Despite spending most of my life writing, I have never won any awards or accolades for writing and have no reason to think that I am an especially good writer.
I say this not because I’m fishing for you all to tell me that I am actually not a bad writer etc., but to tell you that despite writing being an obsession of mine in which I read many how-to write guides, produce the occasional one or two myself as well as try to deconstruct writing I consider good (or bad) to reverse-engineer results, reaching the exalted heights of the greatest writers… hasn’t happened for me yet.
Worse than that, though, is the fact that not all writing advice that is out there is good.
Which brings me to today’s topic.
In the past, I have been bamboozled by a mainstream of writing advice that has been propagating through these how-to-write guides for decades. So bamboozled that I even recommended two of the best-known ones to students. I regret those recommendations, because I have discovered there is a hidden racist thread in that writing advice that does not stand up to scientific scrutiny.
Some decades ago, I found out that apparently everyone interested in improving their English writing should read two things: a short book called The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, and an essay called “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell. I did so. I passed the references on to my students. I edited work that writers trusted to me with Orwell and Strunk & White in my mind. And I edited my own work that way. The result? Wasted years during which my writing suffered, especially when I wrote for academic audiences who have no interest in Strunk, White, or Orwell. I wasn’t getting rejections because I was a bad student of writing, but because I was too good a student of Strunk & White and of Orwell.
Strunk and White, Orwell, and their predecessors produce writing advice in short, simple rules – modeling, of course, the advice they give writers. You may have seen them. Here are a few from E.B. White (of Strunk & White): Use active voice instead of passive. Use the positive form instead of the negative. Omit needless words.
Orwell will tell you to avoid dying metaphors, operators like “militate against”, pretentious diction (science words, adjectives, old words, foreign words). He says:
“(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. (ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do. (iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. (iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active. (v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. (vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.”
If you are a sincere student who reads these essays and tries to implement them as I did, your writing will suffer. So will your readers. Because these pieces of advice, presented as universal truths about the english language, are audience dependent at best, and useless at worst. They aren’t even guidelines that are good in most situations but bad in others. They are just White preferences (and Orwell preferences). What they like to see. The style they like to write in.
Telling writers to write short simple sentences with monosyllabic words is older than Orwell or White, who probably got their material from American businessman Robert Gunning’s 1944 book, The Technique of Clear Writing. He has 10 principles: 1. Keep sentences short. 2. Prefer the simple to the complex. 3. Prefer the familiar word. 4. Avoid unnecessary words. 5. Put action in your verbs. 6. Write like you talk. 7. Use terms your reader can picture. 8. Tie in with your reader’s experience. 9. Make full use of variety. 10. Write to express not impress.
Gunning provides a list of 3000 words writers should stick to and includes a quantitative set of “readability yardsticks” for writers to use. He recommends writing to what he calls a “sixth-grade level” and recommends a “fog index”, a formula that combines sentence length and percentage of polysyllabic words (similar to the Flesch Readability Score and other such indices). Charles Kay Ogden, author of a book called Uncontrolled Breeding, or Fecundity versus Civilization (1916), provided a list of 850 “Basic English” words to stick to for readability.
Gunning also cites Herbert Spencer’s book The Philosophy of Style, which explained that “a reader brings to your writing limited mental power.” Spencer spread philosophies beyond those of writing style: he was big on measuring skulls to determine intelligence and wrote pieces of English prose like this one: “The forces which are working out the great scheme of perfect happiness, taking no account of incidental suffering, exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their way. … Be he human or be he brute – the hindrance must be got rid of.”
Since we’re talking about Herbert Spencer, it’s time to return to what I mentioned earlier: a racist strain running through too much of this English prose advice. It has to do with a 19th century obsession with the idea that pure Anglo-Saxon England was conquered by the Normans in medieval times and in addition to corrupting the pure vigorous Anglo-Saxon blood, the Normans corrupted the vigorous Anglo-Saxon language. This idea of getting back Anglo-Saxon racial purity through the use of short sentences filled with single-syllable words is explicit in the likes of Herbert Spencer and reproduced by White and Orwell etc., without acknowledging where the racialist passion for monosyllables comes from.
University of Chicago academic John Williams, in the 1995 writing book Style: Towards Clarity and Grace, talks about the Norman conquest and its effects on English – thankfully, without the racial nostalgia. Williams’s analysis is that because medieval English lacked words for translating and doing business and government, these words were imported from Latin and French. 16th century Renaissance scholars brought in Greek and Latin for classical texts. The result is that 80% of daily words come from Anglo-Saxon, while in more technical fields, there are more French- and Latin-origin words. The result: Depending on what you’re writing about, it could simply be impossible to choose the single-syllable Anglo-Saxon word, which might not exist. As Williams quotes “there ys many wordes in Latyn that we have no propre Englysh accordynge thereto”.
In addition to racialist nostalgia, these style guides bring to the writer the advice given to every sales force: pander. But pandering ignores one of the main reasons that readers read: to learn new things, including new words! When I read, I look for writing that has as much new (to me) material in it as I can handle without getting overwhelmed. New words, new ideas, new combinations. I don’t pick up a book looking to read the same 850 words in the shortest possible sentences.
Anyway you can do propaganda in small words and short sentences just as well as you can in big words and long sentences (maybe better). Orwell inverts this reality in his “Politics and the English Language”, arguing that “plain english” is inherently less deceptive. “Bad writers… are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones,” he says. But this isn’t true. It took Trump’s mastery of plain english for liberals to take notice, but they eventually did.
If you’re not pandering and you’re not trying to recapture teutonic vigor the better to help your superior race rule the whole world, then all of the White-Orwell rules go out the window. Short words aren’t better than long ones. Short sentences aren’t better than long ones. Anglo-Saxon words aren’t better than Latin ones. Language is an infinitely creative system endowed to us by miraculous accidents of evolution over millions of years. How degrading to confine ourselves to 850 short words!
No, writing is a relationship between people. A social relation. To be meaningful, advice about writing is advice about this relation. You can be cynical about it and follow University of Chicago writing centre director Larry McEnerney, who tells graduate students
that the writer’s job is to solve a problem for the people with power in their field. You can follow Virginia Tufte and reverse-engineer hundreds of sentences to see what makes them good. The way I think about writing now is as a research phase where you find the resources you need, a first draft phase where, as McEnerney advises, you actually use the writing of the first draft to figure out what you think, and a revision phase where you rewrite the whole thing with your reader in mind.
Instead of thinking of writers as pretentious Latins who don’t use enough simple vigorous Anglo-Saxon words, think about writers as working to reach specific readers with their language. Then you will understand more about how propaganda works than Orwell wanted you to. When the New York Times says that a missile “finds” cafe patrons watching soccer, that’s not because they’re too stupid to use the active voice: it’s because they are connecting with NYT readers, who want to know what is happening in Israel/Palestine in a way that is palatable to their pro-apartheid commitments. Thinking of this as bad writing by stupid writers leads to feelings of smug superiority. That’s fine where Orwell lives but it’s a luxury we (ie., the anti-apartheid side in this case) cannot afford. Time to dump Strunk, White, and Orwell.
