Stephen VasciannieIF YOU are reading this, there is a strong probability that you spend some of your time writing.
Reading and writing are organically linked, save perhaps in exceptional cases, or where the dreaded writer's block intervenes, the act of reading tends to trigger the impulse to write.
And, conversely, those who write are well-advised to gather pearls of wisdom, or at least grains of sand, from the thoughts of others.
This is really beyond conjecture. V.S. Naipaul has entitled one of his post-Nobel offerings Reading and Writing, and one has the distinct impression that for Naipaul the conjunction of these two activities is as natural as eating or sleeping.
Similarly, in a short, fairly recent book of essays, Home and Exile, Chinua Achebe clearly traces the link between his own early literary output to material he read as a young student in Nigeria.
FIRST DRAFT
For Achebe (who, incidentally, should have won the Nobel Literature Prize long ago), the postman in colonial Africa was especially significant, not least because he served as a crucial component of the chain of ideas between the metropole and the empire.
Even though in Achebe's village the Royal Mail van was known by the frightening alias Ogbu-akwu-ugwo ("the Killer that doesn't pay back"), it was appreciated because it promoted intellectual development. Mail delivery enhanced the capacity of the empire to write back.
But how do you write? The first draft of this column is being penned as a BWIA flight (with some rather abrupt attendants) taxies along the Norman Manley runway.
I had been reading an essay by the English historian A.J.P. Taylor on Napoleon, in Europe: Grandeur and Decline, and came upon the following sentence: "Napoleon killed his secretary by overwork; with the dictaphone and typewriter they would have survived quite easily." (Penguin edition, page 15).
I wondered whether this was true the survival part, that is and out came by pen, setting down these thoughts on both sides of the white paper bag you get on planes for largely unmentionable purposes.
The impulse to write comes in unusual places, but almost always it is stimulated by reading. But, of course, there is writing and there is writing.
The academic writing, for instance, for a journal in the social sciences has to subject her or his writing to the scrutiny of peers, and this fact tends to shape the way journal articles are composed.
In brief, many academics feel that they need to impress the specialist, and they do this by relying heavily on jargon understandable only to the cognoscenti. Such 'technical' writing sometimes becomes absurd.
In 1996, the American physicist Alan Sokal submitted an article to the journal Social Text under the title, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity".
It was a hoax. Sokal had deliberately written pure bunkum, but he sought to put it in highfaluting language, and incorporated some propositions that pandered to the ideological preferences of the journal's editors. The article was published even though it made no sense no doubt the editors were embarrassed for publishing big words and pure confusion as scholarship.
DIRECT COPYING
Another writing issue is, of course, that of plagiarism. To be sure, some writers may well run into problems because, having read something, they absorb the ideas, and when they come to setting down their thoughts they reproduce the essence of what they have previously read.
Occasionally, too, writers who rely on research assistants may inadvertently include words and thought patterns of others.
In some work, too, the writer will have to address the question of authority. In particular fields, such as the law, there will be methods of identifying appropriate sources for specific points, but in other fields the methods appear to be eclectic.
Or, perhaps I should put that in another way some writers appear to take an eclectic approach to the identification of authorities in their work. This happens not only in specialist writing it makes its way even into the greatest newspaper in the outer empire.
Finally, most good writers can express their ideas concisely. But my time is up, so I must stop.
Stephen Vasciannie is a professor at the University of the West Indies and a consultant in the Attorney-General's chambers.
