More than once, I’ve been taken to task about my language.  It’s been suggested to me that my word choices leave people confused, or that my sentence structures — even in plain speech — are “too smart.”  That is, uniformly condescending to my listeners.

I just browsed some of my writing from my early undergrad days, and I was astonished at how plain it was.  Short sentences.  General-reference errors.  Common words.  What happened?

Two things, I think.  The first was in-depth training in a foreign language.  Having minored in Latin — including 10 hours at the graduate level — I was exposed to all aspects of formal grammar, even things that are obscure even to professional grammarians.  I was also required to write Latin using all three dominant historical styles of that language:  the simplicity of the early and middle Republic, the rich complexity of the early Imperial period, the inconsistency and orthographic chaos of the early medieval era.

Today, English speakers increasingly resort to relatively short sentences with a simple subject-verb-object grammatical structure.  More and more, even native speakers rely on a small, common vocabulary, drawing on auxiliary parts of speech (including prepositional phrases and appositives) to flesh out meaning.  It wasn’t always like this, of course; a reading of 18th-century prose, for example, will numb the mind with its serpentine sentences and obscure words and incredible density of ideas-per-column-inch that leaves contemporary readers perplexed.

Languages evolve over time, and my exposure to the varied dominant styles of Latin over 1,500 years of evolution undeniably impacted how I speak and write. 

The other influencer was newspaper writing.  For years, I had to churn out a fully reasoned and entirely self-contained editorial using a fixed number of column inches (usually, equivalent to about 600 words).  And at least once per week, I had to write an on-demand bylined opinion column of varying length to fit the space left at the last moment by less-than-reliable staff columnists.  Sounds easy … until you try it.

With blogging, there’s no word-count limit on post lengths.  There’s no requirement to use tight, concise prose.  No challenge to use the right word in the right context, even when the word selected isn’t especially common.  No points are awarded for an elegant turn of phrase or finely balanced complex construction.

Some habits die hard.  Circumstances forced my language patterns to change and my vocabulary to expand, and I’ve had to use thee new attributes to be successful.  When I use “big words” or speak in semicolons, it’s not to insult others or to appear smart.  It’s no more and no less than a function of experience, and I can’t not use the right word in the right setting than a bodybuilder can simply refuse to use 80 percent of his biceps when helping neighbors to move.

And I’m not sure that I’d want to.  There’s so much richness that comes from delving into the mechanics of language, from mining the vocabulary of meaning, that to simply stop would feel almost criminal.

My poor friend Jen.  Confronted with the task of writing several papers simultaneously as she enters the endgame of her undergraduate years, we chatted a bit about a four-page assignment she has due, a reflection on a self-selected theme from Elie Wiesel’s Night.

Night is a short but powerful book, telling the story of Wiesel’s experience as a boy in the Nazi death camps.  Several major themes pervade the the author’s historical narrative — the love between fathers and sons, the depth of man’s inhumanity to man, the courage to remain human in the face of certain death, the mercy of the afflicted. 

Wiesel, of course, did not escape the camps unscathed.  Perhaps no one could.  But Wiesel did something significant — he wrote.  His story, now a staple of American classrooms, is a reminder to us all of the depths of human depravity, but also of the moral heroism that so many of the afflicted were able to summon.

It’s said that time heals all wounds, yet many of the survivors of the camps emerged with hopelessly shattered souls.  Some killed themselves in the years following their liberation; others withdrew, numbing themselves with alcohol or withdrawing from full participation in the human experience.  No, mere time is not enough; there must be something more — something cathartic, to allow a person to reconcile how such evil could exist, and how a victim of that evil could survive while so many loved ones did not.

For Wiesel, writing helped him to tame the demons within.  Telling his story contributed to his coping with the horrific experience of his youth; in fact, in his introduction, he said that he felt a duty to write, because allowing the dead to sleep in silence would be tantamount to killing them again.

One theme of Night, then, that receives perhaps too little attention, is the value — the necessity — of a cathartic release after emotional trauma.  Contemporary theories about grieving suggest that most people usually move along a well-defined continuum of reactions to an emotionally disruptive experience.  Consider a terminal cancer diagnosis:  First, we deny the that we really do have a fatal illness.  Then, we become angry.  Next, we try to bargain — usually with God, but it depends.  Then, we get depressed, until we finally accept our fate and then, with that acceptance, embrace the inevitable with serenity.

A nice theory, in its way, but it treats emotional wounds as if they were a paper-cut:  Simply follow a five-step process for cleaning the injury, and all will be well eventually.  But death camps do not inflict emotional paper-cuts; they slice at a person’s heart and soul, causing damage so deep that the band-aid of “acceptance” cannot bring healing.  Something more is needed.

That “more” is an act of atonement, of re-balancing, of signaling one’s defiance to the soul-defining power of the original injury.  Wiesel’s catharsis came through writing; he served as a witness to evil, and to the power of love to overcome that evil even in the darkest of hours.

But what is it about writing that is so powerful?

Perhaps it’s the durability of the written word.  Knowing that we are communicating a story or an argument or an idea that will persist long after we ourselves are gone, is an act of will that, in its way, makes us immortal, and makes our story a permanent part of the human narrative.  It’s the ultimate trump card against the transience of abject evil.

Perhaps it’s the value of thinking through one’s ideas, of refining a message and understanding what that message means to the writer and to his audience.

Perhaps it’s the unique way that the writing process forces us to confront, and eventually to slay, our demons.

In any case, writing has a unique power to heal.  And what works for Wiesel can work for the rest of us, even when the traumas we experience pale in comparison to surviving a death camp.