Wordcraft -- Who writes better, men or women?

Last Monday I discussed one of the interesting unexpected visitors that show up in my inbox. Today’s post is about another, a series of provocative little info graphs from an online editing service.

Grammerly asked me months ago to subscribe to its grammar checking services for my blog posts. I’m not crazy about paying a company to correct writing I don’t get paid for in the first place. But when it reported that thousands of people it surveyed weighed in on the subject of whether men or women were the better writers, I was hooked.

Grammerly’s conclusion: overall, 59 percent of respondents believe women are better writers. The site suggested that this is because women, in the opinion of those surveyed, tend to write more descriptively and spend more time developing a wider variety of characters. But although I’d love to think that members of my own gender are better, I’ve got to admit¾ I totally disagree with the findings.

Disagree, at least, on the criteria it selected as earmarks of good writing. These were: whether it’s better to spend more time developing characters or get to the point quickly; to write about people or about things; to write about people like ourselves or those who are different; and whether it’s better to write long, descriptive sentences or short, straightforward ones.

It’s not that there are right or wrong answers to any of these questions. Isn’t it obvious that the answer to the question about character development versus getting to the point should be “both”?

And the best answer to the question about “people versus things” (“best” as determined by me, of course) seems obvious when discussing most fiction. But what about those forms of fiction, such as science fiction and thrillers, that require quite a lot of thinginess to give the human characters room to develop?

On the question about writing about people like ourselves versus writing about those unlike us? All characters will have a huge amount of ourselves in them, whether we writers consciously realize it or not, because each of us is the only character we can know from the inside out. Still, I’ll admit to generally giving bonus points for writers who try to stretch both their sympathies and their craft by writing about characters different from themselves, even if it’s only a difference of age or gender.

Don’t even get me started on whether long, descriptive sentences represent better writing than short, straightforward ones. I’m a woman, a woman writer, but I’m extremely wary of long sentences. (Especially wary after criticism from a short story contest judge for using what he¾ or possibly she¾ considered overly long sentences.)

I decided that, on the whole, the question of which gender writes better is a sign of progress. After all, if Daniel Defoe’s 1718 Robinson Crusoe is taken to be the first novel (by which I mean book length prose fiction) we’ve only been writing long fiction for about three hundred years. Women like proto-Gothic writer Anne Radcliffe were churning out bestsellers by the end of the eighteenth century. But for decades afterward, the writing abilities of women were so denigrated that even such greats as the Bronte sisters originally published under male pseudonyms.

But are women really out of the closet as writers? Or does the whole J.K. Rowling/Robert Galbraith situation mean we’re still more acceptable if we wear our man suits?

Besides making use of Grammerly’s catchy graphics, I opted for a free check of my writing at www.grammerly.com/. I’m still debating whether to sign up for its services. And whether the errors it pointed out are from the viewpoint of a male or female computer program.

Adventure classics -- Castaways’ peaceable kingdom

The Swiss Family Robinson

by Johan David Wyss

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Why has it taken this long for me to realize how much I love castaway narratives? There’s something incredibly satisfying in reading about human beings surviving on their brains and gut. And in the case of Swiss pastor Johan David Wyss’s version, The Swiss Family Robinson, surviving on their hearts.

Because family love and cooperation trump all in this beguiling tale based on the stories Wyss told to his children before gathering the narratives into book form in 1812. The love between father and children, and, uniquely for such narratives, husband and wife, mother and children shines through the now somewhat antiquated language of early translations. (Yes, there’s a feisty, shipwrecked mom in the story, who stands up to her husband when she disapproves of his ideas, dons sailor’s trousers when her skirts become a hindrance, is handy with a gun and able to cook anything from flamingo to kangaroo.)

Jules Verne admired Wyss and hoped to out-Robinson him with his own castaway tale, The Mysterious Island. To do that, he dropped his own crew of castaways from a balloon onto an island filled with almost as improbable a menagerie of beasts and botanicals as Wyss. But he couldn’t come near Wyss’s tale for sheer loveableness.

Both Verne and Wyss’s stories hark back to the grandfather of all castaway stories, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. In fact, the Swiss family’s surname is never revealed. The “Robinson” in the title of Wyss’s book merely serves to link them to the original doughty castaway.

I’ve never understood why Defoe’s version is shelved among children’s books. The early eighteenth century text is full of Crusoe’s spiritual wrestling with the grimly Calvinistic version of Christianity Defoe subscribed to. Fast forward a hundred years and Wyss, although still deeply religious, preaches only gently to his family of rowdy kids. He’s as much a loving parent entertaining his children with wild adventure tales as he is a spiritual advisor.

The story begins a shipwreck. (Defoe’s tale began with a history of the entire Crusoe family, the likes of which Wyss mercifully spares us.) The family¾ father William, mother Elizabeth, and their four sons, Fritz, Ernest, Jack and Franz¾ are sailing through the South Pacific bent on settling in Australia. Abandoned by the crew of their foundering ship, they sustain their courage through prayer and, sensibly, a meal and preparation of makeshift life jackets.

Escaping onto a deserted island, they find the only survivors are themselves, the excellent hounds of the ship’s captain (Verne remembered this when adding a helpful dog to his story) and a host of livestock. But their ship was laden with an incredible array of necessities for their anticipated destination. As industrious as they are lucky, they soon have a multilevel treehouse any kid would envy, a series of improbable domesticated wild animals including a buffalo (which seems to be a bison miraculously transported from the northern to southern hemispheres), but no books. (Yay, school’s out for the duration!)

What is there to fear? Angry natives? No. Pirates? No. Volcanoes, hurricanes, sharks? No, no and no. The worst possibility, in fact, is that a well-meaning rescuer will arrive to take them away from their peaceable kingdom. Even the arrival of another castaway, this one a girl, can’t drive a wedge in their familial happiness.

If you want to read a castaway narrative to your kids, make it this one. Or just pretend it’s for your kids and read it for yourself. It’s widely available, including free downloads from Project Gutenberg,
www.gutenberg.org/.

(Next Wednesday, alas, there’s no peace at the river as Adventure classics continues a September of young heroes with Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.)

Adventure classics -- Merchant, debtor, author, spy

Robinson Crusoe

by Daniel Defoe

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“For all the writing that Defoe had done before the composition of Robinson Crusoe, indeed for all the prose fiction that he had written, Robinson Crusoe must have come to him as almost as wonderful a surprise as it was to his readers. . . For the first time Defoe created a work that drew upon all his talents, knowledge, and experience,” biographer Maximillian E. Novak writes in Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions.

Who but a writer of pamphlets satirizing German George I’s favoritism toward foreigners could imagine a quintessential English character whose family blandly anglicizes its German name of “Kreutznaer” to “Crusoe?” Who but a failed merchant imprisoned for debt could give his castaway a capitalistic fortune from earnings his properties accrued, without so much as a finger lift from him, during his absence on a tropical island? And who but a religious dissenter could imagine that island as a secular paradise where Protestants, Catholics and, yes, even pagan cannibals could live in peace?

But I’m getting ahead of the complex 1719 story of the world’s most famous castaway and the still more complex story of his inventor.

Robinson Crusoe runs away to sea, repents, runs away again, vows to change his way of life, and no sooner does so than he’s backing a scheme of illegal slave trading. For all these sins, he’s shipwrecked on an uninhabited island. While there, he finds a single human footprint where he thought nobody had set foot except himself.

How strange it was, Crusoe marvels, coming across the mysterious print, “That I, whose affliction was that I seemed banished from human society. . . that I was ready to sink into the ground at but the shadow or silent appearance of a man having set his foot in the island.”

He will go on to rescue a young cannibal he names “Friday,” for the day of his discovery. And he and Friday will in turn be rescued, even though inadvertently, by pirates (as fashionable among eighteenth century readers as they are today). And of course, he’ll find up fabulously rich.

In spite of -- or because of -- the money Robinson Crusoe’s four authorized editions made for the aging Defoe and his large family, casting doubt on Defoe’s accomplishments soon became a popular pastime.

The “real” Robinson Crusoe was Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, detractors said. Or a character imagined by medieval Arab philosopher Ibn Tufayl, living on an island without other human beings. Or Crusoe was “really” Henry Pitman, shipwrecked after escaping from a Caribbean penal colony. Pitman is a likely influence, since Defoe’s book was published by the same firm that published Pitman’s memoir. And since one of Defoe’s typically harebrained financial schemes was colonizing the territory around the mouth of the Orinoco River in South America, where he conveniently locates Crusoe’s island.

And by the way, others wrote, Crusoe’s companion Friday was really a marooned Native American whose story had been much publicized early in the eighteenth century. I don’t doubt Crusoe and Friday were all these. But they were also much more.


Defoe would go on to write more groundbreaking novels in the next decade, including A Journal of the Plague Year and Moll Flanders. But no matter how much money his writing (and work as a secret agent for at least two political regimes) brought in, it was never enough. He died in 1731, having spent the last six months of his life hiding from his creditors.

Of course, Robinson Crusoe, Novak’s biography, and Tim Severin’s book, Seeking Robinson Crusoe, are available on Amazon. Perhaps even at your local library.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues an August of adventures at sea with Walter Lord’s story of the Titanic’s last hours, A Night to Remember.)