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Lisa Zeidner and John Allen Paulos

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Hooray for Immediacy and Vulgarity

By John Allen Paulos
Posted Thursday, July 1, 1999, at 1:11 PM ET

Hi Lisa,

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I share your anxiety over the perils of journalistic and Internet instantaneity. Novel-writing certainly has a different logic and pace to it. So does a nonfiction book. I, who rail about random samples, yesterday cited Jay Leno's man-on-the-street interviews as bolstering my point about widespread ignorance. I have a monthly column on abcnews.com and have hosted a few online chats in connection with it and also found them to be dauntingly immediate, a question about the annual number of automobile fatalities in the United States followed by one requesting a solution to a differential equation online (it was easy so I complied). I have a greater appreciation for people who must respond on the spur of the moment and in public to all sorts of off-the-wall questions, politicians in particular.

People do seem (I have no evidence and am not sure what would constitute such) to be getting increasingly impatient. If I ever come across an old movie classic on HBO, I'm amazed at how poky the action often seems to me. We're accustomed to fast cuts, a quick unfolding of the story, simultaneous developments.

Of course, there is a difference between temporal and spatial shortness. What I'm getting at is the famous quote by Proust (or maybe it was Anatole France) apologizing to someone for writing a long letter and explaining that he didn't have time to write him a short one. That is the flip side of manic quickness: the bloated, repetitive writing that is so ubiquitous (assuming ubiquity admits of degrees).

I sometimes perform some magic trick for my class, reveal its secrets, and then ask them to write an expository piece explaining it. They complain bitterly that it is unfair to require this of math majors and particularly resent my grading policy. Their grades, I inform them, are inversely proportional to the number of words in their pieces provided they capture every salient detail. I tell them that a sense of elegance and concision is essential in mathematics and this is one way to nurture this sense, but not too many buy it.

Instantaneity, or at least timeliness, is the essence of the newspaper, else it'd be the oldspaper. Did you see the stories in yesterday's Philadelphia papers about the 70-year-old Philadelphia woman who finally admitted to killing 8 of her 10 children in the '50s and '60's. She got probation and a suspended sentence, ostensibly so science could study her! Would have been a monster national story if she confessed 30 years ago.

Anyway, instantaneity, for all its pitfalls, is important in the news business. Most people realize that most news stories and almost all active Web sites contain errors and that they should reserve judgement.

Not only is timeliness essential in journalism, but so, I think, is a certain amount of vulgarity. The public's business is being discussed, and hiding behind flowery, polysyllabic words, precious, convoluted sentences, and euphemistic, obfuscatory parallelisms (as I do here) does not further that discussion. Given the reams of coverage and dozens of studies of breast implants, auto-immune diseases, and the lack of a connection between the two, for example, I've never read something as straightforwardly clear as "Hysterical Women and Greedy Lawyers Combine To Bankrupt Dow" Such expressions (and contrary ones) have their place amid the more measured, nuanced accounts.

As always,
John