This post is a continuation of my tribute to Joe Moran’s lovely book, First You Write a Sentence.  It’s part of my ongoing series of posts about issues in writing and books on writing.  What I like so much about Moran’s take on the subject is that he not only gives cogent advice for how to write better, but also he provides a stellar model of how to do so with grace and flair.  Never has there been a book about writing that is more fun to read.  He draws on some powerful examples of good writing, but most of the most memorable sentences in this book about sentences are his own. 

Here he is talking about the balancing of concrete and abstract nouns:

We need concrete nouns to name solid things, and abstract nouns to give the vague notions in our heads a nouny solidity. Only with both of them can we capture what it is like to be human and alive.

Unlike other animals, humans do not just use their own data collection to find stuff out; they use data collected by others. Abstractions are how people share this second-hand knowledge, coming up with broad categories for things that, for convenience’s sake, ignore differences. The word home ignores the differences between houses, flats, bungalows and that blurrily mapped place where the heart belongs. Without this abstracting quality, we could never share with strangers all the things we know.

Writing stuck on one rung of the ladder of abstraction is too monotone. Arguments that use only abstract nouns, like truth and power and knowledge, are hard to care about because writing that sidesteps the senses is dull.

One ailment that particularly afflicts academic writing is the overuse of nominalizations.  These are the words that turn dynamic processes (verbs) into nouns:  stratify vs. stratification, educate vs. education.  They’re useful because they compress a lot into a single word, so you don’t have to repeat the entire action sequence that they represent.  They provide abstract categories for incorporating disparate concrete experiences.  But too many of them can drain all the energy from an argument and dull the senses of readers.

A nominalization traps energy inside it, turning fluid actions into unmoving things. It is the white dwarf of the sentence. A white dwarf is the shrunken remains of a star, in which gravity has packed the protons and electrons so tight that a spoonful of matter weighs tons. A nominalization is the shrunken remains of a verbal clause, a noun-heavy mass compacted with pre-learned knowledge. But pre-learned by whom? Your reader, you hope – but you can’t be sure.

If you want to see how much your own writing is burdened by nominalizations — which Helen Sword calls “zombie nouns” — you should paste a piece of text into her Writer’s Diet Test.  

Here’s Moran exploring the problem of too many nouns in your writing:

English is getting nounier. More than half the words in the dictionary are nouns and the number rises each year.

Single nouns grow into noun strings, in which the nouns retool as pseudo-adjectives. In theory these strings, like supply chain resource issues or website content delivery platform, turn all but the last noun into an adjective. In practice, we read them all as nouns until we get to the last one and have to untie the whole string.

This noun-ridden language – stale, self-proving, sleepwalking from one big noun to the next – has become the argot of modern managerialism. To measure its staleness, count the nouns. The nouniness of a piece of writing is a sure sign of lack of care for the reader and lack of thought in the writer. For writing is not just a way of communicating; it is a way of thinking. Nouny writing relieves the writer of the need to do either.

It’s clear how to fix the problem of nouniness, but it’s hard to carry this out in your own writing.

How do you breathe life into sentences choked with nouns? Simple: use verbs. Disinter the buried verbs and bring them back to life by reverbing them. Unspool the noun strings, restoring the proper links between the nouns by adding verbs and prepositions, even if this means using more words. Turn weak verb–noun phrases into verbs. Puts emphasis on: emphasizes. Gives the impression: suggests. Draws attention to: notes. Turn other parts of speech into verbs. Verbs born of adjectives – we dim lights, tame hair, muddy prose – can be especially cinematic.

Verbs enact this universal law: everything moves. 

Solid things only seem solid because their movements are too small to be seen. Things are not things but happenings. Nothing stays still, ever. Life is a noun but it can only be lived as a verb.

Adding strong verbs is hard. A sentence should be a labour to write, not to read. Nouny sentences are the reverse: a labour to read, a breeze to write.

One of Moran’s models for good writing is William Tyndale, who wrote the English translation of the bible that evolved into the King James version — the most influential text in the language.

If you want to write a short, simple, sweet-sounding sentence, Tyndale will show you how.

He has the same ear for vivid sayings, pitched just above normal talk, such as the salt of the earth or the powers that be or in the twinkling of an eye. Just as a proverb does, he takes the spoken word and moves it up a notch, while keeping the pulse and beat of speech.

Sentences should be as much like speech as you can make them – so long as you remember that they are nothing like speech. Writing needs to retain the loose shapes of talk, its rhythmic curves and breathing pauses, but overlay them with the tighter shapes of writing. Tyndale’s sentences feel like that. They land in this sweet spot, this fertile ground between writing and talk. They have godly grandeur but vernacular ease, the stateliness of liturgy but the artlessness of speech. A sentence should ring in the head but be wrought like writing.

One secret is to rely heavily on the short, strong words that were part of Old English, long before the Norman invasion brought Latinate words into the language.

Tyndale has a trick to make his prose more speech-like: he uses short words. The ancient Hebrew and Greek of the Bible have few long words, and nor does the language Tyndale relies on: Old English.

Old English words like ooze and spit retain an onomatopoeia that perhaps all words once had. Old English shut and shun sound out their meanings; Middle English close and avoid do not. Old English verbs, like flee, beckon, bless, and chew, are full of, to use an Old English noun, pith.

Old English is the tongue of a pre-literate people, whose lives turn around family, tribe and the elemental world that we know as children – of night and day, cold and dark, breath and life, meat and bread, hunger and thirst.

More from Moran in future posts.  But do yourself a favor and read the book.

This post is a tribute to Joe Moran’s lovely book, First You Write a Sentence.  It’s part of my ongoing series of posts about issues in writing and books on writing.  What I like so much about Moran’s take on the subject is that he not only gives cogent advice for how to write better, but also he provides a stellar model of how to do so with grace and flair.

Let’s start with the elements.

A sentence brings together a noun, which names a thing, with a verb, which says something about that thing. That is all a sentence needs: everything else is optional. If you put the right nouns and verbs in the right slots, the other words fall into place around them.

That sounds easy, but of course it’s not.

Sentences that fail are a dialogue of the deaf. Reading one is like listening to someone in a nightclub over a pounding bassline. You can feel the writer’s hot breath on your cheek but the words are muffled. All you end up with is an earful of broken syntax and spit. The sentence has not tried hard enough to reach the reader, or it has tried too hard and died in the attempt. It could shout at you for eternity and not give up its secrets. These are enduring laments about writing.

Don’t you just love the way he puts this?  I love the “writer’s hot breath” and the “earful of broken syntax and spit.”

Inflected languages, such as German and Latin, don’t rely on word order as much as English does, because the subject and object can be identified by word endings no matter where they appear in the sentence.  Syntax is how English arranges words to make sense.

That neat bit of open-source software, syntax, lets us tap into a vast shared wisdom about how words best join together, and devise word orders that feel right and that make us sound wise. Writing a sentence is a way of withdrawing intelligence for free from this syntactical cashpoint that never runs empty.

Word order gives direction to the sentence, and, at every step along the way, it tightens the reader’s focus toward the end point.

A sentence, as it proceeds, is a gradual paring away of options. Each added word, because of English’s reliance on word order, reduces the writer’s alternatives and narrows the reader’s expectations. Yet even up to the last word the writer has choices and can throw in a curveball. A sentence can begin in one place and end in another galaxy, without breaking a single grammatical rule.

Prose needs to make sense, and syntax guides us how to do this correctly.  But it also wants to sing, at least some of the time.  Music can emerge from any text if the writer develops an ear for it.  

A sentence is more than its meaning. It is a line of words where logic and lyric meet – a piece of both sense and sound, even if that sound is heard only in the head. Things often thought to be peculiar to poetry – metre, rhythm, music – are there in prose as well, or should be. When John Betjeman began a BBC radio talk with the sentence ‘We came to Looe by unimportant lanes’, he must have known it sounded better than ‘We drove to Looe via the minor roads.’ His version is ten syllables with the stress on each second syllable: a perfect iambic pentameter.

Worse than the words being wrongly arranged is putting them in an order that neither moves nor sings. The sentence just limps and wheezes along to its sad end with a tuneless clank. When the writer has a tin ear for the sound of a sentence then the reader knows, just as when she hears flat or pitchy singing, that something is wrong, even if she can’t quite say why.

The need to make your sentences sing often seems unattainable, and it can’t be forced.  So it’s reassuring to learn that writing is an acquired skill rather than  something you’re born with.  Your sentences may not often be things of beauty, but they can be reliably clear and convincing.  After all, writing is not just how we express our ideas; it’s how we develop our ideas.  The clarity is not a preexisting condition but a consequence of writing.

Writing, Kurt Vonnegut once said, allows ‘mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence’.

But one of the hardest lessons to learn about writing is that no one who reads your prose knows what you intended to say if you didn’t say it clearly enough for them to understand.

This, according to Verlyn Klinkenborg, is the lesson a writer learns most reluctantly of all. ‘It’s necessary to write as if your sentences will be orphaned, because they will be,’ he writes. ‘When called to the stand in the court of meaning, your sentences will get no coaching from you. They’ll say exactly what their words say, and if that makes you look ridiculous or confused, guess what?’ Once our sentences are written and sent out into the world to be read, they are on their own. Most of us cling to a residual belief that we will still be there, hovering over the reader as she reads, to explain, when she stumbles over our words, what we really meant. We won’t.

But our sentences are not quite orphans. What they really are is children with parents who love them but who can do nothing to help them.

I’ll be picking up more insights from Moran’s book in a later post. Stay tuned. Better yet, read the book yourself.

This post is a review essay by Irina Dumitrescu about five books that explore how to write well.  It appeared in Times Literary Supplement, March 20, 2020.  Here’s a link to the original.  

She’s reviewing five books about writing.  Is there any writing task more fraught with peril that trying to write about writing?  Anything less than superlative literary style would constitute an abject failure.  Fortunately this author is up to the challenge.

Here are some of my favorite passages.

She reminds of an enduring truth about writing.  Everyone starts with imitating others.  You need models to work from:

Shakespeare patterned his comedies on Terence’s Latin romps, and Terence stole his plots from the Greek Menander. Milton copied Virgil, who plagiarized Homer. The history of literature is a catwalk on which the same old skeletons keep coming out in new clothes.

On the other hand,

Style unsettles this pedagogy of models and moulds. As the novelist Elizabeth McCracken once told Ben Yagoda in an interview, “A writer’s voice lives in his or her bad habits … the trick is to make them charming bad habits”. Readers longing for something beyond mere information – verbal fireworks, the tremor of an authentic connection, a touch of quiet magic – will do well to find the rule-breakers on the bookshop shelf. Idiosyncrasies (even mistakes) account for the specific charm of a given author, and they slyly open the door to decisions of taste.

One author makes the case against turgid academic writing in a book that she admiringly calls

an inspiring mess, a book that in its haphazard organization is its own argument for playfulness and improvisation. Like Warner, Kumar cannot stand “the five-paragraph costume armor of the high school essay”. Nor does he have much patience for other formulaic aspects of academic writing: didactic topic sentences, or jargony vocabulary such as “emergence” and “post-capitalist hegemony”. In his description of a website that produces meaningless theoretical prose at the touch of a button, Kumar notes that “the academy is the original random sentence generator”.

Of all the books she discusses, my favorite (and hers, I think) is 

Joe Moran’s exquisite book First You Write a Sentence…. As befits a cultural historian, Moran compares writing sentences to crafting other artisanal objects – they are artworks and spaces of refuge, gifts with which an author shapes the world to be more beautiful and capacious and kind. Like a town square or a city park, “a well-made sentence shows … silent solicitude for others. It cares”.

Moran’s own sentences are so deliciously epigrammatic that I considered giving up chocolate in favour of re-reading his book. Because he has dedicated an entire volume to one small form, he has the leisure to attend to fine details. As he explores sentences from every angle, he describes the relative heat of different verbs, the delicately shading nuances of punctuation choices, how short words feel in the mouth, the opportunity of white space. “Learn to love the feel of sentences,” he writes with a connoisseur’s delight, “the arcs of anticipation and suspense, the balancing phrases, the wholesome little snap of the full stop.”

Enjoy.

How to write well

Rules, style and the ‘well-made sentence’

By Irina Dumitrescu

IN THIS REVIEW

In high school a close friend told me about a lesson her father had received when he was learning to write in English. Any essay could be improved by the addition of one specific phrase: “in a world tormented by the spectre of thermonuclear holocaust”. We thought it would be hilarious to surprise our own teachers with this gem, but nothing came of it. Twenty years later, as I looked through the files on an old computer, I discovered my high school compositions. There, at the end of an essay on Hugo Grotius and just war theory I must have written for this purpose alone, was that irresistible rhetorical flourish.

As much as we might admire what is fresh and innovative, we all learn by imitating patterns. Babies learning to speak do not immediately acquire the full grammar of their mother tongue and a vocabulary to slot into it, but inch slowly into the language by repeating basic phrases, then varying them. Adults learning a foreign language are wise to do the same. Pianists run through exercises to train their dexterity, basketball players run through their plays, dancers rehearse combos they can later slip into longer choreographies. To be called “formulaic” is no compliment, but whenever people express themselves or take action in the world, they rely on familiar formulas.

Writing advice is caught in this paradox. Mavens of clear communication know that simple rules are memorable and easy to follow. Use a verb instead of a noun. Change passive to active. Cut unnecessary words. Avoid jargon. No aspiring author will make the language dance by following these dictates, but they will be understood, and that is something. The same holds for structure. In school, pupils are drilled in the basic shapes of arguments, such as the “rule of three”, the “five-paragraph essay” or, à l’américaine, the Hamburger Essay (the main argument being the meat). Would-be novelists weigh their Fichtean Curves against their Hero’s Journeys, and screenwriters can buy software that will ensure their movie script hits every beat prescribed by Blake Snyder in his bestselling book Save the Cat! (2005). And why not? Shakespeare patterned his comedies on Terence’s Latin romps, and Terence stole his plots from the Greek Menander. Milton copied Virgil, who plagiarized Homer. The history of literature is a catwalk on which the same old skeletons keep coming out in new clothes.

Style unsettles this pedagogy of models and moulds. As the novelist Elizabeth McCracken once told Ben Yagoda in an interview, “A writer’s voice lives in his or her bad habits … the trick is to make them charming bad habits”. Readers longing for something beyond mere information – verbal fireworks, the tremor of an authentic connection, a touch of quiet magic – will do well to find the rule-breakers on the bookshop shelf. Idiosyncrasies (even mistakes) account for the specific charm of a given author, and they slyly open the door to decisions of taste. Think of David Foster Wallace’s endless sentences, George R. R. Martin’s neologisms, the faux-naivety of Gertrude Stein. In his book on literary voice, The Sound on the Page (2004), Yagoda argues that style reveals “something essential” and impossible to conceal about an author’s character. The notion that the way a person arranges words is inextricably tied to their moral core has a long history, but its implication for teaching writing is what interests me here: convince or compel writers to cleave too closely to a set of prescribed rules, and you chip away at who they are.

This explains why John Warner’s book about writing, Why They Can’t Write: Killing the five-paragraph essay and other necessities, contains almost no advice on how to write. A long-time college instructor, Warner hints at his argument in his subtitle: his is a polemical take on American standardized testing practices, socioeconomic conditions, and institutions of learning that destroy any love or motivation young people might have for expressing themselves in writing. Against the perennial assumption that today’s students are too lazy and precious to work hard, Warner holds firm: “Students are not entitled or coddled. They are defeated”. The symbol of the US’s misguided approach to education is the argumentative structure drilled into each teenager as a shortcut for thinking and reflection. “If writing is like exercise,” he quips, “the five-paragraph essay is like one of those ab belt doohickeys that claim to electroshock your core into a six-pack.”

What is to blame for students’ bad writing? According to Warner, the entire context in which it is taught. He rails against school systems that privilege shallow “achievement” over curiosity and learning, a culture of “surveillance and compliance” (including apps that track students’ behaviour and report it to parents in real time), an obsession with standardized testing that is fundamentally inimical to thoughtful reading and writing, and a love of faddish psychological theories and worthless digital learning projects.

It is easy for a lover of good writing to share Warner’s anger at the shallow and mechanistic culture of public education in the United States, easy to smile knowingly when he notes that standardized tests prize students’ ability to produce “pseudo-academic BS”, meaningless convoluted sentences cobbled together out of sophisticated-sounding words. Warner’s argument against teaching grammar is harder to swallow. Seeing in grammar yet another case of rules and correctness being put ahead of thoughtful engagement, Warner claims, “the sentence is not the basic skill or fundamental unit of writing. The idea is”. Instead of assignments, he gives his students “writing experiences”, interlocked prompts designed to hone their ability to observe, analyse and communicate. His position on grammatical teaching is a step too far: it can be a tool as much as a shackle. Still, writers may recognize the truth of Warner’s reflection that “what looks like a problem with basic sentence construction may instead be a struggle to find an idea for the page”.

Trish Hall shares Warner’s belief that effective writing means putting thinking before craft. Hall ran the New York Times’s op-ed page for half a decade, and in Writing To Persuade she shows us how to succeed at one kind of formula, the short newspaper opinion piece. The book is slim, filled out with personal recollections in muted prose, and enlivened by the occasional celebrity anecdote. Her target audience seems to be the kind of educated professionals who regularly read the New York Times, who may even write as part of their work, but who have not thought about what it means to address those who do not share their opinions. Hall does offer useful, sometimes surprising, tips on avoiding jargon, finding a writerly voice, and telling a story, but most of the book is dedicated to cultivating the humanity beneath the writing.

“I can’t overstate the value of putting down your phone and having conversations with people”, she writes. Persuasion is not simply a matter of hammering one’s own point through with unassailable facts and arguments. It is a question of listening to other people, cultivating empathy for their experience, drawing on shared values to reach common ground. It also demands vulnerability; Hall praises writers who “reveal something almost painfully personal even as they connect to a larger issue or story that feels both universal and urgent”.

Much of her advice would not have surprised a classical rhetorician. She even quotes Cicero’s famous remark about it being a mistake to try “to compel others to believe and live as we do”, a mantra for this book. At her best, Hall outlines a rhetoric that is also a guide to living peaceably with others: understanding their desires, connecting. A simple experiment – not finishing other people’s sentences even when you think you know what they will say – exemplifies this understated wisdom. At her worst, Hall is too much the marketer, as when she notes that strong emotions play well on social media and enjoins her readers to “stay away from depressing images and crying people”. There ought to be enough space in a newspaper for frankly expressed opinions about the suffering of humanity. What she demonstrates, however, is that writing for an audience is a social act. Writing To Persuade is a stealth guide to manners for living in a world where conversations are as likely to take place in 280 characters on a screen as they are at a dinner table.

In Hall’s hands, considering other people means following a programmatic set of writing instructions. Amitava Kumar, a scholar who has written well- regarded works of memoir and journalism, thinks another way is possible. In Every Day I Write the Book: Notes on style, he breaks out of the strictures of academic prose by creating a virtual community of other writers on his pages. The book is a collection of short meditations on different topics related to writing, its form and practice, primarily in the university. Kumar’s style is poised and lyrical elsewhere, but here he takes on a familiar, relaxed persona, and he often lets his interlocutors have the best lines. Selections from his reading bump up against email conversations, chats on the Vassar campus, and Facebook comments; it is a noisy party where everyone has a bon mot at the ready. The book itself is assembled like a scrapbook, filled with reproductions of photographs, screenshots, handwritten notes and newspaper clippings Kumar has gathered over the years.

It is, in other words, an inspiring mess, a book that in its haphazard organization is its own argument for playfulness and improvisation. Like Warner, Kumar cannot stand “the five-paragraph costume armor of the high school essay”. Nor does he have much patience for other formulaic aspects of academic writing: didactic topic sentences, or jargony vocabulary such as “emergence” and “post-capitalist hegemony”. In his description of a website that produces meaningless theoretical prose at the touch of a button, Kumar notes that “the academy is the original random sentence generator”. He is not anti-intellectual; his loyalties lie with the university, even as he understands its provinciality too well. But he asks his fellow writers to hold on fiercely to the weird and whimsical elements in their own creations, to be “inventive in our use of language and in our search for form”.

This means many things in practice. Kumar includes a section of unusual writing exercises, many of them borrowed from other authors: rewriting a brilliant passage badly to see what made it work; scribbling just what will fit on a Post-it Note to begin a longer piece; writing letters to public figures. Other moments are about connection. In a chapter on voice, he quotes the poet and novelist Bhanu Kapil’s description of how she began a series of interviews with Indian and Pakistani women: “The first question I asked, to a young Muslim woman … Indian parents, thick Glaswegian accent, [was] ‘Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?’ She burst into tears”. That one question could fill many libraries. Invention also means embracing collaboration with editors, and understanding writing as “a practice of revision and extension and opening”. Kumar calls for loyalty to one’s creative calling, wherever it may lead. The reward? Nothing less than freedom and immortality.

But surely craft still matters? We may accept that writing is rooted in the ethical relationships between teachers, students, writers, editors and those silent imagined readers. Does this mean that the skill of conveying an idea in language in a clear and aesthetically pleasing fashion is nothing but the icing on the cake? Joe Moran’s exquisite book First You Write a Sentence: The elements of reading, writing … and life suggests otherwise. As befits a cultural historian, Moran compares writing sentences to crafting other artisanal objects – they are artworks and spaces of refuge, gifts with which an author shapes the world to be more beautiful and capacious and kind. Like a town square or a city park, “a well-made sentence shows … silent solicitude for others. It cares”.

Moran’s own sentences are so deliciously epigrammatic that I considered giving up chocolate in favour of re-reading his book. Because he has dedicated an entire volume to one small form, he has the leisure to attend to fine details. As he explores sentences from every angle, he describes the relative heat of different verbs, the delicately shading nuances of punctuation choices, how short words feel in the mouth, the opportunity of white space. “Learn to love the feel of sentences,” he writes with a connoisseur’s delight, “the arcs of anticipation and suspense, the balancing phrases, the wholesome little snap of the full stop.”

The book is full of advice, but Moran’s rules are not meant to inhibit. He will happily tell you how to achieve a style clear as glass, then praise the rococo rhetorician who “wants to forge reality through words, not just gaze at it blankly through a window”. He is more mentor than instructor, slowly guiding us to notice and appreciate the intricacies of a well-forged phrase. And he does so with tender generosity towards the unloved heroism of “cussedly making sentences that no one asked for and no one will be obliged to read”. As pleasurable as it is to watch Moran unfold the possibilities of an English sentence, his finest contribution is an understanding of the psychology – fragile, labile – of the writer. He knows that a writer must fight distraction, bad verbal habits, and the cheap appeal of early drafts to find their voice. There it is! “It was lost amid your dishevelled thoughts and wordless anxieties, until you pulled it out of yourself, as a flowing line of sentences.”

Human beings take pleasure in noticing nature’s patterns, according to Moran, and these patterns help them to thrive, sometimes in unforeseen ways. A sentence is also form imposed on chaos, and his suggestion that it has an organic role in the survival of the species might seem bold. (Though how many of us owe our lives to a parent who said the right words in a pleasing order?) The novelist Jane Alison’s invigorating book Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and pattern in narrative follows a similar impulse, seeking the elegant forms that order nature in the structures of stories and novels. Her bugbear is the dramatic arc, the shape that Aristotle noticed in the tragedies of his time but that has become a tyrant of creative writing instruction. “Something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, no?” Alison has other ideas for excitement.

In brief, compelling meditations on contemporary fiction, she teases out figures we might expect to spy from a plane window or in the heart of a tree. Here are corkscrews and wavelets and fractals and networks of cells. Is this forced? Alison recognizes the cheekiness of her project, knows her readings of form may not convince every reader. Her aim is not to classify tales, to pin them like butterflies on a styrofoam board. She knows, for example, that any complex literary narrative will create a network of associations in the reader’s mind. Her goal is to imagine how a reader might experience a story, looking for “structures that create an inner sensation of traveling toward something and leave a sense of shape behind, so that the stories feel organized”.

Shapes appear in Alison’s mind as clusters of images, so what begins as literary analysis condenses into a small poem. For “meander”, Alison asks us to “picture a river curving and kinking, a snake in motion, a snail’s silver trail, or the path left by a goat”. She speaks of the use of colour in narrative “as a unifying wash, a secret code, or a stealthy constellation”. The point is not ornamentation, though Alison can write a sentence lush enough to drown in, but tempting fiction writers to render life more closely. Against the grand tragedy of the narrative arc, she proposes small undulations: “Dispersed patterning, a sense of ripple or oscillation, little ups and downs, might be more true to human experience than a single crashing wave”. These are the shifting moods of a single day, the temporary loss of the house keys, the sky a sunnier hue than expected.

The Roman educator Quintilian once insisted that an orator must be a good man. It was a commonplace of his time. The rigorous study of eloquence, he thought, required a mind undistracted by vice. The books discussed here inherit this ancient conviction that the attempt to write well is a bettering one. Composing a crisp sentence demands attention to fine detail and a craftsmanlike dedication to perfection. Deciding what to set to paper requires the ability to imagine where a reader might struggle or yawn. In a world tormented by spectres too reckless to name, care and empathy are welcome strangers.

Irina Dumitrescu is Professor of English Medieval Studies at the University of Bonn

This post focuses on the value of using an apt mix of Saxon and Latinate words in your writing.  It draws on a book by Ward Farnsworth called Farnsworth’s Classical English Style.  English has a wonderfully polyglot heritage to draw upon — starting with an ancient form of German brought by early Saxon invaders, then Danish brought by Vikings, and finally French brought by the last set of conquerors. 

The primary poles of the language remain the Saxon and the Latinate, and this polarity provides a rich array of possibilities for authors seeking to enhance the effectiveness of their writing.  The two forms of words have strikingly different characteristics, which the skilled writer can use to considerable effect.

You don’t need the Oxford English Dictionary to tell you distinguish the two kinds of words from each other.  Here’s how Farnsworth puts it:

Saxon words are shorter, and in their simplest forms they usually consist of just one syllable. Latinate words usually have a root of two or three syllables, and then can be lengthened further and turned into other parts of speech.

The simplest guide, useful often but not always, is this: if a word ends with -tion, or if it could be made into a similar word that does, then it almost always is derived from Latin. Same if it easily takes other suffixes that turn it into a longish word.

A key difference is the sound:

Saxon words tend to sound different from Latinate words in ways distantly related to the sounds of the modern German and French languages. Many Saxon words have hard sounds like ck or the hard g. Latinate words are usually softer and more mellifluous.

Another central difference is between high and low speech, formal and informal speech.

When French arrived in England it was the language of the conqueror and the new nobility. A thousand years later, words from French still connote a certain fanciness and distance from the gritty, and Saxon words still seem plainer, less formal, and closer to the earth. If you want to talk clinically about something distasteful, you use the Latinate word for it – the one derived from old French: terminate or execute (Latinate) instead of kill (Saxon).

As the conceptual life of English speakers became more sophisticated, they needed new words to talk about what they were thinking. They usually made them out of French or more directly from Latin or Greek. That is part of why people who teach at universities find it hard to prefer Saxon words when they have their conversations. Most of them would probably write better if they did use more Saxon words, but there are lots of tempting Latinate words that seem designed for academic purposes, because they were. They allow a kind of precision (or facilitate a kind of jargon) that Saxon words cannot match.

As Farnsworth notes, this high-low difference offers both an opportunity and a challenge for academics.  We need Latinate words in order to achieve the desired precision and complexity of argument and to deal with abstraction — all central components of academic discourse.  But we also may lean toward the Latinate simply because it makes us sound and feel more professional, unsullied by common speech.  This not only puts off the nonacademic reader but also clouds clarity and reduces impact for all readers.

Yet another distinction in these types of words is between the visual and the conceptual, the felt and the thought.

Saxon words tend to be easier to picture than the Latinate kind, most of which need a minor moment of translation before they appear in the mind’s eye. Compare light (Saxon) and illumination (Latinate), bodily (Saxon) and corporeal (Latinate), burn (Saxon) and incinerate (Latinate). The difference between visual and conceptual is related to the ways that these kinds of words can speak to the different capacities of an audience. Latinate words tend to create distance from what they describe. They invite thought but not feeling. Saxon words are more visceral. They take a shorter path to the heart.

Here he lays out a central principle of good writing in English.

For most people most of the time, attractive English isn’t the art of choosing beautiful words. It is the art of arranging humble words beautifully.

Here’s an example from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

He provides some other vivid examples from that wellspring of good writing, the King James Bible.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. Gen. 1:3 Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. Matt. 7:7 And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. John 8:32 Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. John 15:13 Every word of those passages is Saxon. The gravity of their meaning matches the simplicity of their wording.

Perhaps more precisely, the sense of weight is increased by the contrast between the size of the meanings and the size of the words. A big thing has been pressed into a small container. The result is a type of tension. It gets released in the mind of the reader.

I love the way he captures the dynamics of powerful writing — creating a “tension” that “gets released in the mind of the reader.”

One way the writer uses the difference in character of the two kinds of words is by deploying them at different places within the same sentence:  starting Latinate and ending Saxon, or the other way around.  Consider what happens when you use the first approach.

Starting with Latinate words creates a sense of height and abstraction. Ending with plain language brings the sentence onto land. The simplicity of the finish can also lend it a conclusive ring. And the longer words give the shorter ones a power, by force of contrast, that the shorter ones would not have had alone.

Lincoln is well-known for his love of simple language, but he was also at home with Latinate words and mixed the two types to strong effect. He especially liked to circle with larger words early in a sentence and then finish it simply. The pattern allowed him to offer intellectual or idealistic substance and then tie it to a stake in the dirt.

Here’s an example, from a letter he wrote about the Emancipation Proclamation:

But the proclamation, as law, either is valid or is not valid. If it is not valid it needs no retraction. If it is valid it cannot be retracted, any more than the dead can be brought to life.

An example from Winston Churchill:

They will never understand how it was that a victorious nation, with everything in hand, suffered themselves to be brought low, and to cast away all that they had gained by measureless sacrifice and absolute victory – gone with the wind!

And another from an opinion by Oliver Wendell Holmes.  The setup is Latinate, the punchline is Saxon.

If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought – not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.

Frederick Douglass:

Inaction is followed by stagnation. Stagnation is followed by pestilence and pestilence is followed by death.

But you can also reverse the direction to good effect, starting Saxon and ending Latinate.

A frequent product of this pattern is a sense of compression released. Moving from Saxon to Latinate words makes the first part of a sentence feel compact, the rest expansive. The last part thus gains a kind of push.

The way of the Lord is strength to the upright: but destruction shall be to the workers of iniquity. Prov. 10:29 In that last case the good and the strong are described in simple words. The long words are reserved for the villains. 

How great are his signs! and how mighty are his wonders! his kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and his dominion is from generation to generation. Dan. 4:3 These sentences go from a tight start to a finish that flows freely and gains in height. The result can be a feeling of increasing grandeur, like passing from a low ceiling into a room with a higher one.

Lincoln again:

I insist that if there is any thing which it is the duty of the whole people to never entrust to any hands but their own, that thing is the preservation and perpetuity of their own liberties and institutions.

And Churchill:

You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.

Try creating and releasing tension in your own sentences through a judicious mix of Saxon and Latinate words.