"One really would have to have a miserly spirit not to love both."
Call me Scrooge.
How to Write English Prose
11–20 of 30 posts
Re: How to Write English Prose
#12Only if you want to write prose for its own sake. Otherwise use language as is it is intended, to convey meaning. The best writing is invisible to the reader.
I used to think this way about prose too, but a book called "First You Write a Sentence" by Moran changed my assumption on this one. As Moran points out, the "sound" of writing conveys meaning in itself. A little flourish, so long as it's not distracting, can improve the clarity of a sentence and make it more pleasant to read.
Re: How to Write English Prose
#13"and the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives." It sounds like the man doesn't like naps. I am wary of such.
I certainly don't like the fact that I'm going to blow a third of my life unconscious. I only get one of these and to know that a third of it is off the table from day one does sting a little.
Re: How to Write English Prose
#14This is something that needs to be read when fully awake and, probably, with a dictionary nearby! I admit that I gave up with the opening spiel quite quickly -- I'll have another go later -- and skipped to "The Rules"; many of which I don't necessarily agree with, but perhaps I'm too mired in technical writing. (I have a feeling they'd give the Plain English Campaign people a heart attack!) There are some gems in there, though. This superluminary rant made my morning, for example:
18. All these vapidly doctrinaire injunctions—urging you to write
only plain declarative sentences stripped of modifiers and composed
solely of words familiar to the average ten-year-old and demanding
that you always prefer charcoal-gray to sumptuous purple—are
expressions of everything spiritually deadening about late modernity
and its banausic values. They reflect an epoch in which the
mysterious, the evocative, and the beautifully elliptical have been
systematically suppressed and nearly extinguished in the name of the
efficient, the practical, the mechanical, and the starkly
unambiguous—in short, in the name of everything that makes existence
uninviting and life boring. They are reflections of an age of
bloodless capitalist economism, the reign of brutally common sense,
the barbarian triumph of function over form, a spare, Spartan civic
architecture of featureless glass and steel and plastic, a
consumerist society that lives on the ceaseless production and
disposal of intrinsically graceless conveniences. Learn to detest
all of these things and you will be a better writer for having done
so.
Re: How to Write English Prose
#15Ah, David Bentley Hart.
To propose a list of rules for writers is probably a very presumptuous thing to do. The only authority it can possibly have is one’s own example, and so offering it to the world is something of a gamble. One has to assume that one’s own writing is impressive enough to most readers to provide one with the necessary credentials for the task. If one is wrong on this score, issuing those rules will invite only ridicule. I mean, for goodness’ sake, Steven Pinker (of all people) published a book on style. How can anyone take that seriously?
Few writers do such a fine of job of puffing themselves up while at the same time cutting others down.
But, he is a gifted thinker and, at times, pleasant writer. For example: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/08/a-perfect-game
Re: How to Write English Prose
#16Only if you want to write prose for its own sake. Otherwise use language as is it is intended, to convey meaning. The best writing is invisible to the reader.
"Best."
The medium is the message.
Re: How to Write English Prose
#17> "There are few if any passages in the works of Sir Thomas Browne that I do not find thoroughly delightful"
The opening sentence is a perfect example of how to write English... if you want it to lack clarity. Double negatives like this leave the reader having to spend time working out the positive meaning of the sentence.
Re: How to Write English Prose
#18I can recommend Patrick Leigh Fermor as a travel writer. For those who don't know of him, he was the leader of the partisan group wo abducted the German General Kripke in Crete in 1943, filmed as I'll Meet by Moonlight. His books of his pre-war adventures hiking across Europe on foot are a joy to read.
it's "ill met by moonlight" (from "a midsummer night's dream" - oberon to titania, i think)
Re: How to Write English Prose
#19In addition to the pleasure of reading these lovely prose passages, I learnt a new word: cunctation. Seems it’s a near synonym to procrastination, defined as the act of delaying or putting off doing something.
"Cunctator" or "the delayer" was of course, the sobriquet given to the famous dictator and consul Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, whose eponymous strategy helped to fend off Hannibal from Rome.
Re: How to Write English Prose
#20> "There are few if any passages in the works of Sir Thomas Browne that I do not find thoroughly delightful" The opening sentence is a perfect example of how to write English... if you want it to lack clarity. Double negatives like this leave the reader having to spend time working out the positive meaning of the sentence.
One seeks to find a clear and beautiful double-negative-free rendition of the same sentence, written by thy own fair hand. Alas, one seeks in vain, as the critic fails this test of courage.