How to avoid Bad English

Good books on the practice of writing are rare. Sir A. Quiller-Couch’s On the Art of Writing is extraordinarily good. It contains the lectures he delivered at Cambridge just before the war; and even readers who do not desire to write at all will find Sir Arthur’s jokes very amusing and his criticisms, general and particular, sound and (what is more unusual) new. He touches a great variety of subjects, though always in some relation to the main theme. He is especially illuminating on the Authorized Version, and on Homer’s skill in dealing with the “Primary Difficulty of Verse”—that is to say, the difficulty of filling up the interstices between highly emotional passages without lapsing into dull prosiness. His most diverting chapter is that on what he calls “Jargon,” which he distinguishes from Journalese. The distinction he draws may be appreciated if I concoct examples of both commodities. Writing in “Jargon” I might say:

“In the case of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch I am proud and happy to associate myself in the fullest sense with a work of this useful, elevating, instructive, and educative character.”

Writing in Journalese, as he defines it, I might say:

“‘Q.’s brilliant book goes to the root of the matter. It strikes home. He is out to slay the dragons of bad writing. He burns them with the fire of his passion. He lashes them with the scourge of his invective. He tears them to shreds and tatters with the shrapnel of his ridicule. He will not sheathe the sword until ...”

Yes.... The first kind consists of woolly, indefinite words, of redundancies and shapeless prolixities; the man who writes the second is trying to produce what he believes to be “literature” by means of imagery and rhythmical movement. Sir Arthur says that the greatest propagators of Jargon are public bodies, politicians, and so on; but he recognizes that journalists also use it. The two things, in fact, are often seen in one article. I conceive that there might be passages which would fall into either of Sir Arthur’s classes. But there is a clear difference between bad sentences produced by an effort to say something and those produced by an effort to say something vividly. All bad writers, however, have common defects, and these are dealt with in other chapters.

Every one who has thought about the art at all has discovered for himself the truths that Sir Arthur tabulates. One must aim at accuracy (a word that covers almost everything that is needful) and at clarity; one must, normally, prefer the concrete to the abstract word, and the short word to the long; and one must avoid the superfluous adjective. How well we know these rules; how certain we are of their validity; how feebly we struggle to obey them! At all times the ready-made sentence, the makeshift epithet, the pot-shot image must have been ready to the hand. In the present age, when we live in a honeycomb of print and begin each day by exposing ourselves, before, during, or after breakfast, to masses of the weakest English we can find, the job of writing well is more difficult than ever. Our fluency is the measure of our accursed memory. We have bales of phrases ready for every experience we describe; our pigeon-holes are stuffed with dead metaphors and bogus synonyms; and we are always ready to say in six words what ought to be said in two. Every time we sit down at a desk or open our lips to speak, the nymphs Jargonia and Journalesia, besieging us as the sylphs besieged St. Anthony, hold out their hands full of glittering treasures which will save us the trouble of thinking. Usually we do not even see them; we find the fatal gifts in our hands and employ them without remembering their origin. And the descent to hell is rapid.

It is good to revise: to correct, to improve, and to delete. Few, even of the most careful writers, find their proof-sheets free from trite and superfluous words which they would be ashamed to publish. It is better still to think long before writing, to make sure that one’s thoughts are clear-cut before one gives them a visible form. That habit it is a writer’s duty to acquire. But it does not do to be incessantly and acutely conscious of the qualities of good writing and the difficulty of securing them. That way madness lies. Sometimes, to a man who broods overmuch on these things, every phrase will appear a cliché, and every word a dummy. “God help me!” he will moan, “I have called the sun ‘bright’ and the grass ‘green’! Millions of men before me have written ‘bright sun’ and ‘green grass.’ I know I did not think freshly and independently at these objects. I put the adjectives down mechanically. I have merely heard that the grass was green. Why haven’t I looked at it through my own eyes? If a real writer looked at it, I don’t for a moment suppose that its greenness would be the attribute which would impinge most forcibly upon him. Very likely it isn’t green at all.” This, I say, does not do. I don’t suggest that there is anything peculiar about grass which should make a novel statement about it impossible. In fact, Swinburne said that grass is hair, and Mr. Chesterton has very probably said that it is red. I merely use “green grass” as an example of the sort of thing that an exaggerated fastidiousness might lead a man to question in his own work.

There remains one property of good prose that no amount of painstaking or instruction can produce. That is rhythm. It is, indeed, remarkable that one of the most elaborate analyses of prose rhythms hitherto made was made by a writer whose own prose is anything but musical. Either Providence has given a man an ear or it has not; if it has not, he will not write great prose. But his prose will be better in proportion as he obeys the principles of good writing as “Q.” enunciates them. One suggestion more might be useful for him. That is, that he will be well advised in making his uneuphonious sentences short if he desires his writing to be an efficient instrument of persuasion.