How to Write English Prose

Instead of asking, is this true or not, it is often better to ask "What is this true of?" Hyaline seas are a great thing in literature, and a terrible idea in a public service leaflet about what to do if you hear the tsunami warning sirens.

I have read lots of student projects and dissertations where, although the student could explain themselves perfectly fine in spoken English, once they were in front of a keyboard and TeXworks they fell into a style of writing that was as tortured as the syntax for fancy LaTeX tables. Orwell's advice would have been very good advice for these students!

As to writing specifically for small children: J.R.R. Tolkien's childrens' story Roverandom contains a character called Psamathos Psammethicus, and Tolkien made quite clear in other writing of his that he doesn't think much of "writing down" even to children. A. A. Milne similarly has a scene in which Owl says "The atmospheric conditions have been very unfavourable lately." "The what?", Pooh asks. "It has been raining.", Owl explains. That's all at once an example of making fun of pretentious writing, giving an example of the kind of writer who should read some Orwell, and something that even very young children can handle just fine (along with words like Heffalump).

Ah, 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

The grandeur of early 17th century English prose really is something quite special. Charles Rosen gave a memorable account in his review of Burton:

>The first part of the seventeenth century was, for Samuel Johnson when he compiled his dictionary, the moment when the English language reached its ideal state. One would have thought that he would have preferred the clarity that was achieved a half century later in the prose of Dryden and Swift, but he was evidently conquered by the Baroque exuberance of the time of Burton. in the seventeenth century English prose came into its own, and reached the distinction previously held only by verse. With the exception of William Tyndale’s translation of the Old Testament (which seventy years later became the basis of the King James version), English prose in the sixteenth century has nothing to set by the side of the contemporary power, variety, and subtlety in France of Rabelais, Calvin, or Montaigne. English prose remained a somewhat awkward, provincial mode of expression. At the very end of the sixteenth century, however, prose suddenly took on a new vigor in the prose sections of the plays of Shakespeare, Middleton and Dekker, and in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity of 1594.

>Unfortunately, much of the magnificent eloquence of the early seventeenth century lacks a considerable readership today, even in academic circles, perhaps because it deals largely with religious matters in sermons, tracts, and prayers. The prose of Thomas Browne and John Donne still finds a few readers, and Lancelot Andrewes was taken up by T. S. Eliot. But Thomas Adams, so much admired by Coleridge and lamb that he was compared to Shakespeare, is almost forgotten, Richard Hooker is read only by specialists in the history of religion, Thomas Fuller recalled only for a few quaint details, and Jeremy Taylor, previously revered, is now neglected, as his suavity does not recommend itself to modern taste.

I like that the author David Bentley Hart doesn't shy away from strong opinions.

14. Orwell’s final injunction is “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” Since, however, following his rules would produce barbarous prose roughly half the time, he ought instead to have written, “Ignore these rules, except for the one about hackneyed metaphors and the bit about jargon.”

17. In fact, if you own a copy of The Elements of Style, just destroy the damned thing. It is a pestilential presence in your library.

23. If you were told in school that Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea is a specimen of good writing, disabuse yourself of this folly. It is in fact an excruciating specimen of bad schoolboy prose, written by a man who by that point had, alas, been too often drunk, too often concussed, and too often praised.

I 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.

In 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.

I find it amusing that they used the King James bible as one example. The beautiful writing was mostly lifted from the earlier Geneva translation. (I'm told that in turn most of that was lifted from William Tydale's translation, but he didn't complete a bible and I haven't had opportunity to study his version). The King James translators started with existing translations (mostly the Bishop's bible which I also haven't studied), and spent years debating how to and what to update.

"One really would have to have a miserly spirit not to love both."

Call me Scrooge.

Only 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.

That's like Lisp. Always use that single, specific symbol which names a function accessing the exact position in the nested list structure that you want to denote. Assume your reader has come with a full Lisp Machine manual and a copy of ANSI. A proper hacker never resents being introduced to a new identifier.

This 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.

Take his 19th rule to heart and read the above out aloud. You won't regret it.

> "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.

"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.