More Tips for better Writing

This should have been at the end of the last post - but few readers will go back to look for new material – let alone reach the end of what are already (I unreservedly accept) excessively long posts. Seventy years separate the first 2 books I have selected for this reading list - and this shows in the style of the first. 
But Robert Graves was the more brilliant word-merchant and that shows.

-      The Reader over your Shoulder by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge (1944) The link gives you the entire book which looks quite delightful – tracing first the development of the language and then offering 3 chapters on “the principles of clear statement”. The book is replete with examples (good and bad) culled from famous authors to which the principles are applied one by one. Quite merciless

-      The Sense of Style – the thinking person’s guide to writing in the 21st Century; Steven Pinker (2014)

Then 2 essays

-      Politics and the english language; George Orwell (1946) The classic must-read essay on the topic

-       Economical writing Donald McCloskey (1983) A strangely neglected masterpiece

A nice contemporary piece which gives examples of good and bad writing is https://lithub.com/francine-prose-its-harder-than-it-looks-to-write-clearly/ 

Brain pickings is a lovely bi-weekly website which contains such notable advice on writing as Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing, Walter Benjamin’s thirteen doctrines, H. P. Lovecraft’s advice to aspiring writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letter to his daughter, Zadie Smith’s 10 rules of writing, David Ogilvy’s 10 no-bullshit tips, Henry Miller’s 11 commandments, Jack Kerouac’s 30 beliefs and techniques, John Steinbeck’s 6 pointers, and Susan Sontag’s synthesized learnings. 

Finally, two more books

-      To Show and to Tell – the craft of literary non-fiction; Phillip Lapate (2013) A superb teacher and essayist shares his learning (google excerpts only)

-      The Act of Writing – a media theory approach; Daniel Chandler (1995) A dense book (completely accessible by clicking the title) which repays the effort of reading. I’ve only flicked it but it has lots of great quotes. Title of chapter 4 is “writing as thinking”

How to write well

So what? I hear you ask about the last post….. You obviously chose the names to fit your case. What I did in fact was first brainstorm names and then try to find some evidence in the relevant Wikipedia entry that suggested their “Outsider” status – whether in terms of nationality, academic discipline, ethnicity or gender… . It wasn’t difficult….

But I will accept that “good writing” is a rather subjective phrase.

I personally need prose to be taut – not overblown.

And prefer quotes from other authors to be worked naturally into the text – rather than forming forbidding bibliographies which clearly serve no other purpose than that of a glorified virility symbol.

I don’t need an author to prove to me that (s)he’s read the relevant literature – what I need is an indication that (s)he has the empathy to be able to select books for my further study that the author considers will help me. And authors can do that only if they are actually writing for me – not for one of their students or colleagues.

Steven Pinker is particularly good on this point

At this point, I can see that the focus of the post is shifting from the question of how to recognise good writing to the easier one of we all might learn to express our thoughts better in writing…..

I was particularly intrigued with the quote from Charles Handy about how his experience of doing the 2 minute 40 sec BBC spot “Thought for the Day” had taught him to hone his text down to the essential core….In that particular case to 450 words!

A year or so ago I stumbled on a useful format to help me present my thoughts more briefly and clearly – viz a table with questions such as what had sparked off the thoughts and what the basic message was which I wanted to leave with the reader.

I also found that this was a useful format and discipline when I wanted to make notes about a book which I had found interesting – not least because it leaves a great archive for me to access eg https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/03/why-we-should-not-be-so-cynical-about.html and https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2020/10/how-myths-take-root-and-are-difficult.html

And the 1982 article on Economical writing I quoted recently shows the way by being divided into 28 sections - each of which is headed by a delightfully short and clear statement or injunction viz

The author (McCloskey)'s injunction	What I think (s)he Means
Writing is the economist’s craft	Most economists are so focused on the message that they forget they are engaged in communications – which implies a reader
Writing is thinking	Most writing is thinking aloud…trying to clarify one’s own confusions….to be ready for an audience, it needs to go through about a dozen drafts
Rules can help, but bad rules hurt	A lot of books have been written about how to improve one’s writing style – some of them downright silly
Be Thou clear	Clarity is not the same as precision – and requires a lot of experiment and effort. Indeed I would rephrase the adage as “Strive to be Clear”
The detailed rules are numerous	“most advice about writing is actually about rewriting”!
The rules are empirical	The next 2 adages confused me
Classical rhetoric guides even the economical writer	Give up
You too can be fluent	Contains some lovely advice about the process of composing and transposing one’s thoughts and words
You will need tools, tax deductible	On the importance of words
Keep your spirits up, forge ahead etc	We’ve got to get the words flowing on the paper….don’t be a perfectionist….it’s just a first draft…many more to go!
Speak to an audience of human beings	Probably the most important point….who is the paper for? Imagine a typical reader!
Avoid boilerplate	Don’t use clichés or chunks of text everyone knows
Control your tone	You can (and probably should) be conversational – but if you want to be taken seriously don’t joke around
Paragraphs should have points	Readers hate to see several pages of only text. Break it up when you sense you’re moving to a new point
Use tables and graphics – and make them readable	For me, crucial
Footnotes are nests for pedants	Love it!
Make your writing cohere	Very interesting section with points I had never come across before
Use your ear	A sentence consists of a subject, verb and object, We often overburden with qualifying clauses.
Avoid elegant variation	Clumsy way of saying we should not use a lot of adjectives or adverbs to say the same thing
Check and tighten; rearrange and fit	Priceless advice….we should be doing this all the time
Rhetorical questions?	Interesting question
Use verbs, active ones	Some good points made
Avoid words that bad writers use	Some very useful examples given
Be concrete	Great example of circumlocution
Be plain	Cut out the flowery language
Avoid cheap typotricks	Don’t use acronyms
Avoid this, that, these, those	Useful point
Above all, look at your words	Words so easily take over our thoughts. Be suspicious of the words that come initially to mind ….

Does being an outsider improve the quality of someone’s writing?

A rather rambling post a couple of weeks ago tried to explore the insights which can come from straddling worlds which are normally kept separate. This drew on material from 3 years earlier about Ways of Seeing and about Role Conflict.   

Indeed I now see there is a book whicih argues this - Rebel Ideas - the power of diverse thinking by Mathew Syad (2019)

I’m now shifting the focus to try to identify the qualities of a non-fiction book that make it “terrific” rather than merely “good”. I last tried that with Yanis Varoufakis whose books zing with zest….and only, I think, once before with detailed comments on a great book called Defending Politics

Perhaps this will allow me to add a further test to those I suggested in the famous post Why we need to ration non-fiction books.  

Like the good social scientist I am, I already have a hypothesis – namely that the feeling of being an outsider is a catalyst to identify and challenge “groupthink” and that writing is an effective way of exploring the multiple perspectives which subsequently open up…..

Clearly one can be a great writer without being (or feeling) an outsider - although I suspect that people who lack empathy won’t be great writers. But the weak point in my argument is the connection between creativity and writing. There’s no obvious reason why those with creative insights should be able to express them clearly in writing,,,,……

Or is there?    

I have already identified some of the people whose (non-fiction) writing I admire and the first column of the table below simply lists them – in the order in which they came to  mind. 

The second column is my own feeble attempt to label them….

The third will try to explain their “outsider” status which can relate to country, discipline, ethnicity or even gender…Significant that all but one are men? Adding Susan George, Polly Toynbee, Oriana Fallaci or Simone de Beauvoir at this stage is artificial….the point is that their names didn’t come to mind….

What do these great writers have in common?

Name	Status	Outsider in what sense?
Yanis Varoufakis	Globetrotting political economist	Spent first 20 or so years in Greece; European perspective
Theodor Zeldin	Writer, maverick Oxford academic	Came to UK as a child (Russian parents); strong French connection
Arthur Koestler	Central European journalist who made UK his home	Was a communist in Germany. Jailed in Franco Spain. Strong interest in science
JK Galbraith	Prolific Canadian/American economist and writer	23 when he left Canada – American civil servant handling rationing; Ambassador to India for JFK; attracted envy from academic colleagues
Robert Heilbronner	US economic historian	author of the famous “The Worldly Philosophers”; very much a generalist;
Charles Handy	Irish management writer and guru	changed his career every decade
Ralf Dahrendorf	German academic and politician; EC Commissioner, Director of LSE; and Lord	Straddled German and British academic and political worlds - for 25 years apiece
Richard Rose	Policy analyst, writer	had been a young journalist, Came to UK when 27
Roger Scruton	Maverick academic,	Often complained that his traditional brand of conservatism marginalised him
David Graeber	Anthropologist, activist, anarchist	Author of “Bullshit Jobs” Failed to have his academic position renewed by Harvard. Anthropology, almost by definition, means being an outsider
Jan Morris	Journalist	Change of sex certainly gives one a new perspective! And (s)he’s half English and half-Welsh – with this article explicitly referring to her felt “outsider”status
Jonathan Meade	Journalist and film maker – culture and buildings	His autobiography “An Encyclopaedia of Myself” makes it fairly clear he felt he was an outsider
Michael Pollan	Academic (Prof of Journalism), writer	He graduated in English; Generalist; jewish Author of “Cooked”, “In Defence of Food” etc
Alain de Botton	Pop philosopher	Early years in Switzerland
David Runciman	British political scientist; writer	Author of “How Democracy Ends” Son of a famous father, his case simply doesn’t fit!
Ha-Joon Chang	Development Economist	Graduated from South Korea; came to Cambridge for further studies and remained, Author of “23 things they don’t tell uoi about capitalism”
Yuval Harari	Israeli historian	Graduated Israel and now writes bestsellers like “Homo Sapiens”
Rutger Bregman	Dutch historian/journalist	Author of “Utopia for Realists”

Writing again

The issue of good writing has had me in its grip since my post on No Man’s Land 2 weeks ago....I confess that I have a folder on the subject - with a 100 page “commonplace” collection of comments and links  about the matter....

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

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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

Most of us are Pirates these days!

I am not a great subscriber….I tend to leach off the freebies

Recently, however, I took out digital subs for both LRB and NYRB. And the rates of a slightly more academic journal I have loved since the 70s – "Political Quarterly" – are so reasonable (15 euros for not only 4 quarterly editions but also the entire archives) that I was also seduced by them last year. 

For a few months even I managed to get the full daily edition of "Le Monde" – until they cottoned on to the fact that my payment had not actually gone through…

So it’s not altogether surprising that, these past few days, I’ve been looking again at the list (which was one of several annexes of To Whom it May Concern – the 2019 posts) of the journals I considered worth reading.

And that I actually took out yet another sub.

Have a look at the updated list below and see whether you can guess which new title I succumbed to!!

The list which I had compiled all of three years ago had started with a not altogether unjustified crack about the superficiality of newspaper coverage. That, in turn, raised the question of which (English language) journals would pass a test  with such criteria as –

- Depth of treatment

- Breadth of coverage (not just political)

- Cosmopolitan in taste (not just anglo-saxon)

- clarity of writing

- sceptical in tone

My own regular favourite reading includes The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian Long Reads and book reviews,  – and the occasional glance at the New Yorker; New Statesman; and Spiked.

Other titles which might lay some claims to satisfying the stringent criteria set above are -

Aeon; an interesting new (since 2012) cultural journal

Arts and Letters Daily; daily internet roundup from books and articles 

Book Forum; a bit too US centred for my taste…..

Brain Pickings; a superb personal internet bi-weekly endeavour which gives extended excerpts from classic texts about creativity etc. One of the best

Current Affairs is a fairly new American radical journal which looks to be very well-written eg this take-down of The Economist mag and this article on development

Dissent; a US leftist stalwart whose recent analyses of ecological issues have been exemplars of typology
Eurozine; terrific stuff from a European network of 70 odd cultural journals
Jacobin; a rather too predictable US leftist mag with a poor literary style

Literary Hub; a literary site with original selections and frequent posts

London Review of Books; couldn’t do without it!

Los Angeles Review of Books; great addition to book reviews from global cites (eg Boston, Dublin) 

Monthly Review; an old leftist US stalwart with well-written and solid analysis

Mother Jones; more journalistic US progressive

N+1; one of the new and smoother leftist mags

New Humanist; an important strand of UK thought

New Left Review; THE rather academic UK bi-monthly journal which I’ve dipped into ever since it started in 1960 

New Republic; solid US monthly

Prospect (UK); rather too smooth UK monthly

The American Prospect (US); ditto US

Public Books – an impressive recent website (2012) to encourage open intellectual debate
Quillette – a very new journal emphasising “free thought” whose pieces are very well-written 

Resurgence ; UK Green mag

Sceptic; celebration of important strand of UK scepticism

Slate; more right wing internet venture

Social Europe; a european social democratic E-journal whose short articles are a bit too predictable for my taste

Spiked; a very strange journal whose staff came from the "Living Marxism" group and adopt counter-intuitive attitudes to issues. See the useful http://www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=124 for more

The Atlantic; one of my favourite US mags

The Baffler; highly original leftist US bimonthly running for 30 years which I’ve only  noticed recently

The Critic - a new journal (since the end of 2019) opposed to the cosy “left-liberal consensus” it considers disfigures the british chattering classes. A bit parti-pris

The Conversation; a rare venture which has academics writing more journalistically 

The Nation; America's oldest weekly, for the "progressive" community

The New York Review of Books; a fortnightly I’ve been reading avidly for the past 30 years

The New Yorker; very impressive US writing

The Point – a relatively new venture (5 years) which advertises itself as “the magazine of the examined life”

Washington Independent Review; a new website borne of the frustration about the disappearance of so many book review columns

Wired; unpredictable - often has very good material

The answer to the question I posed earlier    is...... most curiously, The Point – as well, after a hiccup, as The New Yorker – the latter offering last week a 4 month internet sub (with archival material) for only 6 dollars. I have to declare, however, that - after a full week - I’ve still not been able to activate access to that delight. Serves me right for succumbing to an offshoot of the Conde mulinational!!!! 
But the digital version of “The Point” is already available - for only 31 dollars a year……..

I confess that I still have fond memories in the 1980s of "The Encounter" mag which was shockingly revealed later in the decade to have been partially funded by the CIA and which as a result shut up shop in 1990....I still have some copies in the glass-covered cabinet in the mountain house study (on the left of the pic).......

The entire set of 1953-1990 issues are archived here – and the range and quality of the authors given space can be admired. European notebooks – new societies and old politics 1954-1985; is a book devoted to one of its most regular writers, the Swiss Francois Bondy (2005) 

A generation of outstanding European thinkers emerged out of the rubble of World War II. It was a group unparalleled in their probing of an age that had produced totalitarianism as a political norm, and the Holocaust as its supreme nightmarish achievement. Figures ranging from George Lichtheim, Ignazio Silone, Raymond Aron, Andrei Amalrik, among many others, found a home in Encounter. None stood taller or saw further than Francois Bondy of Zurich.

European Notebooks contains most of the articles that Bondy (1915-2003) wrote for Encounter under the stewardship of Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol, and then for the thirty years that Melvin Lasky served as editor. Bondy was that rare unattached intellectual, "free of every totalitarian temptation" and, as Lasky notes, unfailing in his devotion to the liberties and civilities of a humane social order. European Notebooks offers a window into a civilization that came to maturity during the period in which these essays were written.

Bondy's essays themselves represent a broad sweep of major figures and events in the second half of the twentieth century. His spatial outreach went from Budapest to Tokyo and Paris. His political essays extended from George Kennan to Benito Mussolini. And his prime metier, the cultural figures of Europe, covered Sartre, Kafka, Heidegger and Milosz. The analysis was uniformly fair minded but unstinting in its insights. Taken together, the variegated themes he raised in his work as a Zurich journalist, a Paris editor, and a European homme de lettres sketch guidelines for an entrancing portrait of the intellectual as cosmopolitan.

Update; https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/april-2020/journal-de-combat-of-the-cold-war/