Defining the TermStyle is one of those words that resists easy definition. If you were asked to say, off the cuff and without consulting a dictionary, what style means, you might very well find yourself having to think fairly hard, even if you were not restricting yourself to the literary senses of the word.First of all, you would probably want to distinguish between a style and style in the abstract. A style, you might suggest, is roughly the same as a fashion, a manner, or even a form or a type. Each of those words, however, has as many meanings as style itself, if not more, and none of them is an exact match. A particular style of dress, for example, may be in fashion or out of fashion. Domestic architecture is one type of architecture, but homes can be built in any number of styles. Style in the abstract is equally hard to pin down. Is it the same as elegance, or grace, or beauty? Again, those words come close, but none of them on its own exactly fits what is meant here by style.Style is easier to recognize than it is to define. When someone dresses, serves a meal, handles a situation, dances, or even skateboards with style, most of us are quick to appreciate the fact. We are well aware too that, in using the phrase with style, we are expressing admiration. What we are admiring is not so much what is done but the way in which something is done. The manner in which a particular action is performed strikes us as having a certain something that lifts it above the ordinary. And at this point we are again faced with the problem of trying to say what that certain something is.If we cannot find another single word that exactly reproduces what is meant by style, perhaps we should try to put together a group of words that mean the same thing. Elegance is likely to be one of them, as well as grace and beauty, as suggested before, but self-confidence perhaps belongs in the group as well. Style in the wider world has a lot to do with presentation. It is possible, for instance, to wear clothes that are in themselves stylish and yet to make a distinctly unstylish impression, not simply by being ungainly but also by being shy or timid. A word such as pizzazz might even suggest itself, too. There is often an element of energy or dynamism in things that strike us as stylish. Quiet elegance and classic beauty are definitely not the be-all and end-all of style.We may argue about precisely which words belong in the group, but once we have decided that the word style, in the abstract, denotes a combination of admirable and attractive qualities rather than a quality that can be represented by another single word, we have made considerable progress. We have also made it easier for ourselves to link style in the abstract with what we usually mean by a style.If you set out to describe to someone what a ranch-style home is like, you would probably end up listing the characteristics that distinguish a ranch house and make it different from other types of dwelling. You would say that it has only one story, it has a low-pitched roof, its interior is likely an open plan, and so on. You would probably follow the same procedure if we were describing the Gothic style of architecture. Gothic buildings, you would say, have pointed arches and windows; they have high ceilings supported on slender columns; they also tend to be richly decorated inside and outside. In fact, whatever kind of style you are attempting to describe—in apparel, cooking, or even behavior—you would probably go about the task in the same way, listing the characteristics that make it recognizable. A style, in other words, is a combination of distinctive and recognizable qualities or features, just as style in the abstract is a combination of admirable and attractive qualities. The qualities or features that characterize a particular style will differ in each case and differ again from the qualities that constitute style in general, but since each is a combination or mixture of different elements, there is common ground.Let us now turn our attention to the kind of style that particularly interests us here—writing style—and see how these preliminary observations relate to it.Writing Styles and StyleWhen we use the word style in relation to writing, we need to make the same primary distinction that we made before. We can speak of a style in writing; indeed, if we pay any attention to what we read, we soon notice that there are as many different styles of writing as there are styles of dress or architecture or even types of books or documents. We can also speak of writing style in the abstract and mean something that varies rather less. In both instances, the word denotes a combination of qualities or features.StylesLet us think first of particular styles. We know that many famous writers have a style that is distinctively their own. Ernest Hemingway, for example, did not write in the same style as Charles Dickens did. This was partly, of course, because the former was American and the latter British, and partly because they were dealing with different types of subject matter in their novels and approached their subjects in different ways. It was also because they wrote in different centuries, and both writers and readers thought differently and used English differently in the 20th century from the way they did in the 19th century. Even style in the abstract changes somewhat from century to century. But the difference in these authors' styles stems principally from the simple fact that they were different people with something in common: They were both extremely gifted and original writers. This served to ensure that each of them would find a new way of expressing himself. As a result, few readers who know the works of both writers are likely to mistake a passage of Hemingway for a passage of Dickens, or vice versa, and most great writers, even those who were writing the same kind of book during the same period of history, have equally individual and recognizable styles.However, we do not have to remain in the realms of great literature to notice similar differences in writing technique. Different kinds of book demand different approaches and therefore different styles. Even if you cannot tell a Dickens from a Hemingway, you would probably be able to tell a thriller from a science fiction novel, or a western from a bodice ripper, even without looking at the title and the cover, simply by reading a representative section of the text. Most kinds of popular fiction have certain stylistic conventions, and most of their writers observe them, which is not to imply that popular writers lack individuality, for they most certainly do not.On this subject we need not confine ourselves to books either. A person who writes for a tabloid newspaper is likely to write in a different style from a person who writes for a highbrow magazine or a learned journal. Similarly, a person who produces advertising copy for a computer manufacturer will probably set about the task in a different manner from a copywriter whose brief is to assist in marketing a new brand of hairspray. Nor do we even need to restrict the discussion to professional writers. A lawyer drawing up a contract or other legal document will employ a different style from the one he or she uses in a letter to a client explaining what has been done. And that same lawyer would probably adopt a different style again if writing on everyday subjects to a personal friend. What the lawyer does, we all do as the occasion demands. Whether speaking or writing, we suit the language we use and the way we use it to the purpose and the audience we have to address. In other words, we all have more than one style at our disposal and often switch from one to another by instinct in response to the demands of the situation confronting us. As socially competent and sensitive beings, we can do no less.Furthermore, as has been implied more than once already, variation in style is not entirely dependent on external circumstances. Two people can be faced with the same situation and respond to it in two different ways, because of who they are. Likewise, two people can set out to write the same kind of text under the same circumstances and produce different results, because of who they are. From great writers and popular novelists to journalists and copywriters, from politicians, lawyers, academics, preachers, and the many others whose professional success depends to a greater or lesser extent on skill with words, right down to the ordinary man and woman in the street, all of us are individuals.By virtue of that simple fact, each of us possesses an individual style that cannot be taken away from us. We can try to disguise it, we can choose to ignore it, but if we write at any length, this personal style will almost inevitably show itself. It can mark us out as clearly as our handwriting does so that if we happen to leave a letter unsigned, people who know us will usually still have a good idea of where they should send the reply.So, a multiplicity of styles appears in writing. They may be personal, professional, genre related, or purpose oriented, and lists could be drawn up detailing their particular characteristics. But the fact that they are many and various should not obscure the fact that there is also another specific combination of characteristics that constitutes style as such. Let us change from a quantitative to a qualitative approach and briefly consider what they are.Whatever you happen to be writing and in whatever style, you may write well or you may write badly. Like the stylishness that distinguishes some clothes and some of their wearers, there is a stylishness that some writing and some writers possess and others do not. It is, in fact, a combination of admirable and desirable qualities that all writing ought to aspire to. What are those qualities? In this instance, there is little argument among the experts. The qualities that constitute good writing and style for the purposes of this book are clarity, simplicity, elegance, vigor, and variety. Although, as has been said, the prevailing style changes from century to century, for the past 300 years or so there has been general agreement on the basic principles. What an 18th-century writer considered to be elegant or vigorous differs somewhat from a 21st-century writer's concept of the same qualities, but if either had to make a list of the characteristics that make a piece of writing easy and pleasurable to read, then clarity, simplicity, elegance, vigor, and variety would be sure to figure prominently on it.The Treatment of Style in This BookAs was mentioned in the introduction, this book will deal with style in several different senses of the word. In the preceding subsection, several different aspects of writing style were mentioned. It is now time to sort out which aspects of style are most relevant to our purposes and to set out in greater detail the procedure that will be adopted in dealing with them.Of the points discussed above, the following are crucial to the argument of the book as a whole:- There are very many different writing styles that can be used.
- Each person has his or her own writing style.
- Every writer, far from being limited by personal characteristics, can adopt any one of the many different styles available in order to fulfill a particular purpose (that is, adapt his or her own style in such a way as to make it suitable for the purpose in view).
- There are certain qualities common to all good style: clarity, simplicity, elegance, vigor, and variety.
Now, it will be immediately apparent that it is impossible in a book of this size to discuss every particular kind of writing style that the reader may decide to use or be called upon to use. It is likewise impracticable to discuss the individual aspects of every reader's personal style. The basic procedure adopted in this book will therefore be to work from the general to the particular.We have arrived at a basic definition of what style means in general and in writing, but that definition does not tell us all we need to know about style: where it comes from, how it relates to content, how we put style into our writing. Some very interesting questions have been raised but have so far been left unanswered. In particular, alert readers may have noted a certain tension between the statement that style is a distinctly and unavoidably personal trait in a writer and the equally valid statement that writers can and do write in a variety of different styles. Can that tension be resolved, and if so, how?To What Extent Is Style Personal?Our personalities, our upbringings, and our experiences all inevitably contribute to shaping how we express ourselves. As a result, each of us has his or her own individual style in speech or writing. In fact, the great French novelist Gustave Flaubert—writing, incidentally, in the days before avoiding sexism became a major concern for writers—went so far as to say that "Style is the man himself."There is a great deal of truth in that observation. It is said that Sir Winston Churchill, the great British statesman who was also an extremely popular author, especially of large-scale historical works, would rely on a team of researchers to do most of the information gathering for him. His main task, instead, was to unify the finished product and give it the unique Churchillian stamp, which he did by recasting the material that his researchers had provided into the sonorous rolling prose for which he was famous and which his readers expected. Churchill's readers may have wanted to learn history, but they also wanted to feel the presence of the great man in his work. And he was present in the work—through his style.Few of us possess such an instantly recognizable and reproducible personal style as Churchill's, but equally, few, if any of us, can remain anonymous. It was emphasized earlier that you do not have to be a great writer in order to have an identifiable personal style. We know from common experience that most people when speaking or writing tend to favor particular words or phrases and to put words and phrases together in particular ways. We all know someone who, when confronted by a particular situation, always says the same thing. Most of us find that we remember people from our past not only by how they looked, what they did, and the sound of their voices but by the way in which they habitually used words. How often do we hear people preface a comment with the phrase: "As my grandmother [father/teacher/friend Michael etc.] used to say …"? When they do so, they are implicitly bearing witness to the fact that individuals have their own distinctive way with language.The personal element in writing is very valuable. Teachers certainly think so. They constantly urge students to express their own opinions in their own words. Given the choice, most people would rather read or hear a firsthand impression couched in firsthand words than be offered secondhand thoughts in borrowed language. Given a stack of assignments to grade, teachers especially appreciate anything that shows a fresh approach and speaks to them in a distinctive voice. The same applies outside the education system. People, generally speaking, would rather read a letter or report that appears to have been produced by a living, breathing individual than something that sounds as if it had been issued from a machine. Individuality is to be prized, and if, as has been suggested previously, your personality is bound to show through when you write at any length, then this is something that generally works in your favor. One of the main reasons why people pick up a pen or sit down at the keyboard is to express themselves. You should not be afraid to allow your personal style some scope.In some respects, however, this is easier said than done—at least, easier said than consciously done. Although we each have our own individual style, most people probably find it harder to describe or even recognize their own style than to define style in general. Other people are usually much better able to spot our characteristic behaviors or quirks in everyday life than we are ourselves, and the same is usually true in writing. There is little point in undertaking a lengthy analysis of your own writings to try to ascertain what precisely it is that makes them yours and nobody else's. So, how do you preserve your individuality? The answer was implied in what was said in the previous paragraph about firsthand and secondhand language. To maintain your individuality, avoid, as far as possible, following standard patterns of thought and using stock phrases. Write about what you know or what you have discovered in the words that come naturally to you. And, as a specific means of achieving this aim, try to keep in touch with your speaking voice when you are composing on screen or on paper.Finding Your Own VoiceIf individuality is so valuable, some might ask, what is the point of books like this one? Why should writers not simply do what comes naturally, especially if they are being advised to "write as they talk"?The nature of the relationship between a person's speaking voice and the way in which he or she writes will be dealt with shortly. Suffice it to say for the moment that first a sense of proportion must be kept. Unfettered individualism is a somewhat dubious commodity in any sphere. The basic rules of good writing apply to everybody, and everybody's writing is likely to be improved by following them. Second, far from diminishing the personal quality of your writing, working in accordance with the advice offered in a book like this one may actually enhance it.In book reviews you often find the critic saying that an author has found, or is beginning to find, "his or her own voice" in a particular work. This is a cliché of book reviewing, but, for our purposes, a rather interesting one. What do reviewers mean when they use it?They are saying that the author has now arrived at an original and distinctive manner of putting his or her ideas across and thereby implying that in his or her earlier works the author either showed a general lack of originality or was experimenting unsuccessfully with style, or had been unduly influenced by other books on similar subjects or of a similar nature. Writers are, after all, continually being urged to check out what book or magazine publishers want before submitting their own material, and a beginner author will often feel that the easiest way to get published is to give publishers more of the kind of thing they have published before.Everyone at some time or other, wittingly or unwittingly, copies what others have done before. The previous references to firsthand and secondhand thought and language imply as much. Imitating others—which is subtly different from simply copying their words or ideas—can be a valuable learning and confidence-building exercise. The first time a person has to write a business letter, say, or a letter to a newspaper, he or she is very likely to look at the way other people usually write the one or the other for fear of sounding like an ignorant beginner who does not know the standard conventions. There is no disgrace in that; almost everyone does it. It is useful to know what the standard forms and courtesies are. This book contains numerous illustrations of how, in the authors' opinion, certain tasks should be tackled and certain kinds of document should be written. The user of this book is welcome to take inspiration from them if they serve his or her purpose; in fact, their very purpose is to offer examples that the user can learn from rather than borrow so that he or she can find personal solutions to the problems and ways of approaching writing tasks—just as the more experienced novelist eventually finds his or her own voice.Only with practice, and with the increase in skill that comes with practice, do writers acquire the ability and the confidence to say new things in a fresh and distinctive way. The confidence to use your own voice comes from knowing what you are doing and knowing that you are able to do it well. Nothing, perhaps, surpasses practice as a builder of confidence, but understanding the essential principles of style as set forth in a guidebook like this one certainly helps.Can Style Be Learned?Yes. That much should be evident from what was said in the previous subsection. Some people are born with a special gift for language and self-expression, just as some people are born with a special aptitude for playing the piano or playing baseball. Even child prodigies and other exceptionally talented people, however, have to learn the standard techniques; they simply learn them much faster and are ready to strike out on their own much sooner than ordinary mortals. People of less staggering ability can at least approach the standard of the precociously gifted by proceeding at their own pace. People of ordinary ability who want to write, play the piano, play baseball, or master any other skill can go a long way by following good advice and practicing.The basics of a good style in writing are not rocket science. You can learn them from this book. You can learn more by reading other books, fiction or nonfiction, and by careful attention to not only what the authors say but how they say it. Copy what they do or say only if you have to, but remember that to reproduce another writer's words without quotation marks and without an acknowledgment or, in the case of longer borrowings, without permission from the author or publisher is plagiarism. Above all, write as much as you can on any subject that interests you. The best way of learning is always by doing.How Does Style Relate to Content?Style is sometimes spoken and written of as if it were a kind of optional extra. There is a view of the writing process that suggests that it operates as follows: You have an idea, you put that idea into ordinary words, then you translate those ordinary words into grander or more stylish words if the words you first thought of were not impressive enough.This bears some relation to how writers usually proceed, but it is a highly simplified account and based on a false notion of style. It is, in fact, rather difficult to explain the relationship between ideas and words or to explain the process by which a piece of writing gets written. To get around the problem, writers frequently resort to metaphor, and a favorite metaphor from the 18th century onward has compared thought to the human body and language to its clothes. "Style is the dress of thought," according to organist and composer Samuel Wesley, the son and nephew of the founders of Methodism; in other words, a writer "clothes" his or her thoughts in suitable language.Unfortunately, this metaphor has probably helped promote a false notion of style and its relation to content. Just as a person might have one set of clothes for everyday purposes and another more stylish set for going out or evenings, so, it is reckoned, a writer or speaker may use one kind of language if he or she is not being style-conscious and another kind of language when he or she wants to impress. Style, therefore, becomes a kind of dressing up. Worse still, if we took the metaphor to its logical conclusion, we would have to conclude that language or style covers or conceals thought, for the basic function of clothing is to cover or conceal the human body. If language really were like clothing, then you would have to strip off that clothing to see the idea clearly. That, surely, is not a very positive or helpful starting point for a discussion of this very important relationship.Style is the expression of thought rather than its dress. The relationship between what you want to communicate and the way in which you actually communicate it ought to be as close as possible. After all, when you write something, what you intend to communicate to the person you are writing to or for are ideas, rather than words as such. Words are simply the means you use to get the ideas across. On that basis, the most important matter is that the words you use should not get in the way of, obscure, or detract from the ideas that constitute your message to your reader. The best style is that which is one with the thought it expresses, which encapsulates that thought in such a way that the hearer or reader understands perfectly and with little effort what the writer or speaker is trying to say.Language and ThoughtFor most purposes it is convenient to consider thought and language as if they were separate and distinct, thereby giving meaning to the concept of putting one's thoughts into words. Yet neither this separation nor the familiar phrase that derives from it entirely corresponds to the nature of thought as we usually experience it. Further investigation into this relationship can clarify and reinforce the statements about style made in the previous paragraph.Thought does not usually exist apart from language. Some people perhaps think in images most of the time. All of us sometimes see things in our mind in the form of a picture or have an idea in the form of a feeling about something. When that happens, we have to divide our consciousness so that one part of our mind can consider the vision or feeling experienced by another part and attempt to find words to describe it. Most of us, however, for most of the time think in words. We think "Those flowers would look better in a blue vase" or "Harold is a perfect saint." We do not generally see an image of the spray of flowers in a blue vase or conjure up a picture of Harold in white robes with a halo around his head. The ideas, rather, present themselves to us already verbalized.In a great many cases, then, it is difficult to separate an idea from the words in which it enters our minds. Content, therefore, does not usually change its essential form in the process of becoming a finished written document. It does not make sense to speak of "putting words into words," so what are we actually doing when we write?As has already been said, what we set out to communicate are ideas, not words as such. Thus, when we say to someone "Harold is a perfect saint," our intention is not to make our listeners envision Harold in robes or halo, nor, in the first instance, to imprint the particular manner in which we have expressed our thoughts on their minds. It is rather to impress upon them the fact that Harold is, at least in our opinion, an exceptionally good or exceptionally patient and forbearing person. Our essential purpose is to express our opinion of Harold and/or to change or reinforce other people's opinion of him. The words we use to do this are important inasmuch as the idea does not exist, or at least cannot be communicated, without them, but there their importance really begins and ends.Thought may most often come to us in verbal form, but the same thought can be expressed in different ways. The previous paragraph illustrates as much. We might say,Harold is a perfect saint. or we might equally say,Harold is an exceptionally patient and forbearing person. Which of these two—or of all the other possible variants of this particular statement—we actually say during a conversation will probably depend on which of them comes into our head first at the time. Which of them we write may likewise be determined on a "first-come-first-served"—or, in this case, "first used"—basis. But, when we are writing, we are not held captive to the inspiration of the moment. We have time to reflect, to ask ourselves, Is there a better way of putting this? or Of the various ways of expressing this idea, which is the best or which best suits the context and/or my purpose in writing? It is at that point, during that moment of reflection, that considerations of style come into play. We then have to decide, in this particular instance, whether a metaphor—Harold is a perfect saint—or a more straightforward expression better fulfills our aim.The criteria we should use in making such decisions are the subject matter of this book. For the moment, we are simply concerned with the type of decision that is involved. It is less often a decision as to how to put something abstract into words and more often a decision as to whether to accept, reject, or modify the wording in which a particular idea presents itself to us. And that, in a nutshell, is the style-conscious writer's basic task.Summing UpIn summing up the relationship between style and content, let us try to get away once and for all from the old clothing metaphor and find a newer one. Language, and therefore style, relates to content roughly as the computer or television screen relates to the image displayed on it. The screen is not the same thing as the image, but you cannot view the image without it. Language is not the same thing as the idea, but you cannot, as a writer, express the idea without it. The screen may need to be adjusted to give the clearest and sharpest picture possible. Your language may need to be adjusted likewise. But just as, in most instances, you do not want your screen image to appear in unnaturally bright colors, so you will not generally want to add extraneous color to your writing. All you want is for the ideas to shine through.Metaphors apart, most ideas will present themselves to you already formulated, or at least partly formulated, in language. Your job then is to accept, reject, or modify that formulation. Your first formulation may or may not be the best. Paradoxical as it may sound, your first formulation may not even be the one that is most personal to you, since ideas can easily present themselves first in secondhand terms. What is certain is that the more active your imagination, the more language you have at your immediate disposal, and the greater your skill in manipulating language, the more interesting will be both your initial formulations and the modifications you will be able to make if your initial formulation seems in any way unsatisfactory.In the interval between having the initial inspiration and writing down the idea, you have the opportunity to reflect and make decisions. There are several questions you may ask yourself in the process of making this decision: Is this the best way of putting this? Is this clear? Is this sufficiently distinct from what I have said before? and so forth. But among those questions—just to link this discussion back to another of our main concerns—may be the following: Is this a fresh way of putting it? Is this what I want to say? Is this how I would naturally say it? Is this me? Style as such and your own personal style both come into consideration at this moment, and the best answer to the question will usually be one that reconciles the two.At What Point in the Writing Process Should the Writer Be Most Concerned about Style?For a full account and analysis of the writing process, the reader is referred to part I of The Facts On File Guide to Good Writing. A brief summary will suffice here.The writing process has four stages: thinking and researching, planning, writing, and revising. Considerations of style actually enter the process at the very beginning, since when you decide what kind of work you intend to write you are more or less bound to decide at the same time what style you intend to write it in. Even if you do not make a conscious choice between, say, an informal or formal style, an academic or a journalistic style, but merely decide to go ahead and "write it as it comes," you have implicitly opted for your own "default" personal style. Nevertheless, in the nature of things, considerations of style are likely to loom largest in the latter two stages of the writing process, when you are composing and when you are revising.Methods of CompositionPeople set about the task of composition in different ways. Some people rush off a first draft, looking neither right nor left, as it were, and trying not to stop for anybody or anything. What is important for them is to get something down on paper in whatever form. What they write may be ungrammatical, may lack punctuation, may not be divided into paragraphs—none of that matters to them. What they are writing is simply a draft: correctness and style can be dealt with later. Other people feel painfully exposed if they are aware that they are leaving a lot of errors and infelicities in their wake. They prefer to proceed from a solid foundation, not to erect a temporary structure that has to be shored up and fitted out later. They proceed slowly and carefully and do their best to get it right the first time. Such people are likely to be more intensely aware of style matters while composing than the members of the get-it-all-down-as-quickly-as-possible school.The practice of most people will probably lie somewhere between these two extremes. There will be times when ideas come thick and fast and their writing seems to flow. There will be other times when the words only come like blood from a stone, or when the writer becomes absorbed in some key passage and works away at it until he or she is able to fix it in something like a final form.Every writer should feel free to work at his or her own pace—so far as deadlines will allow—and to adopt the method that suits him or her best. The method advocated in The Facts On File Guide to Good Writing is simply intended as a guide to the most logical approach. If any individual's method necessitates ignoring matters of style at any interim stage in the writing process, then so be it. The one stage at which considerations of style cannot be ignored, however, is the final one, the revision stage.Revising for StyleThe style-conscious writer's basic task is to accept, reject, or modify the wording in which a particular idea is presented. The writer is likely to perform this sort of operation many times in any writing session, except when consciously suppressing the urge to correct in order to speed ahead. During revision, however, this is the writer's sole task. He or she should work through the entire text checking each and every sentence for its relevance to the work as a whole and using the criteria set forth in this book to assess whether the sentence is stylistically as near perfect as it can be made.At any point up through the final draft, a writer may get a better idea or may reject whole paragraphs or even whole sections as they stand and decide to rewrite them. Everyone gets last-minute second thoughts at some time or other. But these too, once they are written down, should be submitted to the same rigorous process of revision. Style, as has been suggested, may well be among your first thoughts when you begin. It should definitely be among your final thoughts as you prepare to produce a clean version of the finished text.Adding and SubtractingStyle tends to be thought of as something added on, as in the traditional clothing metaphor; however, in order to arrive at the best and most stylish way of expressing a particular idea, writers as often have to remove unnecessary or inappropriate words as they have to insert more elegant or telling ones. Gardeners have to prune their plants to keep them in shape and in a healthy condition. Writers frequently have to carry out similar operations on their text. The more elegant, simple, and vigorous version of what you have to say may be hidden under a mass of words struggling to get out. Be flexible and open-minded when you are revising your work. Do not automatically assume that improving it means adding to it. Remember the old adage Less is more. It is frequently cited in regard to short-story writing, but it equally applies to other types of writing.Do not, on the other hand, take too much to heart the equally old advice to Kill your darlings. The British scholar and author Dr. Samuel Johnson was given the following advice by his college tutor: "Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out." Since Johnson's own work is full of fine, high-sounding passages, however, we can safely assume that he did not himself follow this instruction to the letter. Nonetheless, never fall in love with your own compositions to the extent that you feel they are beyond criticism. Always try to distance yourself from them—especially from the "particularly fine passages"—and read them as an uninvolved outsider would. If, at the end, you are satisfied that they are bold and imaginative rather than inflated and overwrought, leave them as they are.Criticism and Self-CriticismWhen you are trying to decide whether you need to add to or subtract from your text in order to perfect it, it is useful to know whether you are by nature a wordy or a laconic writer. As has been said before, identifying the characteristic strengths and weaknesses of your personal style is difficult. But all criticism is difficult—especially self-criticism. Identifying the shortcomings of a particular piece of work may be an extremely unwelcome task for any author; after all, the writer has struggled through to the final period, become rather attached to the way he or she has formulated particular ideas, and has an ego to protect and nurture just like anyone else. You can stare and stare at a piece of your own writing, sometimes knowing instinctively that there is something wrong with it, yet be unable to conjure up any ideas for making it better. At this point, you need help if you can get it.Self-criticism is the handiest form of criticism because the critic does not have to be summoned away from some other activity to offer an opinion. Self-criticism, however, usually only develops with experience and demands a certain kind of temperament. Besides, if we are honest with ourselves, self-criticism often takes it cue from criticism offered by outsiders. It is often they who first point out what we are doing wrong. If we are wise, we internalize what they have to say and apply it to our own work, without prompting, the next time around.The aspiring writer should be grateful for criticism from any source. Gratitude is not, of course, the usual emotion that we feel when someone takes a piece that we have labored long and hard to bring to completion and rips it to shreds. Nevertheless, it is an unfortunate truth that we usually learn more from having our faults pointed out than from having our virtues commended. If you can find someone who is able to mix appreciation of your good points into a candid appraisal of your weaknesses, then you will have found the best possible kind of help. But it is better to bite the bullet and offer your work to someone who will deal harshly with it (sometimes in order to enhance his or her own ego at the expense of yours) so long as that person offers specific and fairly detailed comments. Nothing is more frustrating for a writer than to be told, after a cursory inspection, "It looks fine to me." So, try to find someone, preferably a knowledgeable person, who has the time to read through your work and will give an honest and detailed opinion of it. Treasure anything that person says, even though you may have difficulty accepting it with grace at the time, and even though you think he or she may be wrong. You retain the final decision as to whether to act on the criticism or not. If you find the same criticism being offered by several different people or with respect to several different pieces of work, then the chances are that a characteristic weakness of your way of writing has come to light. This knowledge gives you a chance to amend it.What Should the Relationship Be between the Way You Speak and the Way You Write?It was suggested earlier in this chapter that one way of preserving the valuable personal element in your writing is to endeavor to stay in touch with your speaking voice. There is yet another old adage that advises writers to Write as you talk. Will the golden age of writing therefore arrive once everyone possesses voice-recognition software and can speak to a computer without the need for such irritating intermediaries as the keyboard and in the certain knowledge that what eventually appears on the screen will be good style? No.The write-as-you-talk injunction is a useful reminder not to try to be too pretentious when writing. In earlier times, critics sometimes complained that a writer's work "smelled too much of the inkhorn," by which they meant that the work seemed to have been produced by a cloistered individual who had little contact with everyday life and language and was writing simply for a select band of equally erudite or pedantic readers. The modern-day equivalent would perhaps be the kind of prose that is sometimes found in learned journals or official documents and is full of specialist polysyllabic words and unexplained acronyms.While nobody appreciates writing that is self-consciously arty, there are dangers in going too far in the other direction. Some modern novelists write long passages in the slang or jargon of the streets, and these can be just as difficult to follow as the most formidably academic writing. But these writers, perhaps, write as someone else talks, rather than as they talk themselves.In reality, few people write precisely as they talk. Most people probably feel they do not speak well enough—that is, fluently, eloquently, and correctly enough—to want their conversational style recorded and passed on, potentially, to posterity. When they sit down to write, they automatically set their sights a little higher and consequently use language more carefully and more formally than they would do if they were addressing a listener across the room rather than an invisible reader. It is right that they should do so. The main advantage that writing has over talking is that it is a delayed-action medium. The writer has time to reflect on what he or she is saying, to have second thoughts, to go through a revision stage before submitting a work for inspection. As has been said before, the moment of reflection is the moment of decision, the crucial moment for considerations of style. Even writers of slang take the opportunity to polish it. The talker usually has to think on his or her feet and has a limited time in which to get a point across. Talk is often full of stops and starts and repetitions and digressions and apologies, and is backed up by hand gestures and eye contact (or lack of it) and body language in general. With the best will in the world, you can hardly reproduce all of these on paper, even if you wish to, even if you are writing dialogue. Nor, in fact, is there any need to try to do so.That said, however, language does seem to live a fuller life somehow when it is being used in speech. It does need to come out into the open air and be traded between people. Spoken language may often be imperfect, ungrammatical, or disjointed, but equally often it is lively, inventive, and colorful. It arises on the spur of the moment out of immediate contact with situations, as the vast majority of writing does not. Writing almost always is, in the phrase William Wordsworth used to define poetry, "emotion recollected in tranquillity." There are distinct advantages in that, but the danger is that the tranquillity may get the better of the emotion. The text of a play or a poem only comes completely to life when it is spoken by a living actor or reciter. Certain of the finer points of style, similarly, can only be appreciated if you are aware of the spoken value of the words on the page. If it were possible to get the best of both worlds, that would surely be the ideal solution.To some extent it is possible. Instead of trying to write exactly as you talk, rather make sure that what you write is speakable in your own voice. To do this you do not necessarily have to read your text to yourself aloud. You may well find yourself unconsciously saying the words "in your mind's voice" as you write them down. If you do not do this automatically, try making a conscious effort to do so. Listen to your text. Listen, especially, to anything you have written that looks long or complicated on paper. Say it over to yourself internally, and if it does not roll off the mind's "tongue," say it again aloud. If it does not lend itself to being spoken in your normal speaking voice, then this fact should immediately put you on your guard. If it does not sound "right" or does not sound "like you," it is advisable to make changes. Work on the sentence or paragraph in question until it becomes speakable with little effort. Thus you not only follow the spirit of the injunction to write as you talk; you also keep in touch with your own style.Imagination is, obviously, an extremely valuable faculty in a writer. We are more or less conditioned to think of imagination as a kind of visual faculty operating through the mind's eye. From much that has been said in this chapter, however, it should be apparent that "the mind's voice" is, if anything, a more important part of the writer's equipment. It formulates ideas, it checks for readability, and it can help to keep you in touch with the greater world outside. Use it.
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