Quack This Way

Selected passages from an interview between David Foster Wallace and usage authority Bryan A. Garner, conducted in 2006. Wallace dissects the mechanics of argumentative writing — how openers must "fail to repel," how transitions are the real craft of nonfiction, and why the writer must never let the reader forget what's at stake. He treats Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" as a model of organic argumentation and warns against writing that mistakes complexity for intelligence.