We have two reading this week. Both deal with writing. As
you read, consider what you value as a writer. What is most important to you as
you write?
READING 1
THE FOLLOWING IS FROM
Orwell's essay, “Politics and the English Language”
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at
least four questions, thus:
- What am 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?
One can often be in
doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can
rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:
- Never use a metaphor, simile,
or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a
short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word
out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you
can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a
scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English
equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner
than say anything outright barbarous.
READING 2
Twain's Rules of Writing
(from
Mark Twain's scathing essay on the Literary Offenses of James Fenimore Cooper)
1. A tale shall accomplish
something and arrive somewhere.
2. The episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help
develop it.
3. The personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and
that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.
4. The personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient
excuse for being there.
5. When the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound
like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in
the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable
purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject
in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when
the people cannot think of anything more to say.
6. When the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the
conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.
7. When a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf,
hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a
paragraph, he shall not talk like a Negro minstrel at the end of it.
8. Crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader by either the author
or the people in the tale.
9. The personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let
miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausably set
it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.
10. The author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of
his tale and their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people
in the tale and hate the bad ones.
11. The characters in tale be so clearly defined that the reader can tell
beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.
An author should
12. _Say_ what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.
13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.
14. Eschew surplusage.
15. Not omit necessary details.
16. Avoid slovenliness of form.
17. Use good grammar.
18. Employ a simple, straightforward style.
