This post is about writing prose. It exists partly to
advertise my own writings, so let us get that bit over first. You can find my
“A-grade History Lectures” here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_8?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=a+grade+history+lectures&sprefix=a+grade+%2Caps%2C1583
And my “Lectures in Scottish History” here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=lectures+in+scottish+&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Alectures+in+scottish+
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I was lucky at school to have an outstanding English
teacher. He told us that the finest sentence ever written in the English
language comes in one of the sermons of John Donne. I see no reason, forty-seven
years later, to disagree with him. Here is the sentence:
“The dust of great persons graves is speechless too, it says
nothing, it distinguishes nothing: as soon the dust of a wretch whom thou
wouldest not, as of a Prince thou couldest not look upon will trouble thine
eyes, if the wind bloweth thither; and when a whirlwind hath blown the dust of
the Churchyard into the Church, and the man sweeps out the dust of the Church
into the Churchyard, who will undertake to sift those dusts again, and to
pronounce, This is the Patrician, this is the noble flower, and this the
yeomanly, this the Plebeian bran.”
(It is pleasing to find that the grammar-checker on my
computer has no objection to this sentence, despite the lack of an apostrophe
and of a pair of inverted commas, where one might expect them)
Later on, as a young adult, I began to read the writings of
George Orwell for pleasure, rather than as set texts. I can remember thinking,
after I had finished “Homage to Catalonia ”
that the use of words had been so good, so luminously clear, that it was almost
as though they did not exist. The black squiggles on the paper provided no
barrier at all between Orwell’s mind and my own.
Around about the time I retired I stumbled upon the writings
of Clive James, whose work had rather passed my by as I was growing old a few
years behind him. (It really is true that class-room teaching can be very
time-consuming.) Not only did I enjoy his prose style hugely, I was also struck
by his judgement that it is harder to write good prose than to write good
poetry; and note that he is an accomplished poet as well as a writer of prose.
It is universally acknowledged, and self-evidently true,
that the best training is to study the great masters. This applies to art, teaching,
music, sport and, I suppose, cookery. Young persons seeking to improve their
own prose cannot do better than read lots and lots of the good prose that has
accumulated over the centuries on library shelves and, in the twenty-first
century, free on-line. I have mentioned three authors worth reading. There are
countless others. One of the turning points for the growing reader is the
discovery that books called “classics” have achieved this status not because
they are boring but because they are read and re-read with pleasure by every
generation.
However, in this blog I will concentrate on Donne and
Orwell, though with frequent references to others.
There is a great deal of discussion just now in the press,
by people involved with education, and (if my circle of acquaintance is
anything to go by) amongst the wider public, about the extent to which the
rules of grammar ought to be taught in schools. There is a widespread anecdotal
feeling that they are not taught enough.
Of course some rules ought to be taught. I work as a history
examiner, and the work of otherwise quite good candidates frequently includes
sentences where the meaning is not clear, or where the words as written mean
the exact opposite of what the candidate must have meant. Common faults include
the use of a plural verb after a singular subject, so that the reader’s mind
casts about for a plural noun somewhere that could be the subject. Or
adjectival clauses, containing present participles, float freely so that the
reader may or may not attach them to the intended phenomenon.
My father (another fine English teacher; not the one
mentioned above) used to write on the blackboard: He did not go to school because he was ill and then ask “Well? Did
he go to school or not?” the correct answer was “Yes. He did go to school, not
because he was ill but for some other reason.” One missing comma can reverse
the whole meaning.
When I became a teacher I was occasionally roped in by the
English department to assist with characters who were re-sitting after poor
results the previous year. My greatest compliment came from the First Fifteen
coach. “What have you been up to? Half my team was discussing the use of the
semi-colon all the way to Durham .”
However, these rules need to be kept in their place; they
are servants not masters. The two things that make the difference between good
and bad prose do not include the accuracy with which specific rules are
applied. The two things are meaning and rhythm. Write with your brain
perpetually alert for meaning and your ear perpetually alert for rhythm.
As far as clarity of meaning is concerned there can be no
better model than George Orwell. Read as much of his journalism as you can get
hold of, and do read his magnificent essay “Politics and the English Language”,
which is freely available on line: https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
Learn from Orwell, if you do not know it already, that words are weapons and
that obscurity in prose is the enemy of freedom.
As far as rhythm is concerned, study the sentence from John
Donne’s sermons with which this post begins and see how the words are used to
make a piece of prose that is a subtly rhythmical as any piece of music. Notice
how short phrases are juxtaposed with long ones, how there are runs and linking
passages and cadences. Hear how the sound of the words is used to evoke the whisper
of dust. Enjoy the way the definite rather than the indefinite article is used;
we do not imagine a man sweeping a church but the man sweeping the
church. And so on.
I am not suggesting you should imitate Donne’s style, but
you can learn from it. Another of my good English teachers – when I was about
ten years old – used to read to us often. As he read “Kidnapped” he pointed out
how easy and pleasurable it was to read, because Robert Louis Stevenson took so
much trouble over the structure of his prose – word choice, rhythm and
punctuation. It is said that RLS would lie awake worrying about a comma, and
get out of bed to make adjustments. Good prose matters.
This post has gone on quite long enough. Perhaps my next
post will be specifically about the writing of history. We shall see.
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Post Script: One of the genuine pleasures of being a history examiner is to be reminded every year how many young people do write excellent prose, even when they are scribbling under extreme pressure.
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