Accentuate the Positive

Months ago I submitted this to an essay contest. It wasn't chosen as the best essay in a competition open to the entire English-speaking world. It is, however, good enough to post here...

The Best Writing Tip: Accentuate the Positive

Even the word "positive" is problematic in English. Favored by people with a weak grip on reality, it's used as if it meant "nice." Since it actually means what's there, occupying a position, in some circles "Tracy's positive" means that Tracy has cancer, or perhaps has AIDS.

I've heard "Accentuate the positive" used in counterproductive ways. "Write things that make people feel good"? How does anyone know what will make anyone feel good? As Douglas Adams observed, the sentence "Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts make a good meal for tourists" is more pleasing than the sentence "Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts make a good meal of tourists," but in the long run the tourists will be better pleased by the sentence that is accurate.

"The subconscious mind does not understand the negative. Say 'remember' rather than 'don't forget'"? Who knows what the subconscious mind understands, or what it means to say that the subconscious mind exists, but sometimes our minds forget one thing in order to remember another thing.

No. Although it is easier to describe things in terms of what they are, sometimes we understand things better in terms of what they're not. An Australian Robin is a red-breasted songbird like an English Robin, but it's different from the English Robin because...

I read several confused and confusing discussions of the rule, "Accentuate the positive," before I started thinking seriously about improving my articles. Funnily enough, when I thought about improving my articles, "Accentuate the positive" leaped into mind.

It does not mean avoiding negative sentence construction.

It does not mean never describing what people wish were not there--the pollution in the water, the murders of prisoners who were never even accused of anything that might justify their being in prison, the beast that may eat tourists.

It does not even mean limiting your attention to what is currently there. You might want to help contractors visualize an old house you're renovating with double-paned windows, modern toilets, and a wheelchair-accessible entrance.

It means focus on what I want to place, or posit, in attention.

For about a year, my Glyphosate Awareness Newsletters discussed new evidence of glyphosate's harmfulness and the progress of lawsuits against chemical companies. I became increasingly bored writing them, and readers did not become more interested in reading them. A very astute reader took a look at my overall Twitter "metrics" and suggested, "Why not study the animals that are affected by glyphosate?" Probably all animals are adversely affected by glyphosate (dogs were chosen for toxicity studies because they're the least adversely affected animal that was available).

I started writing about animals that live on or in the plants glyphosate is being used to kill along road verges. In a few weeks I had a contract to write articles about butterflies for a science supply store, and friends were lobbying the US Congress for federal protection of, primarily, the Monarch butterfly. Monarchs are found in almost every part of North America at some time of year; they're pollinators, and they share habitat with almost every other North American butterfly.

Glyphosate's effects on humans are things people avoid talking about. "I break out in an internal rash of bleeding ulcers--how do you react?" wouldn't be polite conversation even on The Far Side. But people can talk about protecting the habitat of pretty butterflies. That's a positive image to keep in mind.

Whatever we write, from an office memo urging staff to check spelling to a novel about world hunger, is more compelling if it evokes a positive image in our minds.