Random Rules for Prose

I begin a new school year today with some fresh, sometimes anxious, faces in our first New Testament class. Their writing will matter to us at Northern as it will not only lead to better papers but it will also foster better speaking because good writing requires good thinking. But, we will be opening doors for our students to walk into the room, open a book by scholars who, well, don’t always pay attention to audience. They write for themselves and for their scholar friends, and, well, only they can understand one another.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Let me have a go at this because it’s on my mind.

Every discipline develops its own vocabulary, much of it technical and known by instinct to insiders, but disciplines developing styles lead their users into mischief. The kind of mischief I’m talking about is a style and vocabulary only insiders comprehend. The inner circle pats one another on the back but they increase distance from even other disciplines.

That style and vocabulary creates the impression that the circle wants to impress others as enlightened. George Orwell, who despised such language circles because he wanted to communicate in plainspoken English, once translated the beauty of Ecclesiastes into jargon. He quotes Eccl 9:11 in the KJV’s beauty:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

He converts into “swindles and perversions” with this:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

That about does it. Very few Bible verses are clearer than Eccl 9:11 and very few “versions” less understandable than his “sheer humbug” version.

We all flap around in jargon at times, and we all extend the length of words more than we need, but there are some rules – Orwell’s – that can help us develop better style and stronger vocabulary.

He suggests four, no six, questions to get the writer started:

What I trying to say?

What words will express it?

What image or idiom will make it clearer?

Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more:

Could I put it more shortly?

Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

These are pretty good questions to get one started, and they tack the author’s attention down to word choice. (Like that word “tack.”)

Academic “orthodoxy” really does “demand a lifeless, imitative style.” Over the years I have jotted down on a slip of short paper on a back cupboard in my brain authors in New Testament studies whose prose does a job Orwell would approve: CH Dodd, CFD Moule, Morna Hooker, James DG Dunn, EP Sanders, NT Wright. (This reflects my reading history.) Before I begin writing for the day I limber up with some pages from CS Lewis or George Orwell.

Orwell has given me eyes to see the swindles of political writing, which he once called “a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and [here he knows not the meaning] schizophrenia.” He says “the worst thing one can with words is to surrender to them.” Make them work for your ideas by refusing them to make your ideas fit those words.

So he has six rules:

(1)  Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(2)  Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(3)  If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(4)  Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(5)  Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. [How many writers have this list near their writing desk?]

(6)  Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I would add one to his list: Read good writers. Like E.B. White, Edith Wharton, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Mark Twain (if you need some barbs on the line).
Over to you, what are your best rules for writing?