I’m glad, however, that I hadn’t released it on a unsuspecting audience
- since I’ve just discovered a quite brilliant extended essay on ”Economical
Writing” written in 1983 by one Donald McCloskey who underwent an identity
change a couple of decades later and is now the redoubtable Professor Deirdre
McCloskey.
I recommend the
piece partly because it is so beautifully written and structured – a veritable
exemplar of the advice it offers - with just one exception. Some of the
references are dated or too American. Harry G Johnson, for example, may have
strutted the globe like a Colossus in the 70s and 80s but, very sadly, only older
economists will now recognise the name.
But the piece
should also be read since it is one of the few which superbly captures the travails
of writing
That essay, in
turn, alerted me to several important texts on writing style about which I was
totally ignorant – not least one by the glorious English writer Robert Graves The
Reader over your Shoulder which Graves and Alan Hodge actually
published in the war years of 1944. The inimitable Paris
Review had this to say about the book -
Modestly
subtitled “A Handbook for Writers of English Prose,” the book was never merely
that. The Reader Over Your Shoulder has been called the authors’
contribution to the war effort. It would be too much to say that they thought
good English could save the world. But to Graves and Hodge, clear and logical
prose was not a mere nicety: “The writing of good English is … a moral matter,
as the Romans held that the writing of good Latin was.”
The title sums
up their theme, stated early in the book: “We suggest that whenever anyone sits
down to write he should imagine a crowd of his prospective readers (rather than
a grammarian in cap and gown) looking over his shoulder.” By imagining readers’
questions, the authors say, “the writer will discover certain tests of
intelligibility.” These tests, outlined in part 1, consist of forty-one
principles for writing, twenty-five devoted to clarity and sixteen to grace of
expression. Each principle is carefully defined, then illustrated by snippets
of writing that fail the test.
In part 2,
Graves and Hodge reverse this process. They analyze more than fifty short
passages by eminent contemporary writers, applying line by line the principles
laid out in part 1. But they don’t just point out shortcomings. They actually
rewrite the passages. This took a lot of nerve, considering that they were
correcting people like T. S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, Ernest Hemingway,
John Maynard Keynes, Cecil Day-Lewis, Ezra Pound, Stephen Spender, H. G. Wells,
and George Bernard Shaw. (One of their friends suggested as a subtitle “A Short
Cut to Unpopularity.”)
Their purpose
was not to sneer at the mighty, but to show that occasionally even the best
writers are careless or inattentive. In choosing their samples, the authors
explain, they simply took up a book or article by each writer, then “read on at
our usual speed until we found ourselves bogged in a difficult passage. This
passage became the subject of our analysis.”
Each
sample—whether from a prime minister or a popular novelist—is subjected to the
same forty-one principles. There should be no doubt in the reader’s mind as to
who, what, when, where, how much, how long, and so on. No word or phrase should
be ambiguous or out of place. Sentences should be linked logically and
intelligibly. Ideas should follow one another in a natural order. Metaphors
should be handled with care. Nothing unnecessary should be included, nothing
necessary omitted.
Another delight
unleashed on me by McCloskey’s essay was Unended
Quest – an intellectual autobiography; Karl Popper (1974 – updated 1992)
In the meantime
I had resumed my reading here in Ploiesti of David Runciman’s little bombshell
- How
Democracy Ends (2018) whose references to other relevant texts reminds me a bit of Matt Flinders’ In
Defence of Politics. Runciman's book has been nicely reviewed here - and here
-
One of my new subscriptions
had an interesting take on the new
US radical mags
If the intellectual at the think tank was the assistant to the legislator, here she has become the willing tool of the activist......Last year, in a report on “new public intellectuals,” the Chronicle of Higher Education referred to The Point as being the “least left-wing” of the intellectual magazines that had emerged in the first two decades of the 2000s. The phrasing consolidated a common misunderstanding.
What
distinguishes The Point from the other magazines mentioned in the
story (Jacobin, the Nation, n+1, Dissent, the Baffler) is
not where we fall on the left-right spectrum, but rather how we picture the
relationship between politics and public intellectual life—or, to use Benjamin
Aldes Wurgaft’s helpful phrase, “thinking in public.” Whereas the other
magazines have framed their projects in ideological and sometimes in activist
terms, we have attempted to conduct a conversation about modern life that
includes but is not limited by political conviction. This has meant, on the one
hand, publishing articles that do not abide by the dictum that everything is
“in the last analysis” political. (Some things, we believe, are in the last
analysis poetic, some spiritual, some psychological, some moral.) It has also
meant publishing a wider range of political perspectives than would usually be
housed in one publication. This is not because we seek to be “centrists,” or
because we are committed to some fantasy of objectivity. It is because we
believe there are still readers who are more interested in having their ideas
tested than in having them validated or confirmed, ones who know from their own
experience that the mind has not only principles and positions but also, as the
old cliché goes, a life. If the Jacobin slogan indicates a political
truth, it inverts what we take to be an intellectual one: Ideas Need
Resistance....
In our
eagerness to advance what we see as the common good, we rush to cover over what
we share in common with those who disagree with us, including the facts of our
mutual vulnerability and ignorance, our incapacity to ever truly know what is
right or good “in the last analysis.” This is the real risk of the strategic
approach to communication that sometimes goes by the name of “political
correctness”: not that it asks that we choose our words carefully but that it
becomes yet another tactic for denying, when it is inconvenient for the
ideology we identify with, what is happening right in front of our eyes—and
therefore another index of our alienation from our own forms of political
expression. The journalist Michael Lewis, embedded with the White House press
corps for an article published in Bloomberg in February, observed
that a “zero-sum” approach is spreading throughout political media, such that
every story is immediately interpreted according to who it is good or bad for,
then discarded, often before anyone has paused to consider what is actually
happening in the story.
The photo is of my village in the winter - just 200 metres from my house
The photo is of my village in the winter - just 200 metres from my house
