Colette
We must all learn to write. Writing is our craft and our main means of communicating our ideas. Good writing can be judged by whether or not it is good communication. For many years I have advocated a particular technique to students. As they have never followed my advice, perhaps I am not communicating well enough. But let us not be deterred. If, gentle listener, you want to write well, consult the experts. Learn from them. This means that you must read widely and analytically.
In the inter-war period there were writers who understood their craft so well that they practised it with little or no pretension. When I write in Italian, I have to remind myself that a good literary model is as complex as it is elegant. Not merely balance, but poise must be achieved. The armoury includes present- and past-tense subjunctives, reflexives, engineering the position of clauses and sub-clauses vis-a-vis the stem, choosing longer, more abstruse words rather than shorter, simpler ones, always with the proviso that they convey elegance. By contrast, the simpler we make English, the better it is. There is an amusing reflection by J.B. Priestley that I was served up with at school many years ago. Its title is "My first article". He concludes, "I signed it pretentiously 'J. Boynton Priestley'" The essay recounts his mixture of pride and youthful ostentation at seeing his first, very modest effort published with all its vain attempts to appear cultured, literary and authoritative. How quickly he abandoned the smokescreen! In a later essay, "Making writing simple" he reflects: "Writing that was hard to understand was like a password to their secret society." 'They' in this case was a young group of writers who believed that readers should have to work hard, but without any valid reason why.
Consider this exchange between the authors of Lord of the Flies and For Whom the Bell Tolls. "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." (William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway). Hemingway retorts, "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?" Now who would you side with?
Another protagonist from that period was Eric Arthur Blair, nom de plume George Orwell. Besides the question of his name, he was not what he seemed in other matters as well. A visionary and a revolutionary in some ways, he lived a double life, Eton educated, as both an exponent and a critic of the British Establishment. Despite his identity crisis, he wrote some interesting tirades against the misuse of the English language, especially on how it had been hijacked by fascists (something that is happening again). To me, his prose always seems to mask a substratum of hysteria. Perhaps that is what we need nowadays in order to defend language, given that satire falls like water off a duck's back among the swelling masses of people who are unable to recognise irony, the shouting, cursing classes. To appreciate irony to the full you must have experienced the Baroque (as a culture, not an art form - see my book Confronting Catastrophe; I was much influenced by José Antonio Maravell, a Spanish historian of the Baroque).
On to other things. I learned the triple cadence from Montague Rhodes James, who was sometime Master of King's College Cambridge. James was a palaeographer and a great admirer of the work of Dickens. He never said he could improve on it, but linguistically he did, at least in my humble opinion. James's short stories are so good that I almost know them by heart. I read every one of them at least three times a year. In his non-fiction writing, by deploying the triple cadence, he could achieve balance, economy and precision (there you are, just like that!). The triple cadence is something that can convey extreme elegance or alternatively be a deadly weapon, depending on how one wants to use it. In language, it is power! I have used it to shoot down both published and aspiring authors.
Like Dickens, M.R. James could break the rules. Both of them were not scientists and so were liberated from many of the constraints of objectivity. Of course, we can all break the rules, but how many of us can do so legitimately? To break the rules and not be convicted for it, one has to understand them - fully and intimately (that, by the way, is the double cadence, a weapon of smaller calibre). One has to know which rules one is breaking and exactly how one is doing so. It becomes a game, but one played according to very strict rules (paradoxically).
Breaking the rules - legitimately - adds colour to prose. Arthur Conan Doyle, like Charles Dickens, did it all the time. Anthony Trollope, like John Galsworthy, never did it. M.R. James was the past-master of it, and nobody better demonstrated how it evokes an atmosphere or an emotion. But he was a palaeographer and understood language (English, French, Latin, Greek) down to the finest of its finer points. Claudio Vita Finzi was one of my mentors. He was Professor of Earth Sciences at UCL. His book The Mediterranean Valleys is worth reading for the spare elegance of the prose. He once confessed to me that he had developed an inadvertent fixation with the phrase "to throw light upon". He realised this when he found that he was stalking through his prose throwing light left, right and centre!
With all respect to Jane Austen and Regency fiction in general, the Victorian novel was the pinnacle of achievement. Whenever I pass down Via de' Tornabuoni in Florence, which is quite often, I cast my eyes up to the memorial plaque to George Eliot, whose real name was May Anne Evans. That is where she wrote her great fictional account, entitled Romola, of 1492 and the demise of Savonarola. Her masterpiece was Middlemarch. Consider this extract from a concluding chapter:-
"It had taken long for her to come to that question, and there was light piercing into the room. She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving—perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining."
For me, this paragraph is the culmination of the book. It is masterly in its deployment of language, cadence, balance and idiom; speaking of which, I read that there has recently been an initiative to translate the classic authors from English into American. This involves substituting words with modern slang equivalents and selling the result as an e-book for 99 cents: the Walmart 'pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap' versions of Emily Bronte and Jane Austen. Bah!
Here is half a poem:-
1953:
First came cold wind, followed by lashing rain.
Scudding scraps of cloud disappeared into
Grey masses, which during the night went black:
Colours dense enough to strangle the eye,
To throttle hope.
Then up welled the water, trickling, gurgling.
Menacingly it lapped at the threshold
And it came in, kicked the door down, entered,
Slid along the corridor, pushed its way
Into the rooms.
No tap-water this; freezing and sullen,
Mud-laden, stinking of estuary,
It rose like a canker swelling with pus,
It sucked the life out of the house
And left it dead.
Dawn spread its pewter light over the scene,
Obscured it with a heavy cloak of mist.
Silently, the turgid pool of water
Intersected the street, foreshortened it,
Cut the houses in half.
Where was rescue, where was blessed relief?
Firemen in their oilskins wielding axes,
With Rule Britannia helmets, grim faces,
Dragging hoses, gamely struggling in mud,
Policemen in capes.
No boats, no hoses, no rescuers came.
The silent pond in the street lay waiting.
Blackly, a dead dog floated in the mire,
Time stood still, stunned by the onslaught, beaten
Into abeyance.
A monochrome story of post-War life
Was this, a grainy newsreel disaster.
Perhaps all floods are cast in black and white,
For the greens and blues of tranquil waters
Fade away in adversity.
What one struggles with in this is the transformation of imagery into words: how to convey insight by word-painting. It has to be done with strict economy of language. In fact this piece is written in a very ordinary five-beat Iambic pentameter (beloved of Dante and Chaucer), with a coda at the end of every quatrain. The coda, or tail, is designed to lessen the cantilena, to stop each verse from being tritely sing-song. The absence of rhyme does that as well. The whole puts the steel clamp of discipline upon thoughts in order to render their expression as imagery.
When the brother of Niels Bohr presented his thesis at the University of Copenhagen, an examiner said, "Sir, there is much in your thesis that is new, and much that is original. Unfortunately that which is new is not original, and that which is original is not new." Dr Samuel Johnson once demolished one of his critics with a similar epithet. It is a useful one to deploy with the typical run-of-the-mill science that one is forced to read today, but what about applying it as a test of one's own work?
Sometimes, reading prose is like going for a stroll in a field of barbed wire and concrete blocks. It is neither edifying nor satisfying. Perhaps the perpetrators should be locked up in a room for half an hour a day and forced to recite over and over again: "The cat sat on the mat". The - definite article; cat - subject and common noun; sat - verb; on - preposition; the - definite article; mat - object and common noun; no clauses or sub-clauses. All too often, unravelling syntax is like playing cat's cradle with a live snake. Remember: clarity of writing reflects clarity of thinking. Evidently, dear scholar, your mind is lost in a fog.
Language has a definite, formal structure. You cannot imitate it, you have to practise it. You cannot write what language "sort of sounds like". You must write according to the canons of proper practice. Language is communication. You need to stop miscommunicating. Precision, not blather, tells your story.
Too many in the academic world have no idea about how to improve their writing, or even why it is necessary to do so. To me it seems blindingly obvious. For a start, it is time to stop inflicting pain. The pain is not in the mistakes, which are numerous enough to be legion, it is in the breathtaking approximation. I find approximation insulting. It makes me feel worthless.
Read some Hemingway. He wrote in short sentences, full stop. This was good, full stop. It did no harm, full stop. His writing is respected and admired, full stop. It could be a model for yours, full stop. Hemingway, the mortal enemy of the clause (now tell me what rule I have just broken).
Learn the rules: for example, subject-verb accordance. Discover what a clause is and how to delimit it. Find out why you should not write sentences that are only clauses. Bad writing is a form of laziness. Never forget that.
If you want to read writing as it should be, try Colette's Paradis terrestre (particularly the part entitled Mes apprentissages). Even in translation (as Earthly Paradise), it sparkles with a rare clarity and beauty. The work is a fine illustration of the principle that clarity of thought is reflected in clarity of writing. It is the perfect marriage. (Sadly, Colette's unions were anything but.) Now there is someone who truly served her apprenticeship - and as a result became a national treasure. (Perhaps we should say the same of the translator). Reading Colette's intimate reflections on her own life shines a light on the way forward. It is not merely edification, it is a toolkit: a toolkit for you, gentle listener.
In the inter-war period there were writers who understood their craft so well that they practised it with little or no pretension. When I write in Italian, I have to remind myself that a good literary model is as complex as it is elegant. Not merely balance, but poise must be achieved. The armoury includes present- and past-tense subjunctives, reflexives, engineering the position of clauses and sub-clauses vis-a-vis the stem, choosing longer, more abstruse words rather than shorter, simpler ones, always with the proviso that they convey elegance. By contrast, the simpler we make English, the better it is. There is an amusing reflection by J.B. Priestley that I was served up with at school many years ago. Its title is "My first article". He concludes, "I signed it pretentiously 'J. Boynton Priestley'" The essay recounts his mixture of pride and youthful ostentation at seeing his first, very modest effort published with all its vain attempts to appear cultured, literary and authoritative. How quickly he abandoned the smokescreen! In a later essay, "Making writing simple" he reflects: "Writing that was hard to understand was like a password to their secret society." 'They' in this case was a young group of writers who believed that readers should have to work hard, but without any valid reason why.
Consider this exchange between the authors of Lord of the Flies and For Whom the Bell Tolls. "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." (William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway). Hemingway retorts, "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?" Now who would you side with?
Another protagonist from that period was Eric Arthur Blair, nom de plume George Orwell. Besides the question of his name, he was not what he seemed in other matters as well. A visionary and a revolutionary in some ways, he lived a double life, Eton educated, as both an exponent and a critic of the British Establishment. Despite his identity crisis, he wrote some interesting tirades against the misuse of the English language, especially on how it had been hijacked by fascists (something that is happening again). To me, his prose always seems to mask a substratum of hysteria. Perhaps that is what we need nowadays in order to defend language, given that satire falls like water off a duck's back among the swelling masses of people who are unable to recognise irony, the shouting, cursing classes. To appreciate irony to the full you must have experienced the Baroque (as a culture, not an art form - see my book Confronting Catastrophe; I was much influenced by José Antonio Maravell, a Spanish historian of the Baroque).
On to other things. I learned the triple cadence from Montague Rhodes James, who was sometime Master of King's College Cambridge. James was a palaeographer and a great admirer of the work of Dickens. He never said he could improve on it, but linguistically he did, at least in my humble opinion. James's short stories are so good that I almost know them by heart. I read every one of them at least three times a year. In his non-fiction writing, by deploying the triple cadence, he could achieve balance, economy and precision (there you are, just like that!). The triple cadence is something that can convey extreme elegance or alternatively be a deadly weapon, depending on how one wants to use it. In language, it is power! I have used it to shoot down both published and aspiring authors.
Like Dickens, M.R. James could break the rules. Both of them were not scientists and so were liberated from many of the constraints of objectivity. Of course, we can all break the rules, but how many of us can do so legitimately? To break the rules and not be convicted for it, one has to understand them - fully and intimately (that, by the way, is the double cadence, a weapon of smaller calibre). One has to know which rules one is breaking and exactly how one is doing so. It becomes a game, but one played according to very strict rules (paradoxically).
Breaking the rules - legitimately - adds colour to prose. Arthur Conan Doyle, like Charles Dickens, did it all the time. Anthony Trollope, like John Galsworthy, never did it. M.R. James was the past-master of it, and nobody better demonstrated how it evokes an atmosphere or an emotion. But he was a palaeographer and understood language (English, French, Latin, Greek) down to the finest of its finer points. Claudio Vita Finzi was one of my mentors. He was Professor of Earth Sciences at UCL. His book The Mediterranean Valleys is worth reading for the spare elegance of the prose. He once confessed to me that he had developed an inadvertent fixation with the phrase "to throw light upon". He realised this when he found that he was stalking through his prose throwing light left, right and centre!
With all respect to Jane Austen and Regency fiction in general, the Victorian novel was the pinnacle of achievement. Whenever I pass down Via de' Tornabuoni in Florence, which is quite often, I cast my eyes up to the memorial plaque to George Eliot, whose real name was May Anne Evans. That is where she wrote her great fictional account, entitled Romola, of 1492 and the demise of Savonarola. Her masterpiece was Middlemarch. Consider this extract from a concluding chapter:-
"It had taken long for her to come to that question, and there was light piercing into the room. She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving—perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining."
For me, this paragraph is the culmination of the book. It is masterly in its deployment of language, cadence, balance and idiom; speaking of which, I read that there has recently been an initiative to translate the classic authors from English into American. This involves substituting words with modern slang equivalents and selling the result as an e-book for 99 cents: the Walmart 'pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap' versions of Emily Bronte and Jane Austen. Bah!
Here is half a poem:-
1953:
First came cold wind, followed by lashing rain.
Scudding scraps of cloud disappeared into
Grey masses, which during the night went black:
Colours dense enough to strangle the eye,
To throttle hope.
Then up welled the water, trickling, gurgling.
Menacingly it lapped at the threshold
And it came in, kicked the door down, entered,
Slid along the corridor, pushed its way
Into the rooms.
No tap-water this; freezing and sullen,
Mud-laden, stinking of estuary,
It rose like a canker swelling with pus,
It sucked the life out of the house
And left it dead.
Dawn spread its pewter light over the scene,
Obscured it with a heavy cloak of mist.
Silently, the turgid pool of water
Intersected the street, foreshortened it,
Cut the houses in half.
Where was rescue, where was blessed relief?
Firemen in their oilskins wielding axes,
With Rule Britannia helmets, grim faces,
Dragging hoses, gamely struggling in mud,
Policemen in capes.
No boats, no hoses, no rescuers came.
The silent pond in the street lay waiting.
Blackly, a dead dog floated in the mire,
Time stood still, stunned by the onslaught, beaten
Into abeyance.
A monochrome story of post-War life
Was this, a grainy newsreel disaster.
Perhaps all floods are cast in black and white,
For the greens and blues of tranquil waters
Fade away in adversity.
What one struggles with in this is the transformation of imagery into words: how to convey insight by word-painting. It has to be done with strict economy of language. In fact this piece is written in a very ordinary five-beat Iambic pentameter (beloved of Dante and Chaucer), with a coda at the end of every quatrain. The coda, or tail, is designed to lessen the cantilena, to stop each verse from being tritely sing-song. The absence of rhyme does that as well. The whole puts the steel clamp of discipline upon thoughts in order to render their expression as imagery.
When the brother of Niels Bohr presented his thesis at the University of Copenhagen, an examiner said, "Sir, there is much in your thesis that is new, and much that is original. Unfortunately that which is new is not original, and that which is original is not new." Dr Samuel Johnson once demolished one of his critics with a similar epithet. It is a useful one to deploy with the typical run-of-the-mill science that one is forced to read today, but what about applying it as a test of one's own work?
Sometimes, reading prose is like going for a stroll in a field of barbed wire and concrete blocks. It is neither edifying nor satisfying. Perhaps the perpetrators should be locked up in a room for half an hour a day and forced to recite over and over again: "The cat sat on the mat". The - definite article; cat - subject and common noun; sat - verb; on - preposition; the - definite article; mat - object and common noun; no clauses or sub-clauses. All too often, unravelling syntax is like playing cat's cradle with a live snake. Remember: clarity of writing reflects clarity of thinking. Evidently, dear scholar, your mind is lost in a fog.
Language has a definite, formal structure. You cannot imitate it, you have to practise it. You cannot write what language "sort of sounds like". You must write according to the canons of proper practice. Language is communication. You need to stop miscommunicating. Precision, not blather, tells your story.
Too many in the academic world have no idea about how to improve their writing, or even why it is necessary to do so. To me it seems blindingly obvious. For a start, it is time to stop inflicting pain. The pain is not in the mistakes, which are numerous enough to be legion, it is in the breathtaking approximation. I find approximation insulting. It makes me feel worthless.
Read some Hemingway. He wrote in short sentences, full stop. This was good, full stop. It did no harm, full stop. His writing is respected and admired, full stop. It could be a model for yours, full stop. Hemingway, the mortal enemy of the clause (now tell me what rule I have just broken).
Learn the rules: for example, subject-verb accordance. Discover what a clause is and how to delimit it. Find out why you should not write sentences that are only clauses. Bad writing is a form of laziness. Never forget that.
If you want to read writing as it should be, try Colette's Paradis terrestre (particularly the part entitled Mes apprentissages). Even in translation (as Earthly Paradise), it sparkles with a rare clarity and beauty. The work is a fine illustration of the principle that clarity of thought is reflected in clarity of writing. It is the perfect marriage. (Sadly, Colette's unions were anything but.) Now there is someone who truly served her apprenticeship - and as a result became a national treasure. (Perhaps we should say the same of the translator). Reading Colette's intimate reflections on her own life shines a light on the way forward. It is not merely edification, it is a toolkit: a toolkit for you, gentle listener.
Appendix: a list of common errors in scientific writing in English
- errors of common English usage
- failure to observe standard conventions
- wrong choice of words
- misuse of idiom
- absence of articles where they are required
- lack of prepositions where they are needed
- lack of synonyms, resulting in 'wooden' prose
- awkward, unbalanced and contorted syntax
- indiscriminate use of slang or excessively colloquial language
- clash or misuse of tenses
- failure to use the possessive case when it is needed, or misuse of it
- misuse of capitalisation (common and proper nouns)
- clash of singular and plural in the same sentence (subject-verb agreement)
- failure to recognise collective nouns
- use of past progressive where the simple past tense is needed: 'was going' instead of 'went'
- lop-sided clauses without initial or final comma to delimit them
- missing hyphens in compound adjectives
- misuse of the present participle (e.g. 'going')
- wrong wording to introduce lists
- synthetic words with no real meaning
- starting sentences with figures
- misuse of contractions (an overly colloquial tone)
- starting a sentence with a conjunction
- a sentence without a verb
- missing function words (e.g. 'that')
- failure to recognise the plural form in Latin derivatives
- inadvertent legalese - ‘insurance policy’ prose
- writing a clause as if it were a sentence.
