In an awkward scene straight from Dostoevsky’s novel, The Possessed, I once found myself in unfamiliar territory in a ladies’ toilet in Maputo, Mozambique.
It was in 2011, in my year-long flirtation with the NGO world after I had ‘fled’ publishing. It was like a dream come true, only to become a dream again.
I had landed in a storm in that beautiful city of stunning beaches and clear waters teeming with coral, but the people did not speak English! They spoke and, naturally, wrote in Portuguese.
I had left my hotel to have a tour of the city when I found myself looking at two doors: one marked ‘M’ and the other ‘H’. There were no artistic drawings. And there were no people going in and out for me to know which door was meant for gents.
ACCESSIBLE LANGUAGE
For several agonising moments, I stood staring at the doors like one does at a crossword puzzle they do not know how to solve. Then, thanks to my English-programmed mind, I walked into the door marked ‘M’, thinking it stood for ‘Male’. Bad decision! In Portuguese mulher (thus M) means woman and homem (thus H) means man!
All my inconveniences in Maputo were brought by miscommunication because I could not understand the language in use. I discovered that language can lead or mislead. In the same way, writers ‘lose’ readers with their difficult language. The reader is left saying: “It’s all Greek to me” (Portuguese in my case).
Some writers behave like doctors in their dalliance with difficult vocabulary. Doctors are fond of giving simple diseases names so complex that it is easier to contract the diseases than to pronounce their names! They call the common cold nasopharyngitis!
In the NGO I worked for, I edited research papers written by economists and they liked using the term ceteris paribus over and over, until I sometimes felt like flinging my head against some hard surface in protest (hey, why can’t you just say ‘with other things held constant’ and reduce the editor’s misery!).
We have had some bursts of laughter in our company when a manuscript comes written in a language so difficult that we have had to huddle together and think maybe the manuscript should be pinned on notice boards as a warning on how not to write.
Writers, who use such difficult language, especially in fiction, forget that their main aim is to communicate. My personal opinion of why more people read Chinua Achebe than Wole Soyinka is that I find the former more accessible because he used simple language.
As much as sales and the number of readers a writer enjoys cannot be used to judge literary greatness, it’s important for the writer to write in the language of the majority (I obviously do not agree with Ngugi’s writing in mother tongue mantra).
Indeed, for writers of children’s books, language is perhaps the most important thing.
It has to be graded to fit the age and level (or class) of the pupil. There is a level for monosyllabic words and another for disyllabic ones.
SWIFT REJECTION
In fact, for younger children, communication is mainly through artworks and less words as children understand better visually.
Writers of fiction should also grade their language so that it resonates with their target audience, in which case language can help a work stand out in the marketplace. The publishing editor, when reviewing the manuscript, does not have time to be checking the dictionary after every sentence.
Therefore, the unnecessary use of difficult words will earn a swift rejection slip. To make it worse, sometimes the writer uses not only a difficult word but also the wrong difficult word. My advice is: if in doubt delete.
Difficult or wrong words affect the flow of the narrative, slowing down the reading of the story.
As the story develops, the publishing editor expects the language to become hurried and punchier. Swift. Hard-hitting. Concrete. This is called the language of action. For language to be an ally, the writer should keep it simple to pass their narrative across.