Two ways to start
Two openings for the same piece.
A. In today’s globalised world, identity is a very complex issue which affects everyone in different ways.
B. There is a question I have been asked, by my own rough count, more than two hundred times: where are you from?
Four questions.
1. What does B give you that A does not?
2. What is the function of by my own rough count?
3. How many marked structures are in either opening?
4. Is A wrong?
The model · 359 words
The shortest true answer
There is a question I have been asked, by my own rough count, more than two hundred times: where are you from? It is not a hostile question, and I want to say that at the outset, because the argument I am going to make does not require anybody to have behaved badly.
The difficulty is arithmetical rather than moral. Each asking costs about forty seconds if the answer is short and about four minutes if it is true. Two hundred askings is therefore either two hours or thirteen, depending entirely on which version I choose — and I have been choosing the short one for eleven years without ever deciding to.
What I object to is not the question. It is the compression. The short answer names a country I left at nineteen and have visited six times since; the long one names two countries, a language I read better than I speak, and a grandmother whose surname I do not carry. The short one is a lie that everybody prefers, including me on most days.
Not once has anybody asked me which version I would rather give. That is not a complaint about individuals — nobody has the time, and the format of the question has no room in it for the offer. It is an observation about a format that has become invisible through use.
Two things follow. The first is small and practical: a question with a built-in time limit will always get the answer that fits, and the answer that fits is not the true one. The second is larger. A person asked the same question two hundred times develops a compressed self to hand over, and that compressed self is what most people in this city know of me.
I do not have a proposal, which is unusual for a piece of this kind, and I am suspicious of the ones I have read. Asking differently helps a little. Asking less does not appear to be available. What has actually changed things, in my case, is a small number of people who asked once, listened to the long version, and never asked again.
Four questions about the model.
1. How many marked structures does the piece use?
2. Why does the first paragraph say the question is not hostile?
3. What is the cleft in paragraph three doing?
4. Why is not once has anybody asked me earned?
Repair a weaker one
The five moves: the concrete question or situation, with a number · what you are not claiming · the cleft that locates the real objection · the one inversion, carrying something literally true · what follows, and the honest absence of a proposal if there is none.
Below, a second formal piece with four sentences removed.
Four sentences have been removed. Put each one back where it belongs.
I changed the spelling of my name on a Tuesday afternoon in 2016, at a desk in a bank, because the cashier had asked me to repeat it four times and there was a queue behind me. [1]
It took eleven minutes and cost nothing. What it has cost since is harder to itemise. [2] It is that my father spells it the other way, and that every document I now hold quietly disagrees with every document he holds.
[3] Not once in nine years has anybody at a desk asked me to repeat it. The change worked exactly as intended, which is the part I had not expected to mind.
What I object to is not the spelling. [4]
And I have never worked out who I would even be objecting to.
From loose to formal
Rewrite each line for a formal written piece. Some need a structure; most need one taken away. The words in the avoid list must not appear.
Spoken → formal written
Honestly people ask me that like literally all the time and it’s so annoying.
Unearned structure → plain
Never in my life have I filled in a form that had enough boxes.
Plain → earned inversion
In eleven years, nobody has ever asked me which version I would rather give.
Vague → located
It’s not really the question, it’s kind of everything around it.
Failed promise → plain
Not only was the form long, it was also printed in quite a small font.
Spoken → formal written
At the end of the day everyone just wants to belong, that’s basically it.
Three questions.
1. How many marked structures does a 360-word formal piece want?
2. What goes in the first paragraph besides the situation?
3. You have no proposal at the end. What do you do?
The piece
How the twenty-three minutes run. Five to plan and allocate two structures, fourteen to write, four to exchange. The allocation happens before the prose, because a structure chosen mid-sentence is almost always chosen for its sound.
Stage 1 · Alone · 5 minutes · Plan
Something about belonging that you have a concrete instance of: a question you are asked, a form, a name, a room, an institution, a language, a document. Invent freely if you prefer.
Five lines, with your two structures allocated in advance and the reason each is earned.
- 1 · The concrete situation, with a number in it. Countable is better than important.
- 2 · What you are not claiming. One sentence.
- 3 · The cleft: What I object to is not ___; it is ___. Both halves filled.
- 4 · The inversion, and the reason it is earned. If you cannot write the reason, use one structure instead of two.
- 5 · What follows — and whether you honestly have a proposal.
Stage 2 · Alone · 14 minutes · Write
Three hundred and sixty words, five or six paragraphs, formal throughout.
Fourteen minutes, and no more than two marked structures in the whole piece.
- Open with the concrete situation and the number. No general statement about the modern world.
- Remove the villain version in one sentence, early.
- Spend the cleft where the objection is located, and the inversion on something literally true.
- Everything else is plain. A formal paragraph with nothing marked in it is a good paragraph.
- Close on what follows. If you have no proposal, say so and say what has actually made a difference.
Stage 3 · Pairs · 4 minutes · Exchange
Swap. Three jobs, in this order, and none of them is proofreading.
Four minutes. Count, test, and take one away.
- Count the marked structures and write the number at the top. More than two is the commonest fault in this task.
- For each inversion, ask one of the two questions: is it really a first? or is the second thing bigger?
- For each cleft, ask: what is the rival? If it has to be invented on the spot, cross it out.
- Say which single plain sentence in the piece you would keep. It is almost never one of the marked ones.
What your partner counted
Two questions.
1. How many marked structures did your draft contain?
2. Which sentence did your partner want to keep?
Two, at most
Two questions. Twenty seconds.
1. How many marked structures does 360 formal words want?
2. What earns an inversion in writing?
Next. The unit task: a formal discussion and the finished piece, assessed on whether every marked structure in them can survive one question from somebody else.