Jordan Mattox

David Bentley Hart is one of my favorite pugilist intellectual types and one of the few theologians I can read these days. I came across an article he wrote in a catholic journal called The Lamp titled How to Write English Prose. I will confess that Orwell’s famous Politics and the English Language was treated as gospel by my younger self and have since adopted a more flexible approach syntax and style. Hart is much more ruthless. Here are the his rules, or anti-rules: 

The Rules

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?

Not that being a good writer is a guarantee that one has any great gift for instructing others in the art. E.B. White was an absolutely splendid stylist; he produced a prose so limpid that he was able to fool even himself that it was a triumph of simple diction rather than of (as was actually the case) very subtle intricacy. But he was also the chief perpetrator of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, by far the most influential and most pernicious book of its kind in English: a total congeries of fatuous advice and grammatical ignorance. Similarly, George Orwell was a perfectly competent (if rather boring) stylist; and yet his celebrated essay “Politics and the English Language,” which was intended as a rebuke of obscurantist jargon, endures now mostly as a manifesto of literary provincialism. Had either White or Orwell followed his own turgid counsels with any fidelity, neither would be nearly as fondly remembered as he is.

Anyway, taking all things into account, I offer the following only to those who like my writing, or who at least think it accomplished enough to make me a credible authority on these matters. These are, if nothing else, the rules to which I adhere and that best express my literary tastes. The first three arise, in fact, from my own direct encounters with editors and critics.

Vocabulary:

1. Always use the word that most exactly means what you wish to say, in utter indifference to how common or familiar that word happens to be. A writer should never fret over what his or her readers may or may not know, and should worry only about underestimating them. As Nabokov said, a good reader always comes prepared with a dictionary and never resents being introduced to a new term. I call this the “ultracrepidarian rule,” simply because an editor once tried unsuccessfully to dissuade me from writing about a certain “polemicist who stumbles across unseen disciplinary boundaries in an ultracrepidarian stupor.” The editor lost that argument because there is absolutely no other word in the English language that so exactly means what I wanted to say.

2. Always use the word you judge most suitable for the effect you want to produce, in terms both of imagery and sound, as well as of the range of connotations and associations you want to evoke. This I call the “hyaline rule” on account of a sentence that appeared in a book of mine entitled The Doors of the Sea: “At the shorelines, the lovely glistening hyaline waters were all at once polluted with the silt and débris and murk of the ocean’s bed, and rose with such terrifying suddenness that very few—even as far away as Sri Lanka—had sufficient time to flee.” An indignant reader complained that I might just as easily have used the word “glassy” instead, as any decent unpretentious soul would have done. But I had chosen “hyaline” for very particular reasons: it is a precise word, meaning “glassy” in the sense principally of crystalline translucency; it had exactly the right sound for the sentence—three syllables, the lovely long-i vowel sounds, the equally lovely liquid “l” and smoothly glistening “n,” all of which gave it a glassy and watery feel on the tongue; and it was the perfect word in the context of that book because it echoes the book of Revelation’s thalassa hyalinē, “the sea of glass like unto crystal” before God’s throne, as well as Milton’s “On the clear hyaline, the glassy sea . . .” Perhaps no reader is likely to be aware of all of that; but I knew what I was doing, and so any other word would have been a craven capitulation to the ordinary.

3. When the occasion presents itself for using an outlandishly obscure but absolutely precise and appropriate word, use it. I call this the “pogonotrophy rule,” because I once wrote a review in the Times Literary Supplement of a book by Rowan Williams, at that time Archbishop of Canterbury, after a dreadfully stupid journalist had suggested that his reputation as an intellectual was a consequence only of his lavish beard. This gave me an opportunity to use that wonderful word, which I had long been holding in reserve for just the proper moment. Such an opportunity would certainly have never come again; if I had let it pass unexploited, I should have carried the grief of it to my grave.

4. Never use a word simply because it is obscure, but never hesitate to use a word on account of its obscurity either. If you show off by being punctiliously precise, as per rule one above, all the grand rococo ornamentation you could ever wish for your prose will spring up all on its own.

5. Do not use a thesaurus. Lists of putative synonyms do not give you a sense of any word’s most proper meaning and use. If you are trying to recall a word you know that inexplicably refuses to surface in your memory, maybe you will find it in such a volume; and perhaps, if you happen to be writing humorous verse and have come up against an intractable problem of scansion, you might find something suitable there. Otherwise, learn the meanings and uses of words by reading widely (with that dictionary that Nabokov recommends within reach).

6. The exotic is usually more delightful than the familiar. Be kind to your readers and give them exotic things when you can. In general, life is rather boring, and a writer should try to mitigate that boredom rather than contribute to it.

Style:

7. Sometimes less is more. More often, more is more and less is less. Sometimes more is the very least one can do for one’s readers.

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

9. Never squander an opportunity for verbal cleverness. I once related in print the notorious tale of Schopenhauer throwing an old washerwoman down a flight of stairs, describing him at one point as seizing her by her “wizened weasand.” Self-indulgent, no doubt, but such moments as those make one feel that one has lived to a purpose.

10. In “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell proposes six rules, the first of which is a sound admonition against using hackneyed metaphors, but the second of which is “Never use a long word when a short one will do.” This is an idiotic maxim, one that concentrates almost every kind of philistinism in itself. What he should have written was “Never prefer a short word because it is short or a long word because it is long, but always use the word that to your mind best combines sense, felicity, connotation, wit, and sound, without worrying about whether your readers are likely to recognize it.”

11. Orwell also decrees: “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.” No great writer in the history of any tongue has ever observed this rule, and no aspiring writer should follow it. The correct counsel would be “If a word is so excessive as to mar the effect of a sentence, remove it; but never remove a word simply because it is possible to do so.”

12. Orwell then commands: “Never use the passive where you can use the active.” This is perhaps the worst rule of style ever proposed by anyone. All of literary history proclaims its imbecility. Instead: “Avoid the passive voice when the active works better and vice versa.” After all, in life we sometimes act and sometimes are acted upon. The causal dialectic between agency and patiency, to use the scholastic terms, is intrinsic to finitude.

13. Orwell’s next dictate is “Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.” All that can be salvaged from this trite and parochial balderdash is “Avoid jargon.” Feel free to use a foreign phrase when it is apt or pleasing to do so, and always do so when it expresses an idea with greater elegance or aphoristic economy than any English equivalent could (for instance, the phrase l’esprit d’escalier). English is a gloriously mongrel tongue, and it has always pillaged other languages for glittering trinkets. Moreover, always—always—employ precise scientific terms in contexts where they are germane.

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.”

15. Strunk and White’s Elements of Style decrees: “Keep related words together.” This is vacuous. Awkward ruptures of sense are obviously to be avoided. Taken as a principle, however, this little axiom is not only bad advice; it is a renunciation of language as such. As any decent student of linguistics knows, one of the chief differences between actual linguistic meaning (on the one hand) and mere ostensive noises and gestures (on the other) is the former’s reliance upon structural rather than spatial proximities. The capacity to qualify a predicative phrase by the interpolation of a subordinate clause (for example) is one of those precious attainments that distinguish us from baboons.

16. The same book advises: “Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs.” That is moronic. Better not to write at all than attempt to heed so obscene a piece of puritanical nonsense. Write with every kind of word that serves your ends.

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. Most of the rules of style it contains are vacuous, arbitrary, or impossible to obey, and you are better off without them in your life. And the materials on grammar and usage are frequently something worse. Some of them are simply inherited fake rubrics—“however” must always be a postpositive, “which” must not be used for a restrictive relative clause, and other nonsense of that kind—all of which are belied by the whole canon of English literature. Others, however, are evidence of surprising ignorance. It is bad enough that the manual insists that one must on principle prefer the active to the passive voice; but it is far worse that it then adduces several supposed examples of sentences in the passive voice that are in fact nothing of the sort. One of them—“There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground”—seems to have been chosen simply because “lying” about sounds like a passive sort of thing to do. That neither Strunk nor White knew the difference between a passive construction and an active intransitive verb in the imperfect past tense—or, as the book also demonstrates, the difference between the passive and an active past perfect, or the difference between the passive and an adjectival past participle without an auxiliary verb—is genuinely shocking. It does, however, impart a useful lesson: never mistake a tone of authority for evidence of actual expertise.

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.

19. Always read what you have written aloud. No matter how elaborate your prose, it must flow; it must feel genuinely continuous. This is not to say one must imitate natural speech; it is only to say that one must try to capture its rhythms. If what you have written is awkward on your tongue, then it is awkward on the page.

Models:

20. Bad writing is rarely mistaken for good by the discerning, but it can often be mistaken for great. Keep this in mind when considering the work of authors you are tempted to emulate.

21. Truly great writing is often inimitable, simply because the better a writer is, the more distinctive his or her voice tends to be. Keep this also in mind when considering the work of authors you are tempted to emulate.

22. If you have ever taken a course in “creative writing,” try to remember as vividly as possible the kind of prose you were encouraged by your teacher to write, and then do your very best to avoid writing that way.

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.

24. For American writers in particular, and especially young American writers, and most especially young male American writers: There is on these shores an indigenous tradition of the “American Sublime”—though in many cases it might better be called “American Fustian.” One encounters it at its worst in William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe when they are at their worst, as well as in a number of other authors whose names I here omit. We as a people like to strive for grand effects, often vastly in excess of any plausible occasion for doing so. Whether this is because of the presence of our magnificent landscape or because of the absence of a long cultural history I cannot guess. I would not say that you must resist the lures of this style altogether. It is there also to be found in the best of our literature—in Melville and Emerson, Muir and Thoreau, and so on—and there it is often glorious. Still, yield to it only to the degree that you can control the forces you set loose. Otherwise, you will lapse into inadvertent parody.

Punctuation:

25. A writer who disdains the semicolon is a fool. In fact, hostility to this most delicate and lyrical of punctuation marks is a sure sign of a deformed soul and a savage sensibility. Conscious life is not a brute concatenation of discrete units of experience; it is often fluid, resistant to strict divisions and impermeable partitions, punctuated by moments of transition that are neither exactly terminal nor exactly continuous in character. Meaning, moreover, is often held together by elusive connections, ambiguous shifts of reference, mysterious coherences. And art should use whatever instruments it has at its disposal to express these ambiguous eventualities and perplexing alternations. To master the semicolon is to master prose. To master the semicolon is to master language’s miraculous capacity for capturing the shape of reality.

26. Second only to the semicolon in subtlety, fluent beauty, and whimsy is the dash. Cherish it. Use it with abandon.

Readers:

27. Those who read only to be informed and never to delight in the words on the page have every right to do so. But do not write for them.

28. The only book reviewers of any significance are themselves distinguished writers. Cultivate critical intelligence in yourself and try to read your own work with impartiality; but studiously ignore criticism from the unaccomplished.

29. Do not write down to what you presume to be the level of your readers (unless you are writing specifically for very small children). To do so is an injustice both to them and to you. Even if your suppositions regarding them are correct, you should do them the honor of assuming they know what you know, or can learn it, or are at least willing to try. True, some readers become indignant at their own inability to follow prose of any complexity or to recognize words any more obscure than those they are accustomed to using when talking to their dogs. Invariably they will blame the author rather than themselves. You owe them absolutely nothing. If you attempt always to descend to the lowest common denominator, you will never hit bottom, but you will certainly end up losing the interest of better readers. Ours is, sadly, an age of declining literacy and attention spans, and the situation grows worse by the year. You simply must not make any concessions to that reality, unless you are prepared in the end to give up on writing altogether.

The Last Things:

30. Memento mori. One day you will die and go to your long home and your voice will fall silent. You have only so much time to make the treasures of your mind and soul manifest. Do not waste the little span allotted to you producing only work intended for the moment rather than for posterity.

31. Know the names of things and the names of places. Both are a kind of poetry and both contain mysteries. It is an ancient intuition that to possess something’s proper name is to possess power over it; it is, if nothing else, to share in that thing’s form—its unique manner, that is, of making being’s inexhaustible richness manifest. This is because language is magic.

32. Language is magic. It is invocation and conjuration. With words, we summon the seas and the forests, the stars and distant galaxies, the past and the future and the fabulous, the real and the unreal, the possible and the impossible. With words, we create worlds—in imagination, in the realm of ideas, in the arena of history. With words, we disclose things otherwise hidden, including even our inward selves. And so on. When you write, attempt to weave a spell. If this is not your intention, do not write.

33. As you near your life’s end, you will be able to look back over your work with some satisfaction if there have been moments in your prose when you have achieved precisely what you hoped to achieve. Keep an inventory of these in your mind, so that you can return to them when you find yourself depressed, uninspired, or suffering self-doubt. I offer two of my own such moments in parting, not because either is in any sense the best thing I have written, but only because each happened (almost miraculously) to have exactly the form and effect that I wanted it to have before I began to write it.”