George Orwell is one of my favorite authors and I think his essay "Politics and the English Language" is a highlight of his work. I'm not sure how I overlooked giving it as a reading assignment for this class. Finding the mention of it in "On Writing Well" confirmed my favorable opinion of Zinsser.
If you don't read the Orwell essay, let me call to your attention to these words of advice from it:
"(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 outright barbarous."
I'm out of town until Monday night when I will have my highlighter out again.
I certainly agree with both Zinsser and Orwell about the need for brevity and simplicity. Short words are usually better than long, and we should eliminate unnecessary words from sentences. Barbara Tuchman, the author of The Guns of August, makes the same point. In Practicing History, a collection of essays about writing history, Tuchman says, “[i]n my opinion, short words are always preferable to long ones; the fewer syllables the better.”
ReplyDeleteTuchman also stresses that the writer must eliminate the unnecessary sentence from the paragraph, and the extraneous paragraph from the essay.
“[The writer of history] must do the preliminary work for the reader, assemble the information, make sense of it, select the essential, discard the irrelevant – above all, discard the irrelevant – and put the rest together so that it forms a developing dramatic narrative.”
Not that she thinks doing so is easy: “Discarding the unnecessary,” she writes, “requires courage and also extra work.”
“The historian is continually being beguiled down fascinating byways and sidetracks. But the art of writing – the test of the artist – is to resist beguilement and cleave to the subject.”
So whether we focus on the word, the sentence, the paragraph, or the story, the message is the same: Stick to the point if you want the reader to stick with your story.
Thanks for sharing, Andy. I had not read this good advice from Tuchman, one of my favorite historians.
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