Expository Writing: Shaping Information Diane Ackerman

He thought for a minute. “Comics. I like to draw comics. I guess I could be an artist that draws comics.” His eye caught the tiny Monet poster I’d taped above the examining table. “That’s pretty cool, that painting.”

“There are a lot of great art schools ­here in New York.” My comment floated off into empty space. We ­were silent for a few minutes. I made a few notes in the chart.

“That stuff about peer pressure is a bunch of crap,” he said abruptly, forcefully, sitting up in his chair, speaking directly toward the poster in front of him.

I leaned closer toward Nemesio, trying to figure out what this sudden outburst was related to. But he continued, staring straight forward, lecturing at the empty room, as if I weren’t there.

“Anyone who tells you they do something because of peer pressure is full of crap.” He was even more animated now, even angry. “People always asking me to do stuff, but I can make my own mind up.” His hands came out of his sweatshirt pocket and began gesticulating in the air. “My brother and his friends, they’re always drinking beer. But I don’t like the taste of it. I don’t believe in peer pressure.”

Speech ended, Nemesio settled back into his chair, resumed his slouched posture, and repositioned his hands into his pockets. Then he glanced up at the ceiling and added quietly, almost wistfully, “But if beer tasted like apple juice, I might be drinking it every day.”

He was quiet for a few minutes. One hand slid out of his pocket and started fiddling with the zipper on his sweatshirt.

Without warning he swiveled in his chair to face me directly, his ­whole body leaning into my desk. “You ever face peer pressure, Doc?”

His eyes ­were right on mine, and I was caught off guard by this sudden shift in his voice and body language. I felt unexpectedly on the spot. Who does he see? I wondered. Do I represent the older generation or the medical profession or women or ­non-­Hispanic whites? Or all of the above?

Nemesio refused to let my gaze wander off his. He demanded an answer to his question, and our doctor–patient encounter had obviously taken an abrupt turn. I could tell that a lot was riding on my answer, though I wasn’t sure what exactly was at stake. Did he need me to provide a reassuring societal answer about how bad drugs are? Or did he need me to identify with him, to say that I’ve been where he’s been, even if that was not exactly the truth?

“Yes,” I said, after debating in my head for a moment, trying to think of something sufficiently potent to satisfy the question but not so sordid as to embarrass myself. “I have.”

He stared at me, waiting for me to continue. His eyes looked younger and younger.

“In my first year of college,” I said. “In the very first week. Everyone was sitting in the stairwell and they ­were passing a joint around. Everyone took a drag. When it came to me I hesitated. I wasn’t really interested in smoking, but everyone ­else was doing it.”

“So what did you do?”

“I didn’t want anyone to think I was a little kid, so I took a drag too.”

“Did you like it?”

“No, I just hacked and coughed. I didn’t even want the stupid joint to begin with, and I couldn’t believe I was doing it just because everyone ­else was.”

“That peer pressure is crap.” Nemesio stated it as a fact and then sank back into his seat.

“You’re right. It is. It took me a little while to figure that out.”

He pushed the ski hat back from his brow a few inches. “In my high school there was this teacher that was always on my case. She was always bugging me to study and take the tests. What a pain in the butt she was.” He pulled the hat all the way off. “But now there’s no one around to kick my lazy butt. I could get to college easy, but I’m just lazy.”

My mind wandered back to a crisp autumn day in my second month of medical school. Still overwhelmed by the ­pentose-­phosphate shunt and other minutiae of biochemistry, our Clinical Correlation group — led by two ­fourth-­year students — promised us ­first-­year students a taste of clinical medicine.

The CC student leaders had obtained permission for a tour of the New York City medical examiner’s office. All suspicious death — murders, suicides, and the like — ­were investigated ­here.

The autumn sun dazzled against the bright turquoise bricks of the ME building, which stood out in sharp contrast to the gray concrete buildings lining First Avenue. We congregated on the steps, endeavoring to look nonchalant.

The security guard checked our ID cards as well as our letter of entry. We followed him through the metal detector, down the whitewashed concrete hallway, into the unpainted ser­vice elevator with a ­hand-­pulled metal grate.

We stared at our sneakers as the elevator lurched downward. It creaked past several floors and landed with a jolt. Out we spilled, gingerly, onto the raw concrete floor. Our first stop was the morgue. The cavernous ­walk-­in refrigerator was icy and silent. There was a Freon smell, the kind I recalled from the frozen food departments in grocery stores. As a child, when I went shopping with my mother I used to lean into the bins of ice cream and frozen waffles and inhale that curiously appealing, vaguely sweet, chemical fragrance. But ­here the odor was ­intensified — magnified by the rigid chill and bleak soundlessness of the room.

Nine naked corpses lay on shelves, their wizened bodies covered with skin that glowed a ghastly green from the ­low-­wattage fluorescent lights. These ­were the unclaimed bodies, mostly el­der­ly men found on the streets. The ones that ­were never identified, never claimed by relatives. The ones that ­were sent next door to the medical school. These ­were the subjects of our ­first-­year anatomy course.

From there we ­were herded into the autopsy room. Loosely swinging doors delivered us into a shock of cacophonous noise and harsh bright lights. We stumbled into each other, a discombobulated mass at the entranceway, blinking to adjust from the stark silence of the morgue. The autopsy room was long and rectangular. The high ceilings and brisk yellow walls lent an odd air of cheeriness. Seven metal tables lay parallel in the center. Six of them ­were surrounded by groups of pathology residents ­performing autopsies. The residents wore long rubber gloves and ­industrial-­strength aprons. The sound of their voices and their clanking instruments echoed in the room.

The only body I had ever opened was my cadaver in anatomy lab, which was preserved in formaldehyde and completely dried out. I’d never actually seen blood. In the autopsy room there was blood everywhere. Residents ­were handling organs — weighing hearts, mea­sur­ing kidneys, taking samples from livers — then replacing them in the open corpses. Their aprons ­were spotted with scarlet streaks. Blood streamed down the troughs that surrounded each table.

It was disgusting, but I wasn’t nauseated. These bodies didn’t look like people anymore. It was more like a cattle slaughter­house: cows and pigs lined up to be transformed into sterile packages of ­cellophane-­wrapped chopped meat. The slaughter­house that compelled you to vow lifetime vegetarianism, a resolve that lasted only until the next barbecue with succulent, browned burgers that looked nothing like the disemboweled carcasses you’d seen earlier.

Then I spied the last table, the only one without a sea of activity around it. Lying on the metal table was a young boy who didn’t look older than twelve. He was wearing new Nikes and one leg of his jeans was rolled up to the knee. His bright red basketball jersey was pushed up, revealing a smooth brown chest. He looked as if he ­were sleeping.

I tiptoed closer. Could he really be dead? There was not a mark on his body. Every part was in its place. His clothes ­were crisp and clean. There was no blood, no dirt, no sign of struggle. He wasn’t anything like the gutted carcasses on the other tables. His expression was serene, his face without blemish. His skin was plump. He was just a beautiful boy sleeping.

I wanted to rouse him, to tell him to get out of this ­house of death, quick, before the ­rubber-­aproned doctors got to him. There is still time, I wanted to say. Get out while you can!

I leaned over his slender, exposed, adolescent chest. I peered closer. There, just over his left nipple, was a barely perceptible hole. Smaller than the tip of my little finger. A tiny bullet hole.

I stared at that hole. That ignominious hole. That hole that stole this boy’s life. I wanted to rewind the tape, to give him a chance to dodge six inches to the right. That’s all he’d need — just six inches. Who would balk over six inches?

Somebody pulled on my arm. Time to go.

For months after my visit to the medical examiner’s office, I had nightmares. But they weren’t about bloody autopsies or refrigerated corpses. I dreamt only about the boy, that beautiful, untouched, intact boy. The one who’d had the misfortune to fall asleep in the autopsy room.

At night, he would creep into my bed. On the street, I could feel his breath on the back of my neck. In the library, while I battled the Krebs cycle and the branches of the trigeminal nerve, he would slip silently into the pages of my book. His body was so perfect, so untouched.

Except for that barely perceptible hole.

Now I looked at Nemesio Rios sitting before me; his beautiful body adrift in the uncertainty of adolescence, made all the rockier by the unfair burdens of urban poverty. Research has shown that health status and life expectancy are directly correlated with socioeconomic status and earning power. Whether this is related to having health ­insurance, or simply to having more knowledge to make healthier lifestyle choices, there is no doubt that being poor is bad for your health.

As I scribbled in his chart, an odd thought dawned on me: the best thing that I, as a physician, could recommend for Nemesio’s ­long-­term health would be to take the SAT and get into college. Too bad I couldn’t just write a prescription for that.

“Have you taken the SAT yet?” I asked Nemesio.

“Nah. I can’t stand U.S. history. What’s the point of knowing U.S. history?”

I twisted my stethoscope around my finger. “Ever hear of McCarthy?”

He shrugged. “Yeah, maybe.”

“McCarthy tried to intimidate people to turn in their friends and coworkers. Anyone who might believe differently from him. I’d hate to see that part of U.S history repeated.”

He nodded slowly. “Yeah, I guess. I wouldn’t want nobody to tell me what to think. That peer pressure is crap.”

“Besides,” I added, “there’s no U.S. history on the SAT.”

Nemesio turned toward me, his eyes opened wide. “Yeah? No U.S. history?” His cheeks ­were practically glowing.

“No history. Just math and En­glish.”

“Wow,” he said. “No U.S. history. That’s pretty cool.” His tone of voice changed abruptly as his gaze plummeted to the floor. “But damn, I can’t remember those fractions and stuff.”

“Sure you can,” I said. “It’s all the same from high school. If you review it, it’ll all come back to you.”

In medical school, I had taught an SAT prep course on the weekends to help pay my living expenses. For kids in more affluent neighborhoods, these courses ­were standard. But it didn’t seem fair, because for Nemesio, his health depended on it.

“Listen,” I said. “I’ll make you a deal. You go out and buy one of those SAT review books and bring it to our next appointment. I bet we can brush you up on those fractions.”

He shifted in his seat and I could just detect a hint of a swagger in his torso. “Okay, Doc. I’ll take you on.”

Nemesio stood up to go and then turned quickly back to me. “College ain’t so bad, but what I really want is to play basketball.”

Now it was my turn to nod. “There’s nothing like a good ballgame. I played point guard in college.”

“You? You even shorter than me.”

“That’s why I had to find another career.”

He grinned. “You and me both.” Nemesio put his ski hat on and pulled it carefully down over his forehead. Then he slouched out the door.

Nemesio and I met three times over the next two months. While my stethoscope and blood pressure cuff sat idle, we reviewed algebra, analogies, geometry, and reading comprehension. With only a little prodding, Nemesio was able to recall what he had learned in high school. And he thought it was “really cool” when I showed him the tricks and shortcuts that I recalled from the SAT prep course.

I lost touch with Nemesio after that. Many days I thought about him, wondering how things turned out. If this ­were a movie, he’d score a perfect 1600 and be off to Princeton on full scholarship. But Harlem isn’t Hollywood, and the challenges in real life are infinitely more complex. I don’t know if Nemesio ever got into college — any college — or if he even took the SAT exam. But he did learn a bit more about fractions, and I learned a bit more about the meaning of preventative medicine. At the end of each visit, I would face the clinic billing sheet. The top fifty diagnoses ­were listed — the most common and important medical issues, according to Medicaid, that faced our patients. I scrutinized them each time, because I was required to check one off, to check off Nemesio Rios’s most salient medical diagnosis and treatment, to identify the most pressing issues for his health, to categorize the medical interventions deemed necessary for this patient’s ­well-­being, otherwise the clinic wouldn’t get reimbursed.

SAT prep was not among them.

2Example: “Comfort’s catholicity of perception and image, strangely Whitmanesque in range, almost the exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion, continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric accumulative hinting at a cruel, an inexorably serene timelessness. . . . Wrey Gardiner scores by aiming at simple bull’s-eyes with precision. Only they are not so simple, and through this contented sadness runs more than the surface bitter-sweet of resignation.” (Poetry Quarterly.)

3Pétain: Henri Philippe Pétain was a World War I French military hero who served as chief of state in France from 1940 to 1945, after France surrendered to Germany. A controversial figure, Pétain was regarded by some to be a patriot who had sacrificed himself for his country, while others considered him to be a traitor. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1945, the year before Orwell wrote his essay. — Eds.

The Reader’s Presence

1. ‑Ofri uses dialogue extensively throughout the essay. What are the effects of this choice? How would the essay be different if she had not used her patient’s own words?

2. ‑Why does Ofri juxtapose the material about Nemesio Rios with the material about her experiences in the morgue? Is the fact that Ofri does not reveal the outcome of Nemesio’s story disturbing? Does this uncertainty make the essay more or less believable? Why?

3. ‑Ofri argues that continuing his education is the best step her patient can take to safeguard his health. Do you agree? Read John Taylor Gatto’s “Against School” (page 688). Does Gatto’s argument apply to a case like that of Ofri’s young patient? Why or why not?

4People . . . camps: Though Orwell is decrying all totalitarian abuse of language, his examples are mainly pointed at the Soviet purges under Joseph Stalin. — Eds.

George Orwell

Politics and the En­glish Language

During his lifetime, George Orwell was well known for the po­liti­cal positions he laid out in his essays. The events that inspired Orwell to write his essays have long since passed, but his writing continues to be read and enjoyed. Orwell demonstrates that po­liti­cal writing need not be narrowly topical — it can speak to enduring issues and concerns. He suggested as much in 1946 when he wrote, “What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make po­liti­cal writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a feeling of injustice. . . . But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it ­were not also an aesthetic experience.” “Politics and the En­glish Language” appears in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (1950).

For more information about Orwell, see page 221.

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the En­glish language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is de­cadent and our language — so that argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to airplanes. Underneath this lies the ­half-­conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have ­politi­cal and economic causes: It is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the En­glish language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the pro­cess is reversible. Modern En­glish, especially written En­glish, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards po­liti­cal regeneration: so that the fight against bad En­glish is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said ­here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, ­here are five specimens of the En­glish language as it is now habitually ­written.

These five passages have not been picked out because they are es­pecially bad — I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen — but ­because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative samples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:

(1) I am not, indeed, sure whether it is true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a ­seventeenth-­century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the found­er of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.

Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression).

(2) Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes such egregious collections of vocals as the Basic put up with for tolerate or put at a loss for bewilder.

Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossa).

(3) On the one side we have the free personality: By definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these ­self-­secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?

Essay on psychology in Politics (New York).

(4) All the “best people” from the gentlemen’s clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial ­horror of the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated ­petty-­bourgeoisie to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.

Communist pamphlet.

(5) If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity ­here will bespeak cancer and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion’s roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream — as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as “standard En­glish.” When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o’clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, ­school-­ma’amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens!

Letter in Tribune.

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery: The other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something ­else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern En­glish prose, and especially of any kind of po­liti­cal writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated ­hen-­house. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of ­prose-­construction is habitually dodged:

Dying Meta­phors. A newly invented meta­phor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a meta­phor which is technically “dead” (e.g., iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of ­worn-­out meta­phors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgels for, toe the line, ­ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, rift within the lute, on the order of the day, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a “rift,” for instance?), and incompatible meta­phors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some meta­phors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: A writer who stopped to think what he was saying would be aware of this, and would avoid perverting the original phrase.