William F. Buckley Jr. is the author of 38 books, the most recent of which is Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith (Doubleday).

Rewired Editor Tackles Teaching!
A seasoned wordsmith returns to Yale to promote old-fashioned good writing with the latest technology.

December 1997
by William F. Buckley Jr. '50

When at Yale I was the editor of the Daily News and had therefore to write editorials every day. During that period I was close to Professor (of political science) Willmoore Kendall, who cared deeply and fastidiously about the use of language. He undertook to examine anything I passed along for his review. Five years later, after I had started National Review, he came part time (as book editor) and helped to edit everything within reach.

My memory of the early years of the magazine was of everyone editing everyone else. I would routinely pull out of the dumbwaiter, in my upstairs office, copy edited by a colleague, sent up for approval. I profited, as others did, from observing and pondering suggested editorial changes. I was very active as editor, coaching young apprentices and pondering the work even of senior editors, who would in turn contribute their suggestions on my own copy. I concluded many years ago that everyone profits from editing, as T. S. Eliot acknowledged when he asked Ezra Pound to look at his Waste Land.

I began using a word processor, commonplace now at Yale, 15 years ago. Most writers will acknowledge that the word processor is conclusively useful in editing. There is the convenience of instantly reshaping a sentence or paragraph with this or that emendation or addition and then looking at it and evaluating the integrated modifications. I think it safe to guess that most writers who began composing by hand or on the typewriter have traveled, since word processing came in, through the predictable stages.

First we'd compose on the computer; then print the rough copy; then edit by hand; then transcribe the corrections back into the computer; then print out the final drafts -- or else renew the cycle one or more times.

From time to time we still go through these stages, but as facility develops, we tend to edit, progressively, on-screen. What is gained mechanically is manifest -- one stage eliminated. Less obvious is the graphic advantage of viewing assimilated editorial changes. To trace one's handwritten interpolations slightly distracts the attention flow. My epiphany of the spring of 1996 was that the experience I had as an undergraduate and subsequently as a magazine editor, in both cases working on text line-by-line, could now be had other than one-to-one.

I thought to try out my insight at a practical level and so approached Woodbridge Hall with the idea of a seminar in composition. President Levin liked the idea, and last September I confronted 12 carefully selected students.

They took their seats in a miniature amphitheater in the Electrical Engineering building. It is equipped with a large screen. Two-thirds of it is illuminated by a projector attached to a laptop computer opposite which, facing my students, I sat. My assistant, David Southward, a young Henry James scholar a few months away from his PhD, coordinated between me and the students. They were given two topics every week on which to base papers 300 to 500 words long. In advance of class time (one two-hour seminar per week), students handed their essays, on diskette, to David, who fed the material into my computer, awaiting the start of class.

The instructor arrives (I speak in the present tense, since I am offering the course again this year) and learns from the assistant what the sequence is of the student papers lodged on the hard disk. We would ascertain, after two or three sessions, that two hours is time for only three papers to be edited. Rotation resulted in four exposures of each of the 12 students' work in the 13 scheduled sessions.

The student under review is asked to read his paper out loud to the class. I would discover that there was stage fright in some of the students. ("Katya, please speak louder. Put a little life in it. We want to hear it.") Eleven students hear what's spoken and simultaneously read the composition, as it scrolls down on the big screen.

"Okay. Let's look at it." (Set the computer screen back to Page One.) The topic is, "You are hidden and see the preparations being made for a Ku Klux Klan rally."

Brian's text begins:

"Hacking coughs and the occasional sneeze punctuated the rustling of robes in the cool stillness of a late November afternoon. Seemed the first bug of the winter had penetrated the ranks of the White Men in White Hoods. From my perch atop the tin roof of the Hartmans' shed, behind concealing boughs of oak, I overheard snatches of conversation:John Anderrsen reckoned the Jaguars could take the Patriots as he struggled to find room for his considerable girth in his robe."

We begin:

Why not make use of the synecdoche (one part for the whole)? Hacking "cough," not "coughs." Does punctuate sound quite right? Punctuation is either emphasis (he punctuated his speech with thrusts of his fist); or interruption (he punctuated his ode to Caesar with affirmations of friendship with Brutus); or joinerwork (he punctuated his passage comma according to form comma for John comma Jim comma and Ruth). Why "cool stillness" when the "bug of winter" is just around the corner, in the next sentence?

You don't want "Seemed" all alone; you'd need, "It" seemed." "Concealing boughs of oak" can be confusing. You mean, surely, that the boughs of oak concealed the onlooker, not that the onlooker is concealed behind the concealment of the boughs? John Anderrsen probably isn't simultaneously wondering about the Jaguars vs. the Patriots and struggling with his robe, is he?

As these observations are made, and the acquiescence of the class solicited -- that they in fact improve the text -- you type out the suggested modifications and they appear on the screen, parallel to the passages being examined.

"Hacking cough and an occasional sneeze were heard during the robe-donning. It was still, that late afternoon in November. The first bug of winter had reached into where the white men were gathered to put on their white hoods" "concealed by boughs of oak John Anderrsen, wrestling to find room for his considerable girth in his robe, absentmindedly reckoned the Jaguars could take the Patriots this time around"

Time can be felt to stand still under the pressure of a vise so unyielding. But the students are there for this drill, and don't appear to resent it any more than they would a fast-running treadmill in an exercise room.

From a college-sponsored questionnaire filled out (anonymously) by the students at the end of the term: "That everyone involved had such a serious and sincere commitment to writing made possible high-level distinctions I doubt one would find anywhere else."

Another student: "Strengths [of the course include] the ability to write creatively, the terrific atmosphere of mutual exploration of the craft of writing by the other students." And again, "The pedagogical technique (editing on screen, in class), I found very useful. It was helpful to see not only other students' work, but also to have other students critique my work."

The strategic design, in a strict-constructionist writing course, is to exact formal correctness while encouraging stylistic imagination. The topics I gave out sought to encourage originality. The assignment for the final week was an autobiographical essay. "The purpose of this exercise [my infrequent off-premise communications with my students are done through e-mail, using a code that reaches them all] is to have you come up with something challenging which you may even wish to keep, conceivably even to use, when auspices are right."

I thought it useful to give them a model: a biography written as a 21-year old Yale senior might write it. I am a graduate of the Class of 1950, and I wouldn't qualify. But I engaged the discipline by creating an essay as if written by Blackford Oakes, the protagonist in my spy novels. The essay was as by Oakes, written at age 23, when a senior at Yale. Excerpts:

"It's senior year now and I've had a hell of a good time. My stepfather (he is knighted: Sir Alex Sharkey) is a very nice man and an architect -- successful, I assume, because he takes good care of my mother and a check comes in from him to pay for anything the G.I. Bill doesn't cover. The money arrives through channels: The Brits aren't allowed, under the Attlee government, to send money abroad. (Did I say anywhere that socialism sucks? Well, it does.) I'm studying mechanical engineering and really liking it. Prof. Jablonski is especially good, and we like it when he gets carried away (about once a month) and begins on the blackboard to sketch why the Leaning Tower of Pisa doesn't fall down, or why high prices run into asymptotic (his word) problems.

"On the extracurricular side of Yale, there's Sally. I ran into her at a post-football party, and I am her slave for life, but the problem is that she is Jane Austen's slave for life and at grad school (even though she's younger than me). She works non-stop, but we have TERRIFIC moments. Hours, really. Evenings, sometimes.

"I graduate in five months and haven't lined up a particular firm to put in for, but had an odd experience last week when a virtual stranger came to see me, and now I know that I've been propositioned! CIA. The Korean business is pretty explosive. Who knows. But of course, that is confidential."

The returns were gratifying. Again, excerpts:

"My name is Edward Forrest Gesing. The last name doesn't sound Polish, but it is. When people would ask me about its origins, I used to tell them that it was 'Gazinski' until my great-grandfather changed it at Ellis Island. But it turns out that's not true; it's always been Gesing."

A second student: "I did well in school -- public -- otherwise she might not have been so lenient. The other kids thought I was weird because I didn't say much and liked to read, and they made fun of me. (Actually, I probably was weird. I forget.) For years afterwards I thought that anyone who tried to talk to me was just trying to trick me into slipping up and looking ridiculous, so I wasn't very friendly."

And a third: "When my sister and I were very young my mother still had some Village in her, and she commissioned a huge, plastic jungle-gym to be built in the front hall of our otherwise fashionably decorated apartment. The jungle-gym was fun for me and my sister, and I think it lent a kind of funky, artistic feel to the whole place. That feel, though, would not last, because exceptionally strong is the pull of conformity among Upper East Side Moms. By the time I was 9 years old, in the exact spot where the jungle-gym had been, there was a grand piano, but no one in our family knew how to play it."

I was amused (and instructed) when I saw recently the publication of my play, Stained Glass. Stage dramas are put out by the publishing firm of Samuel French, Inc. In order fully to warn potential producers, a comprehensive list appears at the back of the book: every single item required to effect the play's production as originally recorded ("one empty Coke bottle, one elephant, 153 eight-inch candles").

Following that model, here are what I have concluded are the concrete requirements for computer-aided writing seminars: one large screen, one projector, one laptop, one instructor, one assistant instructor, 12 language-hungry students.

It is also most important to be enthusiastic about the enterprise. No -- it is critical that that be so, both for the students and the instructor. Any lesion of interest in either party gives off a sense of helplessness -- to learn; and to teach. Every student can learn, and no instructor ever stops learning how to teach.

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