8 September 1980, named one of them as "3095 omarkhayyam".

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
If with wine you are drunk, be happy
If Seated with a moon-faced (beauty), be happy
Since the end purpose of the universe is nothing-ness
Hence then you shall be naught, then while you are, be happy!
(other meanings of this quatrain)

Oh, come with old Khayyam, and leave the Wise
To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies;
One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.

Up from Earth's Centre through the Seventh Gate
I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate,
And many Knots unravel'd by the Road;
But not the Knot of Human Death and Fate.

There was a Door to which I found no Key:
There was a Veil past which I could not see:
Some little Talk awhile of ME and THEE
There seemed---and then no more of THEE and ME.

Then to the rolling Heav'n itself I cried,
Asking, "What Lamp had Destiny to guide
"Her little Children stumbling in the Dark?"
And---"A blind Understanding!" Heav'n replied.

Why, all the Saints and Sages who discuss'd
Of the Two Worlds so learnedly, are thrust
Like foolish Prophets forth; their Words to Scorn
Are scatter'd, and their Mouths are stopt with Dust.


John Leo, a writer and contributing editor at The Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, is a former syndicated columnist, and the author of three books. Before joining U.S. News and World Report as a columnist in September 1988, he covered the social sciences and intellectual trends for Time magazine and The New York Times. He also reported on religion for the Times, and wrote essays and humor for Time. The following article is adapted from a speech at Ursinus College.
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On Good Writing
At my local recycling center, the first bin is labeled “commingled containers.” Whoever dreamed up this term could have taken the easy way out and just written “cans and bottles.” But no, the author opted for a term out of the bureaucrat’s style book. He chose the raised pinky elegance of a phrase distant from normal English. He also added poor spelling (“comingled is spelled two different ways), and pointless redundancy (the concept of “co” is already embedded in the word “mingled”). How did they pack so many writing errors into two words of modern environmental prose?

George Orwell, at the beginning of his essay, “Politics and the English Language,” made clear that he thought the language had become disheveled and decadent. That was in 1946. Intending shock, Orwell offered five examples of sub-literate prose by known writers. But these examples don’t look as ghastly to us as they did to Orwell, because language is so much worse today. If you doubt this, I offer a few examples.

In plain English, what does it mean when students “achieve a deficiency” or reach a “suboptimal outcome?” It means they failed. A suboptimal outcome is even worse in at a hospital. It means the patient died. The airline industry sometimes speaks of a hull loss. What they mean is that one of their planes just crashed. Here’s more twisted language. Your doorman is now known as an “access controller”, and a receptionist is a “director of first impressions.” Hospital bills can be filled with such language, How about a “thermal therapy unit” (an ice bag) or a “disposable mucus recovery unit”, also known as a box of Kleenex.

But the institution that wins the coveted convoluted language award is the government—any government in any country. A U.S. document speaks of “ground-mounted confirmatory route markers." Translation: “road signs.” In Oxford, England, city officials decided to "examine the feasibility of creating a structure in Hinksey Park from indigenous vegetation." They were talking about planting a tree to get some shade. I’m sure you all know Joyce Kilmer’s famously awful non-poem. As you no doubt recall, it says, “Poems are made by fools like me/But only God can make a tree.” Today, Kilmer might have to write, "Versified and rhythmic non-prose verbal arrangements are fashioned by people of alternative intelligence such as myself, but only the divine entity, should he or she actually exist, can create a solar-shielding park structure from low-rise indigenous vegetative material."

The words of bureaucrats may twist tongues, but language on today’s college campus can truly twist minds. Many prominent people, particularly academics, have invented new ways to torture the English language. My friend Denis Dutton, a philosophy professor who runs the Arts & Letters daily site on the Internet, launched a bad-writing contest to honor these masters of gobbledygook.

Judith Butler, a well-known professor at the University of California–Berkeley was the grand prize winner for this impenetrable sentence.” The move from a structuralist account . . . marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony, etc., etc.” The sentence rattled on that way for 94 words. Another well-known professor, Martha Nussbaum, said Butler’s prose "bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on." Other professors defended Butler on the grounds that English specialists, like technical analysts, are entitled to use private language that non-specialists can’t understand. Think about that: The professors were taking pride in prose readers can’t understand.

Alas Sokal, a professor at NYU, perpetrated a wonderful hoax at the expense of a postmodern magazine, submitting a nearly impenetrable article arguing that gravity is a social construct. Social Text magazine printed it as a serious piece, so Sokal had to explain to the editors, if you think gravity isn’t real, I invite you to walk out my window and test the theory; I live on the 21st floor.

Several kinds of writing heresies are thriving in the universities. One is that the ability to write is so unimportant that it should be expected only in the humanities department, maybe just in English courses. Another is the romantic notion that rules, coherence, grammar and punctuation are unimportant. What counts is the gushing of the writing self. One adherent of this school of thought told me that we should no longer talk about misspellings, but personal spellings. The self decides what is right and wrong. Writing in the Public Interest magazine, Heather Mac Donald reported that “students who have been told in their writing class to let their deepest selves loose on the page and not worry about syntax, logic, or form have trouble adjusting to their other classes—the ones in which evidence and analysis are more important than personal revelation or feelings.”

Grammar and clear expression are under another kind of attack as well. Rules, good writing, and simple coherence are sometimes depicted as habits of the powerful and privileged. James Sledd, professor emeritus of English at the University of Texas, writes in the textbook College English that standard English is "essentially an instrument of domination." If proper English is oppressive, what could be more logical that setting out to undermine it? English Leadership Quarterly ran an article urging teachers to encourage intentional writing errors as "the only way to end its oppression of linguistic minorities and learning writers." The pro-error article, written by two professors at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, actually won an award from the quarterly, a publication of the National Council of Teachers of English. So you can now win awards for telling the young to write badly. (YU CAN NOW WIN A WARD IF YU CAN TELL YOUNG TO BADLY WRITE.)

Some campuses have evolved a separate tongue, marked in large part by stretching the meaning of words to make speech sound like punishable action. Simple criticism, for example, emerges as “intellectual harassment,” or perhaps semantic violence.” And if funding for mostly black schools is too low, well this is “intellectual genocide.” When Lani Guinier’s controversial plan for proportional voting drew protests, she accused her critics of “non-traditional violence.” “Non-traditional” is a common weasel word these days.

“Non-traditional students” refers to older students. One feminist referred to a friend who was having an affair with a “non-traditional man.” She meant that he was not a member of the chattering classes. He was a plumber.

Political speech is a mess as well, larded with euphemism and evasion. In 1990, I was startled to learn that GOPAC, the Republican pac controlled by Newt Gingrich, was shipping words to Republicans around the country so that the speeches of local politicians would sound like Newt. GOPAC supplied positive words to use when referring to the GOP: courage, moral, children, choice and personal, for instance, and ugly words to pin on Democrats, including bizarre, collapse, red tape, sensationalists and anti-flag. These words presumably could be combined in any order, “collapsing anti-flag sensationalists,” for instance, or “morally courageous pro-flag children.” Out of curiosity I looked up Newt’s last major speech, delivered to the Heritage Foundation, and found that it really wasn’t a speech at all. It was a collection of 238 GOPAC buzzwords, lightly connected by a few ordinary non-toxic words.

One cause of bad language is the influx of intentional ambiguity from the world of advertising. What was the meaning of Nike’s famous slogan, “Just Do It”? Did it mean, don’t procrastinate, don’t debate your options endlessly, just seize the moment and act? Or did it mean, forget about scruples and conscience, go get what you want?

This kind of ambiguity shows up in the prose of the right-to-die movement. Take the phrase “aid in dying.” Does it mean moral support for a dying person, help in committing suicide or putting a sick patient to death without consent? It means whatever you take it to mean. All around us is prose intended not to convey meaning but to mask and distort.

Many awful expressions of the day emerge out of misguided compassion. An example is a long New York Times discussion of a famous writer’s plagiarism. The Times could not bring itself to use the P-word, but talked delicately of “unacknowledged repetitions” and “inappropriate borrowings.” It did not want to hurt the plagiarist’s feelings. The idea of offending or hurting feelings can lead to the greatest corruption of language. It can undermine the straight, simple prose that communicates ideas, images or yes, even feelings to a great number of people.

So how should we write and restore the integrity of good English? Candor, clarity and sincerity are important keys. All of us are weary of writers who dance around their subject, protecting friends, bending facts to push a cause. “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” Orwell wrote. When there is a gap between one’s real and declared aims, one turns instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms.” On the compassion issue, be polite and fair, but do not gear your argument to the expected sensitivities of others or the demands of political correctness.. Write accurately and say what you believe is true.

Work to avoid the dead idioms that we all seem to carry in our heads. Paul Johnson says “Most people when they write, including most professional writers, tend to slip into seeing events through the eyes of others because they inherit stale expressions and combinations of words, threadbare metaphors, clichés and literary conceits.. This is particularly true of journalists.”

But one reporter-turned-novelist played a large role is reshaping American prose. As a teenager, Ernest Hemingway joined the reporting staff of the Kansas City Star. Unlike most big-city papers of the day, which featured colorful stories–many vastly exaggerated and some simply untrue–the Star was a stickler for truth and good prose. The stylebook handed to Hemingway on his first day listed 110 rules written to force reporters to use plain English, shorn of clichés. Many of the rules were similar to those developed later of Strunk and White, and the many list rules offered in writing classes today: “Use short sentences. Use vigorous English. Never use old slang. Eliminate every superfluous word.”

“Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing,” Hemingway said in 1940. “I’ve never forgotten them.” One rule that Hemingway particularly took to heart was “Avoid the use of adjectives, especially such extravagant ones as gorgeous, grand, magnificent, etc.”

Adjectives all but disappeared in Hemingway’s style, and often in the style of the generation that looked to him for guidance. Adverbs too, because both adjectives and adverbs are often used to tell readers how to feel. What the reader feels should arise out of action and dialogue, Hemingway thought, not out of stage directions set down by the author. Another factor in the American newspaper influence on the national literary style was the high cost of cables sent home by foreign correspondents. More words were deleted and the style became even more spare. One anecdote about cablese: When Cary Grant was abroad, a feature writer cabled him from New York to doublecheck his age. “How old Cary Grant?” asked the message. Grant cabled back, “Old Cary Grant fine. How you?”

Hemingway showed his first effort in cablese to Lincoln Steffens, He said: “Steffens, look at this cable–no fat, no adjectives, no adverbs—nothing but blood and bones and muscle. It’s a new language.” Hemingway was exaggerating, but not by much. The old florid Victorian prose was being flushed from the language. Hemingway insisted on brevity, economy, simplicity, strong verbs, and short sentences. “Prose is architecture,” he wrote, “not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.” Because of Hemingway and the newsroom style he injected into American writing, quoted lines now simply end with the words “he said” or “she said,” not he averred, she expostulated or he huffed.

Write in your own voice. This sounds simple, but it really is hard. Many of us have been trained to write in the style of l9th century English gentlemen. And our minds are clogged with the clichés, idioms and rhythms of other people. Kurt Vonnegut says that the writing style natural to you will almost always be the speech you heard as a child. He grew up in Indiana, where, he says, “common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin.” He wrote: “I myself find I trust my own writing most and other people seem to trust it most, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am.”

When I started my column in U.S. News & World Report 18 years ago, I decided I would write in a conversational style. This meant I would never use words such as “nonetheless,” “moreover,” “albeit” and “to be sure,” because they are in nobody’s speaking vocabulary. It also meant that I wrote as though I were addressing each reader personally, talking about something that interested us both. My model here, believe it or not, was John Madden, the football announcer. Madden is the most famous TV football analyst, not because he knows the most, though he may, but because he sounds like a friend on the next barstool watching the game and sharing his thoughts with you.
After a month or so, I realized that readers of columns don’t just follow the words. They listen to the background music too. Readers want to know who you are. Is the writer consistent and fair? Does his take on the world relate to me? Is he humorless or playful? Do I want to spend time with him? Is he in the pocket of some cause or political party?

Vonnegut discusses this music factor in terms of caring. “Find a subject you care about and what you in your heart feel other people should care about. It is this genuine caring and not your games with language which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.” That’s true, but caring doesn’t tell the whole story. Putting your whole self into your prose is even more important.

Apprentice writers are told to learn the rules of writing. Yes, learn those rules, absorb them fully, and then be ready to break them on a moment’s notice. Think of how Tom Wolfe burst upon the national scene. Esquire assigned him a piece on the custom-car culture. Wolfe said he was blocked and couldn’t do it. Since Esquire had already committed art and pages to story, Wolfe sent in some hyper notes of hysterical analysis, unspellable howls and more exclamation points than most of us see in a year. According to Wolfe, Esquire removed the salutation of the letter to his editor and ran the whole thing as an article. It was brilliant. By breaking every known rule of writing, Wolfe created a new style that worked.

Or take Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham jail.” All of us are warned against run-on sentences. When I started as a reporter, the AP would not print a lead sentence of more than nineteen words. The key sentence in Dr. King’s letter is 347 words long, a powerful analysis of injustices suffered by African-Americans. The sentence goes on so long that the reader’s impatience about the sentence—when will it end—begins to fuse with the powerful statement about the justified impatience of suffering blacks. The rhetoric used by Dr, King perfectly reflects the substance of what he is saying, at a length no writing teacher would approve. It was a stunning rhetorical triumph.

When you write, how will you sound? Many of us come under the spell of a great writer and imagine our job is to sound like him or her. Or we try on different prose styles like articles of clothing. I remember writing testy letters to the power company in the style of Dashiell Hammett, and lordly letters to the editors in the style of Bill Buckley, complete with the mandatory use of “charismatic” and “paradigm, “ both unusual words at that time, plus a delicately inserted “mutatis mutandis” to call due attention to my Jesuit-induced Latin. Not long after, I absorbed two basic rules: don’t try to sound like other people, and learn all the big words you can, then strive mightily never to use them if a short word will do.

Don’t be afraid to rip up your essay if it doesn’t sound like you. “If it sounds like writing, rewrite it,” said Elmore Leonard. As you write, it may gradually dawn on you that you don’t really agree with your own words. This has happened to me more than once, usually on deadline, in the middle of an argument that made perfect sense in my mind but looked odd on the page.
The late Christopher Lasch said something sharp in this point in his book, “The Revolt of the Elites.” He said that only in the course of arguing “do we come to understand what we know …we come to know our own minds only by explaining ourselves to others.” Exactly. When a friend launches an argument and your rebuttal starts to sound tinny to your own ears, it shouldn’t be hard to figure out that something’s wrong—usually that you don’t really agree with the words coming out of your own mouth. The same is true of writing. Arguing in person, or in print, can rescue us from our own half-formed opinions.

Do not use the phrases “I believe” or “I feel.” A friend who teaches at Duke tells me she has banned both phrases in her writing class. She did this because so many students failed to realize that the expression for an opinion is not an argument. A professor quoted in a recent book on rhetoric makes the same point. A student essay simply said that the writer didn’t like Odysseus at all. The professor scrawled on the essay, “But where is your argument?” No reader is persuaded simply because the writer states an impression or a feeling.

A few years ago, I taught a summer class in non-fiction writing at Southampton College on Long Island. I was very impressed by the quality of the class and their abilities. But they had a group flaw. They wanted to write primarily about their own feelings. One day I said, write me 2000 words on any subject, but don’t use the word “I.” Many in the class balked at this and wrote their non-I essays with great difficulty. Confusing an opinion with an argument has one big advantage. The text is uncriticizable, since the writer can always say, “It’s my prose and I’m entitled to my opinion.”

But writing isn’t a personal or private enterprise. It’s an attempt to change consciousness and change the world. In his book The Ethics of Rhetoric, Richard Weaver says that the right to utter a sentence is one of the world’s greatest freedoms. It is the “liberty to handle the world, to remake it, if only a little, and to hand it to others in a shape which may influence their actions.” Speech and writing constitute what Weaver calls “the office of assertion,” a force adding itself to the other forces of the world. Think about that. Writing is power. A force in the world. If you write well, you can have an impact.


Sahir Ludhianvi , A colossus amongst indian film lyricists, his pen was, at its best, pouring out bitter but sensitive lyrics over the declining values of society, the senselessness of war and politics, and the domination of materialism over love. Whenever he wrote any love songs, they were tinged with sorrow, due to realisation that there were other, starker concepts more important than love. He could be called the underdog's bard; close to his heart were the farmer crushed by debt, the soldier gone to fight someone else's war, the woman forced to sell her body, the youth frustrated by unemployment, the family living on the street and other victims of society. He wrote all the famous songs for the famous Indian movie, Taj Mahal, but then also went on to express his actual feelings about Taj Mahal as follows:

Taj Mahal
taaj tere liye ik mazahar-e-ulfat hii sahii
tum ko is vaadii-e-rangii.n se aqiidat hii sahii
mere mahabuub kahii.n aur milaa kar mujh se!
[mazahar-e-ulfat=symbol of love; vaadii-e-rangii.n=beautiful spot; aqiidat=respect/preference?]

For you, the Taj may be a monument to love;
you may adore this lovely spot
but, darling, let's meet somewhere else!