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ON a recent visit to the Statue of Liberty, my first since the sixth grade, I was struck by how many French people were at the site. Why more French than others from abroad? The answer may lie in the statue’s history. After all, it was conceived nearly 150 years ago almost as much for France as for the United States.
The idea for the monument stemmed from a French struggle for freedom that began in 1852, when Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, having overthrown France’s democratic republic, declared himself emperor. In the summer of 1865, after enduring 13 years of Napoleon III’s near-dictatorial rule, Édouard de Laboulaye, a historian, hosted a dinner for a small group of French liberals to celebrate the North’s victory in the American Civil War. To Laboulaye, the restoration of orderly liberty in the United States put his own government to shame.
Over brandy and cigars, he and his guests, who included Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, the prominent sculptor, decided to organize a public campaign to commemorate American liberty with a grand gift to the United States. But the gift would double as an implicit critique of Napoleon III.
Bartholdi later envisioned a mammoth statue of the kind of ancient Roman goddess that since 1789 had symbolized liberty and the Republic. The French revolutionary tradition actually produced two goddesses: one sported the “liberty cap” and appeared in ardent motion, her breasts often bared, a fierce expression on her face. Her counterpart stood erect and still, her body modestly draped, her expression calm and serene.
Bartholdi chose the second, unthreatening icon to have his “Liberty Enlightening the World” depict the stability that French liberals saw in the United States and wanted for their own turbulent land.
By the time construction began in the mid-1870s, Napoleon III had been removed from power and his opponents had created a moderate republican regime. France had escaped the twin perils of revolution and reaction that had characterized its political life for nearly a century. Now, Bartholdi’s statue could stand for both the French and the American republics......
A Gift from France, to France
The editing was amazing: a variant of this British writing assignment. (Here's dr. pion on precis writing.) The editor cut the original piece in half, losing only one detail everyone was sorry to see go.
I learned something. When I read the editor's version, I was disappointed in the lead paragraph, which was flat. I finished reading the piece & was blown away by the editing, especially seeing as how C. and I didn't get too far in our own efforts to edit an already-tightly written passage last July. So I re-read, thinking maybe I was wrong about the lead. But no. It was flat.
Ed raised the issue with the editor, who told him that a lead paragraph, to be interesting, must have details. When you make cuts as deep as they do for the op ed page, she said, you often end up with flat beginnings -- I assume because the details in most writers' first paragraphs are the least essential to the piece and are thus the ones most likely to be cut, although she didn't say so.
She's absolutely right. Ed fixed the problem by inserting the words "my first since the sixth grade" into the first sentence. That's all it took.
Writing is a mystery.
For me, this lead is boring:
ON a recent visit to the Statue of Liberty, I was struck by how many French people were at the site.
This one works:
ON a recent visit to the Statue of Liberty, my first since the sixth grade, I was struck by how many French people were at the site.
Why should that be?
8 comments:
The point of an introductory sentence is to engage the reader's attention and raise his interest. In the second version, the inclusion of a personal detail changes the observation from general to personal and implicitly encourages the reader to identify with the author. If you can induce empathy, you can grab your reader.
Hi Doug!
Why does the detail recent visit to the Statue of Liberty not engage interest while "since I was in 6th grade" does??
Here's another question.
I'm wondering whether lead paragraphs often have an "engaging detail" that's slightly "irrelevant" to the actual story.
Ed said he tells his students to dive right into the topic, which is something they don't do automatically.
I wonder if there's a kind of "transition" from "everyone's world" to "particular world of the story...."
I don't know what I'm saying, exactly, but I do know that it feels wrong -- to me and to students learning to write -- simply to dive into a topic without some kind of introductory "invitation" to the reader.
When good writers dive into a topic they often use that intuitive feeling to their own purposes by violating it. (I think.)
I'm reading Angela's Ashes -- here's the first paragraph:
My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born. Instead, they returned to Ireland when I was four, my brother, Malachy, three, the twins, Oliver and Eugene, barely one, and my sister, Margaret, dead and gone.
The first sentence of the book, and already a dead baby.
Of course, in a way, it's fair warning.
synchronicity alert: while I was writing that comment my copy of Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student arrived.
I'm thinking: how am I going to learn math AND learn rhetoric AND teach Andrew grammar AND earn a living?
hmm..
Ed lost 100 words to a freaking Maureen Down correction!
aack
He'd been told the piece would be 600 words, and it had been edited to 600 & then at the last minute another 100 had to be cut.
This morning we saw the Dowd correction.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/03/opinion/03berenson.html?ref=opinion
Did they cut the online version also? If so that would be a good example of newspaper "dead tree" thinking....
Congrats to Ed. Nice piece of writing.
Thanks, Ben!
I think that's the whole piece.
He's heard from all kinds of people - he's heard from people who say they've got documents about all these things -- !
Ed says the reason "I went to the Statue of Liberty" is a boring personal detail and "It was my first visit since 6th grade" is an interesting detail is that 6th grade is "Proustian" - it awakens memories of the past, when the reader visited the Statue of Liberty (or could have).
His original draft was about the changing meaning of the Statue since 9/11 - about the hours of security you have to go through, and about the fact that the spiral staircase inside the Statue is closed for good. He went through all kinds of examples of people fighting revolutions inside their own countries & building Statues of Liberty, or physically imitating Statues of Liberty. Apparently at one point there was violence in Liberia & the rebels all assumed the pose of the Statue.
His argument was that the Statue has become an international symbol of freedom. It was moving.
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