LANGUAGE, WRITING, AND ENGLISH

Writing is, in some respects, more difficult than speaking. There is greater scope for misunderstanding when the writer is not there to explain, qualify, or correct what he has written. Faulty punctuation, grammar, or syntax can distort or even deform one's meaning in ways that speech, with its intonation and immediate context, often prevents.

But why should we attempt to write in English if we have another language at our disposal? Nathan Heller gives us an intriguing answer in The New Yorker. Writers able to choose their working languages—Joseph Conrad, Jorie Graham, Vladimir Nabokov—often end up writing in English because, as Conrad reportedly put it, “English is so plastic.”