Quack This Way: David Foster Wallace & Bryan A. Garner Talk Language and Writing

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TL;DR

The full print transcript of what its publisher bills as the last long interview Wallace gave: a 67-minute conversation with the lawyer-lexicographer Bryan A. Garner in a downtown Los Angeles hotel on February 3, 2006, published in 2013 with a long memoir-introduction by Garner. Wallace talks entirely about writing, usage, and teaching — how to write well, why so much professional prose is turgid, what a usage dictionary is for, and why "puff words" like prior to deserve contempt — and in doing so lays out his own composition method (longhand, many drafts) more plainly than almost anywhere else. It is the conversational companion to his essay "Authority and American Usage," and its value is biographical and craft-documentary: it advances no theory about the novel's plot or its interpretive debates (Infinite Jest is name-checked but never discussed), so this note carries no Theories & evidence blocks. What it does carry, first-hand and quotable, is the snoot's ethic of attention and the process behind the prose.

Key claims

Wallace's own statements, in the interview (located by the five titled sections; this edition carries no fixed pagination):

What "writing well" means. In the broadest sense, to communicate clearly and interestingly in a way that feels alive to the reader — an "electricity" in the mediated relationship between writer and reader (section "The reader cannot read your mind").
The one rule above all others: the reader cannot read your mind. He frames it as the single most important thing for student writers to internalize, and the difference between expressive writing (a well-structured diary entry) and communicative writing (section "The reader cannot read your mind").
His composition process, stated flatly. The writing that matters to him is done in longhand: the first two or three drafts are always longhand, because writing by hand slows him down enough to pay attention. What he calls "caviar work" — his own important work — gets recopied and supplemented across many drafts; a first draft "usually approximates somebody in the midst of an epileptic seizure" and clarity emerges only by the second or third pass (section "The reader cannot read your mind", section "Never let the reader forget what the stakes are here").
Why bad professional prose is bad. Turgid academic/legal/scientific writing usually comes not from stupidity but from insecurity: in tight, insular communities, a piece of writing becomes more about "presenting one’s own qualifications for inclusion in the group" than about transmitting meaning (section "Crummy, turgid, verbose...").
The usage dictionary defended. He plugs Garner's usage dictionary to his students; calls a usage dictionary "kind of like a linguistic hard drive" and, for a novelist, "the trunk cable into the linguistic heart" of a discipline — how you make a character sound like a lawyer. He notes William Gaddis used Garner's Modern Legal Usage for A Frolic of His Own (section "The trunk cable into the linguistic heart").
Officialese is deliberate, not merely lazy. Bureaucratic language is "meant to empty the communication of a certain level of humanity. On purpose" — the speaker speaks not as a person but as the larynx of an institution. He extends this to advertising English ("Save up to 50% and more") and to political language, arguing there are perhaps a thousand professional dialects of English with complicated, half-conscious motives (section "You need to quack this way").
Puff words. Asked what is wrong with genteelisms like prior to and subsequent to, he rejects the charitable label and calls them puff words — utilize for use, individual for person — extra syllables that puff the speaker up; the pedantic kicker is that a prior to user should, by the Latin roots, logically say posterior to, which nobody would (section "You need to quack this way"). (See Notable passages; this exchange is the source of the widely circulated filmed clip.)
The two-sided cost of caring. Once you start paying attention, other people's puffery bugs you permanently — but your own writing gets more careful, and you become "an agent of light and goodness rather than the evil that’s all around us" (section "You need to quack this way").
The title. "You need to quack this way" is what he tells his elite students about the professional register they will have to master — said half in resignation, since he suspects that between advertising and national politics he has lost his own finger on what language now means to people (section "You need to quack this way").
Snoot as self-diagnosis. He calls himself "a snooty guy," admits SNOOT is an acronym, and frames the whole usage obsession as "a very elitist thing" — its adepts tend to be highly educated and high-SAT, so it gets "politically charged" (section "Crummy, turgid, verbose...", section "You need to quack this way").
The writers he most admires as models of "crackling-with-voltage" prose: William Gass, Don DeLillo, Cynthia Ozick, Louise Erdrich, and — "a weird one" — Cormac McCarthy, whose Blood Meridian he compares to "the King James Bible on acid" (section "The reader cannot read your mind").

Garner's introduction supplies the biographical frame (see Notable passages and Cross-references): the friendship began when Wallace phoned Garner's office in late 1999 while reviewing Garner's usage dictionary — the review that became "Authority and American Usage" — and the two first spoke on WBUR's The Connection in March 2001, first met at a Bloomington dinner in May 2002, and sat for this interview at their second meeting.

Theories & evidence

The source advances no theory about the novel's plot or any of its interpretive debates. Infinite Jest is named twice (in Garner's introduction and the jacket biography) but is never discussed; the conversation is entirely about writing, usage, and teaching. Its interpretive value is biographical and craft-documentary — Wallace's own account of his composition process and of the usage ethic that animates the novel's language-obsessed household — not a reading of the book. No THEORY blocks apply.

Themes

Language and usage — the SNOOT persona at conversational length; the same attention-as-ethic that "Authority and American Usage" argues at essay length. Wallace's account of the usage-obsessed household ("Mom's brainwashing," corrected spoken grammar at the dinner table) is the autobiographical ground beneath the Incandenza household's language material and the novel's Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts.
Communication and solipsism — "the reader cannot read your mind" is a craft maxim, but Wallace explicitly ties it to a moral one: writing as a remedy for "natural self-involvement and self-centeredness," the discipline of remembering there is another human being on the end of the line. This is the same solipsism-versus-connection preoccupation that drives the fiction.
Addiction — present only in Garner's memoir frame, not the interview: Garner's account of Wallace dipping snuff and spitting into a Coke can at the 2002 dinner, and Sally Foster Wallace's aside that "David has addictions," is first-hand biographical testimony bearing on the writer behind the novel's recovery material.

Cross-references

lawprose-garner-prior-to-1999 and video-zdf-2003-pretentious-language — the widely circulated two-minute "puff words" film clip carried under two competing labels; this book is the print transcript of the session that clip is cut from, and its closing exchange settles which session it is.
wbur-usage-wars-2001 — Wallace and Garner's first-ever conversation, the March 2001 radio hour; Garner's introduction here recounts it and confirms it was the first time the two spoke.
ctl-authority-usage — the essay this interview is the conversational sequel to; Wallace discusses its composition, its Harper's abridgement ("Tense Present"), and its capitalization troubles directly.
city-arts-lectures-2004-kipen — the nearest companion on usage and teaching from the same period.
video-lopate-1996 — the earlier filmed appearance of the classroom-usage persona.

Notable passages

Verbatim, attributed; located by the interview's titled sections (this edition carries no fixed pagination). DFW = David Foster Wallace, BAG = Bryan A. Garner.

On what writing well is (section "The reader cannot read your mind"):

writing well means to communicate clearly and interestingly and in a way that feels alive to the reader

The central maxim, said twice (section "The reader cannot read your mind"):

The bromide associated with this is that the reader cannot read your mind. The reader cannot read your mind.

His own process (section "The reader cannot read your mind"):

The writing writing that I do is longhand.

And on the first draft (section "Never let the reader forget what the stakes are here"):

My first draft usually approximates somebody in the midst of an epileptic seizure.

Writing as a cure for solipsism (section "The reader cannot read your mind"):

it’s a great remedy for my natural self-involvement and self-centeredness

The adult world — the college's lesson to him (section "The reader cannot read your mind"):

Welcome to the adult world. It doesn’t care about you. You want it to? Make it. Make it care.

The usage dictionary (section "The trunk cable into the linguistic heart"):

I consider it kind of like a linguistic hard drive.

It is the trunk cable into the linguistic heart of these disciplines.

a usage dictionary is one of the great bathroom books of all time

Officialese (section "You need to quack this way"):

officialese, as spoken by officials, is meant to empty the communication of a certain level of humanity. On purpose.

The puff-words exchange (section "You need to quack this way") — DFW's answer to Garner's closing question about genteelisms like prior to:

Genteelism seems to me to be an overly charitable way to characterize them. To me, they’re puff words, like using utilize instead of use.

Why say prior to rather than before? Everybody knows what before means, it’s fewer words.

you become an agent of light and goodness rather than the evil that’s all around us

The title phrase (section "You need to quack this way"), on the register his elite students must master:

You need to quack this way.

Writers he admires (section "The reader cannot read your mind"):

William Gass, Don DeLillo, Cynthia Ozick, Louise Erdrich when she’s firing on all cylinders.

On Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian:

like the King James Bible on acid

From Garner's introduction — Sally Foster Wallace's aside at the 2002 Bloomington dinner, on Wallace's snuff-dipping:

David has addictions.