Sarah L. Kaufman on the shared rhythm of dance, critical writing, and finding better verbs

Dance criticism and verbs

0:00Grammar Girl here. In April, I talked with Pulitzer Prize-winning dance critic Sarah L. Kaufman, author of Verb Your Enthusiasm, for the Grammarpalooza bonus segment, and we got into why your brain physically reacts to words like meander and zigzag, and how you can find the zing in your own writing. Our summer break is coming to an end, and this is our last reissue bonus before we head back to brand new interviews. If you have enjoyed these fun after-the-interview chats,

0:30you can get them every week by signing up for Grammarpalooza at patreon.com slash GrammarGirl. Enjoy!

0:44Greetings, Grammarpaloozians! We are here with Sarah L. Kaufman, author of Verb Your Enthusiasm. We just talked about this book in the main segment, a fabulous book that I absolutely loved about verbs, but Sarah is also a Pulitzer Prize-winning dance critic. She wrote Dance Criticism for the Washington Post, and she wrote another book called The Art of Grace on Moving Well Through Life, and we're going to talk about how all these things sort of come together and share common themes,

1:16and then we're going to get her book recommendations. So, Sarah L. Kaufman, thank you so much for being here again. Thank you, Mignon. Delighted. Yeah. So, how do you get from being a dance critic to, I mean, I guess I can see writing about moving well through life and then writing about verbs? Yeah, I guess I just have always been really a word nerd.

1:39Forever. I love those here. I know. I know. It's great. My favorite people. I started out as a copy editor in my journalism career, so I was writing headlines. I was, you know, fixing grammar, fixing syntax. So, actual language has just always fascinated me. And in addition to, you know, needing to know sort of dynamic and dramatic ways to write, because as a critic and covering, you know, a kind of a niche art form like

2:11dance, I wanted my writing to be very clear, but also to deliver some of the charge that I felt watching this art form. I felt like that was really a quality unique to my art form that I could share with people. I really wanted to bring the art form to life and do justice to the dancers as part of it, you know, in addition to evaluation and taking a stand on the performance itself. So, finding ways to

2:50do that and looking at other critics who I admired was how I developed an affinity for verbs. Yeah. I mean, describing dance is such an active thing that people are doing. I feel like I'm at a loss for words here, but a dance, you know, people are, they're constantly moving. It's about action. Exactly. So, that would be why you were focused on verbs, I would imagine. Yeah. It's all action. It is. Even when there's non-action, it's for a reason, you know,

3:20if someone stands still all of a sudden, or, you know, there's an episode, there's a scene where no one's moving. What is being conveyed? I mean, writing about an art form, taking on the mantle of a critic is a really great writing exercise that I advise everyone to try, whether you feel like you're an expert or an authority or not, just do it. Because it's really interesting. You can listen to jazz music or, you know, or hip hop or anything you want to, or even watch sports. I mean, watching

3:52a sporting event too. And just like generate some verbs, generate some ways to express these unseeable things, right? How someone gets from one point to another, you know, how they get from one side of stage to another or, I mean, of course, we see that. But really, how do you express it? How do you express it in just like that burst of creativity that the dancer herself is embodying, right? And in music, how do you

4:23capture the swoops and the plunges in vocals, you know? It's a wonderful exercise to take that on and play around with that. But yeah, that was the challenge for me in capturing dance or in writing about was really like, how do I capture it? And that reminded me of something else that I thought was really good about the book is the exercises. I'm not always a fan of exercises in, you know, trade books like

4:55this. They're not meant to be a textbook. Why are you giving me homework? Often they are somewhat uninspired. But in your book, I actually looked at the exercises and I thought, you know, this actually would be a really useful and fun thing to try, like most of the time when I was going through the exercises. So kudos on that too. I'm so glad. Yeah, they were fun to come up with. And some of them I have inflicted on my students as well, you know, with positive results, I will say. But yeah, just, you know, things like, I mean, I think one thing I advise is to do some of the writing work

5:32in advance, kind of in your downtime, that like coming up with movement driven metaphors. Whenever something jumps to mind, you know, about the sunlight, you know, drifting down on the trees, like a silk scarf or something, you know, anyone listening can come up with something more beautiful than that. But when these images come to you, jot them down. Because then if you're writing, whether it's nonfiction or fiction, and you're struggling for a metaphor, it's easier if you've

6:05already got some, you know, a list that can kind of prompt you as suggestions.

Embodied cognition and metaphors

6:11Yeah. And I thought it was really interesting in the book how you talked about how uncommon metaphors light up the brain more than the ones we're used to hearing. Yes, exactly. So if marketing materials say, right, our candidate kicked off his campaign. Well, we're so used to seeing kicked off, it doesn't, that doesn't really excite us. You know, we, it's just sort of part of the wallpaper, like a common phrase. But if you say something a little bit more uncommon, you know, the sun, you know, you're watching a sunrise. And you know, you say that,

6:46you know, the sun finally popped up like a piece of toast. It's a little bit more, ooh, a little bit more like a little bit of a zing, like a little tingle. And maybe the right, maybe the reader will remember that maybe that'll be one of those phrases that, that they remember that sticks with them. Right. When you're talking about the cord running along the wall, how that, what does that do in our brains? Yeah. So that was a fascinating study by one of the cognitive scientists who I interviewed for this

7:18book, that in the field of embodied cognition, in this field, which deals with intelligence, but also physical responses in, in terms of mental processes, and brain processes, there are scientists who believe that we embody actions, that our brain takes us through actions when we read about them. And in very subtle ways, it's not like you're actually going to feel a punch in your gut when you read,

7:52you know, that realization hit me like a punch in the gut. It's not like you're actually going to feel a punch. But in subtle ways, it triggers a little bit of a response, a little and that brings up emotion. So this woman has done studies where, like the road meanders, your brain understands that as a slow movement. And so your body reacts more, you read it more slowly, which is an interesting kind of nugget to

8:26take in as a writer, is this a moment when I want to use a verb that will slow the action down, meander, or stumble, or wander? Or is there a moment when I want to speed things up and make the reader kind of, you know, hustle a little bit to keep up like, you know, zigzag and hopscotch? Or in inanimate objects, even one like a core, like a road meandering, okay, that's an inanimate object. But we are used to,

9:01it is associated with movement, right? Cars travel on it. So a cord running along a wall, that's an inanimate object that has no connection to movement at all. But to say it runs along the wall, just paints a more vivid picture in our mind and makes that image just stick in our mind a little bit more. And we read it as a faster, smoother process.

9:35And when we are allowing adverbs into our writing, it's interesting when they are juxtaposed in ways that are also unfamiliar. Like one example that I remember is brutally sweating. Yes, yes. That comes from Zadie Smith's novel, Swing Time. And of course, she's such a wonderful writer. And she uses language so well. And that was an example, you know, we a lot of us, it's very easy to overuse adverbs, they kind of come foremost to mind when we're speaking, they color the way we

10:11talk, they color our expressions. But the most powerful way to use an adverb is when, as you say, when you juxtapose it with, we juxtapose an unusual adverb with an action, with a verb. So she talked about soldiers brutally sweating, you know, sweating just this ordinary physiological response, but brutally was just such a wonderful way to elicit the feeling of them, of these soldiers

10:45standing in the hot sun, trapped inside their wool uniforms, and just the violence that that does on their bodies and their spirits. In the same way that in Madame Bovary, there's an example where Gustave Laber writes about Emma Bovary brutally unlacing her corset, you know, when she's with one of her many lovers. And that's another like, you don't expect brutally with unlacing, but it just

11:16gets at kind of the violence, the quickness, the dynamics, the energy, that that forceful energy going into the action. Yeah. And this is why I'm so excited to get your book recommendations, because the examples in your book are fabulous. They're all from these brilliant passages from, from novels and, and stories. You must've had a hard time choosing just three, but I'm very eager to get your book recommendations, Sarah.

Book recommendations

11:44Well, I am so happy to recommend these books. So as a big believer in arts journalism, as I am, I picked a book, a compilation of reviews by a, this is by a rock critic, and it is actually called The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic by Jessica Hopper. Nice. And she, yes. And I was asked recently to, to write about critics who had a great sense of style,

12:17who wrote with a lot of power and dynamics. And she was part of that list. Jessica Hopper has written for the Chicago Reader, for Pitchfork, for the Village Voice. And not only does she deliver cogent analysis of songs and music and, and, and artists themselves, but she just captures these ephemeral things, you know, the way the voice sounds, the way it can just, you know, run up and, and flutter

12:52and dive and plunge. And it's a very dynamic experience to, to read her work. Very exciting. Now I have two novels and they kind of go on the other spectrum of verb use into the more subtle kind of interior charge that verbs can deliver. And the first one is called The Gathering by Anne Enright. She's an Irish novelist. And this book is about a large Irish family that gathers for the wake of a

13:29son. And it's told from the perspective of his closest sister. And she is mourning not only her brother, but also a lot of other fractures in her life that seem to stem from the same wounding incident that her brother was traumatized by and that both of them experienced when they were young. And so it's just incredibly poignant. It's also very witty. She's a beautiful writer.

14:00In one of the verb phrases that just jumps out at me is how someone, she had just learned the news about her brother's death and someone called her and was a little snippy on the phone when she talked about it and said, well, she couldn't really do this thing that he wanted her to do right away. Now she says, well, he was clearly disappointed because my brother had just died all over his Thursday. So, you know, there's like this dark humor. And I love that phrase, you know,

14:31this person just died all over my, you know, all over his Thursday. But it's like a very raw and fresh way of writing. She's just an exquisite writer. And I marveled at how she delved into this subtle territory. And then the third book is just one of my absolute favorites. I don't have it to hand, but it is Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. He actually began his creative life as a musician and a songwriter to kind of circle back to Jessica Hopper. But this book is about a group of kids in a

15:06British boarding school, and it follows them into young adulthood. But the circumstances, there's this twist and the circumstances are revealed very, very gradually. And it becomes, at least for me, it just delivered just almost unbearable feelings of like empathy and emotion, you know, protectiveness, affection. I really, it just flooded me with feelings. And that has never let me go. I mean,

15:37literally, I have, this book has affected me from the last word until today. I think it's extraordinary. And not a surprise given, given the writer. Yeah, and I've listened, I listened to the audio book of that book and enjoyed it very much as well. Well, Sarah, thank you so much for those recommendations. And you know, those are great gifts. You should read Sarah's book first, Verb Your Enthusiasm, and then dive into those others that she recommended. Sarah, where can people find you?

16:10My website is sarahlkoffman.com. Wonderful. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Mignon.