Verlyn Klinkenborg

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    You were being taught to write as part of a transaction that had
    Almost nothing to do with real communication,
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    You were also learning to distrust the reader and yourself.
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    And to use passive constructions, which absolve everyone of responsibility.
    What’s a metaphor in the prose you were taught to write?
    A stage prop, a paraphrase, a clarification, at best,
    Nearly always cumbersome, bordering on cliché,
    Almost always timid, rarely serious, usually self-conscious,
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    A true metaphor is a swift and violent twisting of language,
    A renaming of the already named.
    It’s meant to expire in a sudden flash of light
    And to reveal—in that burst of illumination—
    A correspondence that must be literally accurate.
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    You may notice, as you write, that sentences often volunteer a shape of their own
    And supply their own words as if they anticipated your thinking.
    Those sentences are nearly always unacceptable,
    Dull and unvarying, yielding only a small number of possible structures
    And only the most predictable phrases, the inevitable clichés.
    A cliché is dead matter.
    It causes gangrene in the prose around it, and sooner or later it eats your brain.
    You can’t fix a cliché by using it ironically.
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    A cliché isn’t just a familiar, overused saying.
    It’s the debris of someone else’s thinking,
    Any group of words that seem to cluster together “naturally”
    And enlist in your sentence.
    The only thing to do with a cliché is send it to the sports page
    Or the speechwriters, where it will live forever.
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    When the work is really complete, the writer knows how each sentence got that way,
    What choices were made.
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    I mean a pale and nameless unease,
    As if a poorly constructed sentence could make you slightly homesick.
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    The malaise given off by an awkwardness in the syntax.
    You won’t be able to name the feeling a syntactical problem causes.
    It doesn’t have a name.
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    Where do they come from?
    What line of work are they in?
    Who’s likely to use them?
    And in what context?
    This will remind you that every word carries a social freight.
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