How to write English prose (2023)

Kept out of sight in this rogue essay is the classic question: Who's your audience?

If you're writing for yourself (and maybe a very small number of equally erudite readers) cut loose! Embrace "anfractuous density and heedless flamboyance." But if you're trying to change people's minds, or share knowledge widely, everything in this essay is defiantly at odds with what's necessary to get the rest of the world to pay attention.

Look, I am in no position to seriously critique the author’s writing. He clearly has linguistic chops. But what kind of bunk is this? We get it, the flowery, overdrawn language of yore is more expressive. But that kind of writing gets in its own way. Words seem to trump concept. But reading that sort of writing feels like being in a museum; sure that Victorian gown looks pretty but does anyone actually want to wear it?

And then, while arguing against monotony, this piece spends all its time repeating the same structure: a ten-dollar adjective followed by a ten-dollar noun. Ironically, the five passages cited as “good writing” mostly avoid the wordiness that the piece spends all its time arguing for.

> Do not use a thesaurus.

Oh now he’s just taking the piss.

> 8. If you must choose between elegance and perfect clarity, allow yourself a period of decorously agonized indecision, and then always choose elegance.

I believe that this may be true of prose (it depends on the style of the author and the nature of what's being written,) but that it's untrue of every other form of written communication, and acclaimed prose stylists are often very poor letter-writers for just this reason. In writing non-prose, I find that there are only two rules:

1. Be as clear as possible.

2. Be as brief as possible, but do not veer into the intentionally laconic or abbreviated.

I also am absolutely certain that attempting to attain maximal elegance is a trap that leads directly to purple prose, to works of literature that cannot naturally be read out loud, and to other unfortunate outcomes.

This guy hates Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, the famous "omit needless words" book. He's plugging for a baroque style that would be unreadable today.

We do have baroque styles today, but they're different from classical baroque literature. They're the postings that start with a bio and cover the author's hobbies before getting to the point, perhaps including an anecdote from the author's past. There are writers who can make that interesting, and you can read them in the New Yorker. But the serious magazines have editors. In blog postings, you're reading the slush pile.

His em-dash usage is not clearly defined and distinct from other punctuation marks, it introduces a fair amount of unintended ambiguity. It is easy enough to understand but a few times I had to stop and try and figure out if there was some nuance and intent behind it all.

>And—well, here,

That was especially egregious. And! but—well, here, I guess, if I had to guess—which I don't(but I will)—the purpose of his essay seems to be, that; unintended ambiguity is good and really quite nice from an aesthetic standpoint. David Bently Hart seems to be the anti-McCarthy and falls into all the same traps as McCarthy, just walks into them backwards and blindfolded through a parentheses and a digression instead of jumping in head first.

As a production editor at a uni press, who has to occasionally translate jargon into English, I find Orwell's essay to still be entirely relevant. The kinds of writing Orwell warned about still flourishes in the pablum emails we get from HR, the management reports with roundabout justifications for more layoffs, the political speeches that use a lot of words to say nothing. I just had a manuscript where the author was very fond of using trite filler phrases that added very little. It kind of made me miss the days of red pencils, a somewhat more satisfying way of cutting.

Strunk & White, I have to agree, is mostly not very useful.

We are fortunate that this individual's stylistic perspective is out there adding spice and variety to the world. I think, however, that most of us would be ill-advised to emulate it.

Orwell's maxim, "never use a long word when a short one will do", is something the best writers have always freely ignored. But it's a reliable guardrail for the writer of merely average skill, steering them toward something passable rather than vomit-inducing.

So much hate for this piece in the thread, I'm seeing almost no positive comments. I'm tempted to be unkind, but will exercise restraint; we are here, for the most part, technical writers, for whom parsimony is a professional virtue.

I loved it.

We're in an age where matrix multiplication can yawn out endless passages of trite, dull, sludge. The author, to my mind, makes a powerful and inspiring case for a future for human-written prose. The ability to effectively and creatively deploy a rich and complex vocabulary is the flex (in the parlance of our times) that distinguishes the craftsmen from the clankers.

English prose is one of those things I never quite got well; I grew up having read different versions of the Bible (like King James), old English versions of books, and found it to more "overtly wordy" (found it funny to imagine people talking like that about grocery shopping). I am curious how prose may change in 20-30 years given how cemented internet/social media talk becomes the norm, as well AI (and however education goes during that time). I agree with the author on some points but it depends on the material and subject matter where each matters.

For me there is only one rule of writing: Reader must enjoy reading what you wrote. They are ultimately the final judge - the very reason to write anything at all.

Anything else is just huffing your own farts for the kick of it. No matter how flowery the words are in your book or how intricate nuances of language. Such things can be outright counterproductive.

I think there are tonnes of errors and repetition at the top of this essay. 'Glorious' repeats across two of the opening sentences, for example.

The title, combined with this, has provoked me into live-editing it.

I've turned on "anyone with the link can comment", and am using "suggest".

If you're interested, feel free to jump in:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GxprXLxbOlgaAQ2-IfYyk4zq...

There are lots of similarities between writing/editing prose and coding.

I think these become much more apparent when using version history / suggestion tools in word processors, especially collaboratively.

For editing long-form prose, especially fiction, word processing software is a long way behind git. This has always surprised me.

I'm surprised to note -- if the discussion here is any evidence, then anger and literacy are inversely correlated.

This piece of writing moved me to my core, shook my whole being, enlivened my soul. It reminded me that I need to step away from Claude Code every once in a while and read the Classics.

> A good part of our sleepes is peeced out with visions,

Because of current slang, I read this as “peaced out” then realized it’s “pieced out”. Peace out

Of late I have been reading the writings of some of the United States' founders. I am struck by how sophisticated they are compared to modern writing. Consider this portion of a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to Isaac McPherson on the subject of what today we would call "intellectual property":

> It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices. [1]

This passage is typical for the letters of educated people of that era.

Plowing through the endless waves of vacuous emails that reach my inbox daily, I cannot help but wonder whether we have lost something valuable in the arts of thinking and of expressing our thoughts.

[1] https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12...

I hate to say it, but the reactions in this discussion indicate to me a lack of imagination and literary thinking ability in the Hacker News audience. That is my overall impression anyway, I don't understand the hate!

As someone with english as my second language this style is just too much to bother. Sure, I get that it is elegant and precise. But for me it results in stilted reading.

Hence I disagree with the "Never write for your audience" part of the essay.

Damn, so pretentious.

I agree with many things, in particular his sentiment about styles and "rules", but his demeanor is uninspiring.

He doesnt provide much clarity around good writing and just comes off as rationalizing his own taste.

You cant scorn popularity and accesibility, you gotta understand it and work with it to the extent that its important for what you want to achieve.

Art, history and social contexts fold in on themselves, if you're using a baroque style of writing then understand where it belongs and do something cool with it. Be conscious of it.

There is something distinctly different from people speaking and writing in English prose in the 1600's versus someone trying to do so today. The person from today is infinitely more likely to be putting on airs than the person who is not commanding attention as an anachronism in the past. To be sure, Royal Societies were all about impressing each other to a certain extent, but also, there were some clever fellows/ladies that hovered and flitted about them.

Writing styles like this actually gets in the way of reading a story in my opinion and, I also assume, is also some high-brow writers way of getting around for the need for an actual story anyway. Many of the books I had to read at school, and that "cultured" friends read are like this, but truthfully they put me off reading, and is the type of writing I (as an author) go out of my way to avoid unless the character implicitly demands it.

It's almost refreshing to see intense debate about something DBH wrote that isn't about theology.

i learned that no matter how good i am at writing prose, it doesnt matter if nobody reads it. so i write for AI agents instead, hoping that it'll get picked up by an agent and find propagation that way

> How to Write English Prose

> There are few if any passages in the works of Sir Thomas Browne that I do not find thoroughly delightful; but two afford me particularly intense pleasure.

> To my mind, each is in its own way a perfect, exquisitely faceted gem of English prose from an especially glorious literary epoch. The music of the one has haunted me for most of my life;

Oh come on. Sir Thomas Browne looks well worth reading but the author of this article is unreadably pretentious.

love writing on prose thanks for the share! Marcel Proust would be proud.

The flatulence of text in that prose smells of rotting roses from an apology gone bad.

normal person: "I like to yap."

Sir Baroquesly Yappington, Esq., an intellectual: writes a whole article about it

What a great endorsement for Strunk and White! I love a precise insight, and I'll cede that unfamiliar word may be necessary.

But a polemic that shit-talks the best authors of the 20th century is mid and unpersuasive.