Unlocking the power of words: How writing shapes equality and activism in society

“Words got me the wound and will make me well — if you believe it” 

Jim Morrison, Lament, An American Prayer

“Sticks and stones may break my bones

But words can never hurt me”

(Bombs and drones may break your bones… )

Colloquial saying 

For most of human history writing and reading has been a squarely elite affair. For centuries it was intricately bound up with power and privilege. Only a few people were taught the art of word-fare, and access to the repositories of history, thought and ideation that were stored in writing was strictly controlled.

As usual, it took a combination of struggle by poor people — and the growing needs of the capitalist economy for literate workers by the late nineteenth century — to break the rulers’ monopolisation of the written word. 

Once that happened though, education facilitated mass literacy that in turn opened the door for poor people to greater equality and upward mobility through the classes. 

Not many made it, but enough did to trick people like my father into believing that the key to a good life was getting an education and working hard, “pulling up your boot straps”, as he and others frame it.

If only it were that simple.

Nonetheless, while the expansion of public education eventually meant that most people learned to read, not everyone could write and be read; for the most part, the ability to publish was still tightly controlled by class and quality of education. 

When there were breakthrough texts, like Thomas Paine’s 1791 The Rights of Man, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), or Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx’s 1848 Communist Manifesto, the huge readership they garnered demonstrated the revolutionary potential of the written word. 

But these books were the exception, not the rule. 

For the most part the publishing of words remained tightly controlled — mostly by men. It wasn’t just political words they were afraid of. Words were also used to censor morals and shape culture, often protecting the dominant views of sex and sexuality. 

Books such as English writer DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover were considered “indecent” and became the subject of court cases. In addition, as Pip Williams has shown in her beautiful novel The Dictionary of Lost Words, certain words were deliberately left out of the dictionary if their meanings reflected people or subjects that the elites preferred did not exist.

In democracies slowly that grip has been relaxed. Today in countries like South Africa or England we can still write almost anything. 

But in autocracies the control over words and writing is as tight as ever.   

To an extent the digital and communications revolution of the last few decades has subverted all that. Through social media and online publications, millions more people can write and reach an audience, potentially in millions. 

Indeed, sometimes it feels as if suddenly everyone is writing. Even accomplished novelists, historians and writers of non-fiction now have their own newsletters.

In the last few years, writers have been liberated from traditional publishers with the advent of platforms like Substack, and there’s been a mushrooming of individual newsletters, including my own News from JAH. Many of them are outstanding.

But here’s the rub. 

Could it be that paradoxically the explosion in the production and accessibility of writing has led to an implosion in reading for meaning? Daily Maverick, for example, publishes dozens of “Opinionistas” and op-eds a week. But its own statistics show that the average attention span on a page in 2020 was 12 seconds, only a few seconds more than the attention span of a goldfish.

So, the problem is do people read for meaning, or do they just — like I often do — first cast an eye over an article, think they get the gist of it and move on?

In this context the challenge facing a writer, a person who wants to use writing to persuade others, who wants to use writing for connection, advocacy and engagement is… how do you write in a way that arrests people’s attention? 

How do you write for reading?

For social justice activists it is these questions that occasion the need to have a discussion about the obvious: how to write in order to be read!

Where do we start?

Respect the written word 

Words are powerful. They must be handled with care. They can carry love. And hate. They can liberate and they can imprison. They can betray. They can hide and reveal.

In her book Black and Female, Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangarembga describes her childhood encounters with words and puts it this way: “Watching the adults around me I developed an intuitive idea that words were power. After adults spoke to each other, things happened… I realised I was powerless which meant I needed power, which in turn meant I needed words. With words I could do things. I could make good what was no more.”   

The infinite beauty of words

Isn’t it amazing to think that words will never run out? 

Words seem to be as infinite as the stars. Words offer limitless forms, vocabulary and meaning. New words are being born all the time, and every year a handful enter into common enough usage to get added to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). 

In 2022 more than 650 new words, senses and sub-entries were added to the OED in its annual update, including “trequartista, influencer, and side hustle”. There’s even a process by which words gain recognition and a right of entry!  

But, like black stars, some words are also disappearing. Then there are archaic words that may have been discarded, which find their way back to life by myriad means.

Words are the building blocks of meaning. But in addition there are limitless styles, genres and methods for delivering words: whispered or shouted, through poetry, on the page, as part of musical scores.

I’m a firm believer in respect for grammatical rules, which is partly showing respect for the reader: but I’m also an anarchist when it comes to disrupting and reimagining styles. Connection is all. 

The bottom line: as a writer, the word’s your oyster. 

Writing as considered communication

We write primarily to communicate with other people, but how we write will vary enormously depending on who we think we are writing to and for. Once upon a time one of the most popular and private forms of writing was letters. For years, at boarding school, every Sunday my school mates and I were made to sit down for an hour and write letters to our parents. As I grew up, my repertoire of recipients expanded to girlfriends and later lovers. 

Today, I sometimes think of the articles I write as letters, a way of reaching out to unknown people, seeking affinity, hopefully touching hearts and minds, persuading.

But in addition to writing for/to another person I have discovered that writing is also the best way to achieve concentrated and deep thinking; it’s a way to shape your own thoughts, corral information and tease out meaning from the experiences and ideas you are trying to capture and explain in words.

In her book The Purpose of Power, Alicia Garza, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, writes: “When I write I want to accomplish an outcome… For me, writing is a spiritual practice. It is a purging, a renewal, a call to action that I am unable to defy. It is the way I learned to communicate when there seemed to be no other options.”  

In this respect, the lonely act of writing becomes a form of self-realisation, a way of learning, of forming and shaping your own opinions, hopefully sometimes changing your own mind, as you bring intense thought to bear on trying to put an idea or a feeling or an observation into words.

It’s a way of staying human.

The art of writing

I had the privilege of learning about the beauty of words and their power through having inspirational English teachers at school and studying English language and literature as an undergraduate at Oxford University. Studying literature, however, taught me more about the feeling of words, than how to construct them for readers!

Writing arduous essays about every book written between Beowulf in the ninth century and Samuel Beckett in the twentieth also taught me how to really read texts closely to try to understand their meaning. 

There’s a difference, however, between being able to read for meaning and write with meaning. 

You should never rub your personality out of your writing. How you write should be a part of your personality, like the color of your eyes. It’s instinctive. 

Nonetheless, there are a number of guidelines to consider if you aspire to effective public writing. 

Let me try and unpack a few that help me. 

Interestingly, as it turned out, it was not the study of literature (the most refined form of writing) that taught me how to write, but the study of law. 

For a few years, in the late 1980s while South Africa was in the final throes of rebellion against apartheid, I wrote for an underground journal, Inqaba Ya Basebenzi (meaning the Worker’s Fortress in isiZulu), under the strict editorship of Rob Petersen, a distinguished legal and political thinker. Petersen had gone into exile to establish the Marxist Workers Tendency of the ANC. 

Back in those days words and writing in South Africa were much more subversive. Publications, songs and even books of poetry were banned by the apartheid government because of their power to inflame resistance. In defiance of this, Steve Biko’s collection of essays was titled I Write What I Like. Biko wrote under the pseudonym Frank Talk. 

Petersen was a disciplinarian with words, although often more with the intention to exclude meanings and misinterpretations, than to expand the power and possibility of the word. Revolutionary politics required precision of meaning. The Marxist world was an ideological one and because politics was seen as a science rather than an art form the purpose of words was formulaic, that is to form equations of meaning. A wrong word could give you a wrong meaning! 

That I think is the nature of legal writing as well. 

However, being under Petersen’s cosh taught me two rules of more general application to writing: Firstly, that no word should ever be superfluous. Every word has a role, and therefore every word in every sentence needs to be examined and questioned. 

Secondly, the reader of a journalistic article, and even an essay, will always be assisted by finding that there is a logic and structure to an article. 

The article needs to build a case, to progress, and not to require acrobatics or high jumps from the reader. Don’t lead them into a forest of abstraction. Don’t think of an article as being about you and how clever you are.   

I learned that the hard way. 

After being given a subject to research and write about for an article I would often get carried away in the process. Because I was learning through writing, my articles would be full of what I thought to be extraordinary epiphanies. Thinking and connecting ideas is exciting. But what I thought  were new ideas may have been new and exciting to me, but not necessarily to other people. 

The editorial board meetings of Inqaba Ya Basebenzi were jokingly called the abattoir. Days would be spent pouring over sentences and even words. 

“The writer must be prepared to slaughter your favourite sentences,” said Petersen, and though it hurt like hell, he was usually right. You can get fixated on a few words or sentences and then find that they unwittingly impede the further flow of the article.

But my years studying great literature were far from wasted. As well as writing to convey meanings, a good writer also has a feeling for words. You may not realise it, but words have rhythm and a relationship to each other that adds another layer to their meaning. Reading Shakespeare, or any great writer, can teach you that.

Writing is like lovemaking. It should start with some foreplay. 

My advice is to always look for poetry, even in prose writing. Look for the poetry that flashes in politics and even injustice. Find the angle less seen and explored. When you point it out people will recognise it and realise it was there all the time. Recognition is an important part of reading.

But, beware, I am not giving you an excuse for flowery, flabby language.
Finally, when you think you have finished read what you have written. Place yourself in the shoes of the reader and ask yourself whether you would have read your article. If the answer’s no, then it’s back to the writing board. 

How not to write

Unfortunately these days there’s a lot of bad writing about. Many people produce bad writing for good reasons, so I bear them no grudge. 

The problem is that there isn’t enough discussion about what we are trying to achieve when we write, and very few of us have the privilege of going on creative writing courses.

English writer George Orwell fulminated against bad writing, particularly the bad writing produced by writers on the left. The withering critique he makes in his essay, Politics and the English Language, should be required reading for all social justice activists who pick up the pen.

But, as if to prove his point, Orwell shows us the best of writing from his own pen, as well as its power. A beautiful homily to the Common English toad can be turned into a powerful political statement:

“So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, Spring is still Spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.”

Orwell’s criticisms resonate with the feelings I had for some of the op-eds I used to receive for publication when I was the editor of Maverick Citizen, a section of the Daily Maverick that we had established as a kind of activists’ corner. Our journalists tried to tell stories about activists and activism, but we also created a platform to publish opinion pieces. 

Unfortunately I found that often the articles that came from political activists were dense and dry, jargonistic, didactic and hectoring and poorly structured. Sometimes their authors seem more concerned with their own political correctness, than with reaching out to and engaging with an unknown reader. 

As a result, one of my pieces of advice to writers is to carefully read back over what you have read, as if you were the reader. Detach yourself from your article, read it through someone else’s eyes and then ask whether you would have stayed with it from start to finish. If at first you didn’t succeed, get back on the computer and try again! And remember, even the most accomplished writers find writing hard. DM

Social justice writing that changed the world:

• The Rights of Man
• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
• The Communist Manifesto
• Wretched of the Earth
• Silent Spring