on-writing-well

238 ON WRITING WELL
will not only sound right but will seem to be the inevitable
choice. (E. B. White was a master of that balancing act.) Does
this mean that taste can be learned? Yes and no. Perfect taste,
like perfect pitch, is a gift from God. But a certain amount can
be acquired. The trick is to study writers who have it.
Never hesitate to imitate another writer. Imitation is part of
the creative process for anyone learning an art or a craft. Bach
and Picasso didn't spring full-blown as Bach and Picasso; they
needed models. This is especially true of writing. Find the best
writers in the fields that interest you and read their work aloud.
Get their voice and their taste into your ear—their attitude
toward language. Don't worry that by imitating them you'll lose
your own voice and your own identity. Soon enough you will
shed those skins and become who you are supposed to become.
By reading other writers you also plug yourself into a longer
tradition that enriches you. Sometimes you will tap a vein of eloquence
or racial memory that gives your writing a depth it could
never attain on its own. Let me illustrate what I mean by a
roundabout route.
Ordinarily I don't read the proclamations issued by state officials
to designate important days of the year as important days
of the year. But in 1976, when I was teaching at Yale, the governor
of Connecticut, Ella Grasso, had the pleasant idea of reissuing
the Thanksgiving Proclamation written 40 years earlier by
Governor Wilbur Cross, which she called "a masterpiece of eloquence."
I often wonder whether eloquence has vanished from
American life, or whether we even still consider it a goal worth
striving for. So I studied Governor Cross's words to see how they
had weathered the passage of time, that cruel judge of the
rhetoric of earlier generations. I was delighted to find that I
agreed with Governor Grasso. It was a piece written by a master:
Time out of mind at this turn of the seasons when the
hardy oak leaves rustle in the wind and the frost gives a tang