Simplicity, precision and brevity
To mark the tenth edition of words of the week, an essay on the three virtues of writing persuasively
There is something inexorable about the best prose, like the flow of water in a river. It is as if every word could only have been the one chosen and not some other word. Though the sophists were right to insist that writing can be taught – you can, of course, get better – good style is not to be found, readily packaged, in style guides. There is an abundance of style guides available and many of the authors are distinguished - George Orwell, Kingsley Amis, Stephen King, PD James and Stephen Pinker, for example. The best of them offer serviceable guidelines and ways of avoiding infelicities. But a good prose piece is no more the sum of style guide entries than a fine meal is simply a case of reading the recipe properly.
Where the style guides become fastidious and fussy they will be actively harmful to your prose. There can be no fixed rules because a living language changes in the mouths of its speakers. Everyone who speaks a language is simultaneously writing its dictionary. To borrow Stephen Pinker’s description, when it comes to language the lunatics are in charge of the asylum.
Though the style guides are usually too prescriptive and too full of personal eccentricities passed off as rules, they do, taken as a whole, provide some reliable principles for good writing. There are three aids to clarity which it is as well to keep in mind while writing: simplicity, precision and brevity. Treat these three as guardians of your prose style to ward off the enemy forces of complexity, vagueness and long-windedness. Simplicity is a virtue that can be difficult to honour. It is possible to be simple when, but only when, the speaker has a central case to make. Where the speaker has no topic there will be no clarity and the argument will spiral out into complexity. There is no better way to be boring, as Voltaire once said, than to leave nothing out.
The failsafe way of staying simple is to avoid at work any phrase you would be reluctant to use at home. As Hippocrates said: “the chief virtue that language can have is clearness and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words”. The best advice is to address your remarks to an educated lay person who does not inhabit your world. That will ensure you dramatically simplify, and therefore clarify, your language. This is certainly the advice from the ancient authorities. In the Poetics Aristotle cautioned against “strange words” and “anything that deviates from ordinary modes of speech”. In On Invention, Cicero wrote that writing should be clear, plausible, and brief and should seek to emulate “the practice of ordinary people”. Cicero returned to this idea in his later work De oratore, where he states that “the greatest vice is to disdain conventional language and ordinary feelings”. Hazlitt put the same point well: “To write a genuine, familiar or truly English style is to write as anyone would speak in common conversation….”
In the most effective part of his essay Politics and the English Language George Orwell lampoons five terrible passages of writing and notes that the feature they share is a lack of precision. A mark of poor writing is that it is impossible to edit. Precise writing can be summarised by referring to the concrete details and simply taking out the connecting tissue. Poor writing has nothing but tissue but there is nothing to connect because no precise points are being made. Language that is simple and precise will make a straightforward point quickly.
Which raises the third virtue. Good writing should be exactly as long as it needs to be and no longer. “When you wish to instruct, be brief”, wrote Cicero. “Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind”. To be simple, precise and yet brief will take some prior thought. Pascal’s famous line comes to mind: I’m sorry to have written you such a long letter. I would have written a shorter one but I didn’t have the time. In a memorandum dated 9th August 1940, Winston Churchill asked his staff to strip from their submissions any material not germane to the main point: “To do our work”, he wrote, “we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far too long. This wastes time, while energy has to be spent in looking for the essential points”. Churchill then made the link between the expression of an idea and the thought that preceded. “The discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clearer thinking”, he wrote.