English - The Complex and The Simple

 KH and I have had long chats over current writing styles, where mine fits, and why mine does not seem to fit. KH puts much down to MFA prejudice, I put much down to being from the Midwest. I never expected to be fashionable - I am too old, my interests too removed from current concerns, regionally unsound, and with the wrong initials after my name - but both my tone and substance seem to be of little interest. So, I have a bias in citing the following from David Bentley Hart's How to Write English Prose:

Simplicity is difficult, after all, no less than complexity. Both require taste and skill. Neither is less artificial or more natural than the other. Both are necessary for good writing. And when either becomes a forced regimen, exclusive of the other, the results can be only hideous. Good writing is produced not by forsaking the beautiful for the sublime or the exorbitant for the restrained, but by finding new ways of orchestrating the interplay between them. Now, all the authorities of the age seem to concur, the literary performer should treat the organ’s console as a collection of decadent temptations to be resisted; he or she should confine the performance to a single manual, played with two fingers, with no stops pulled and the pedals never so much as brushed by an errant shoe-tip.

Mr. Hart provides five examples of what he considers fine writing, and they are fine examples (one being Nabokov) before proposing some rules. They woke me up.

He writes about vocabulary. I think practicing law dumbed down my vocabulary. No lawyer lost a case assuming the judge hearing the case was a functional moron. Keeping ideas simple, with only one idea per sentence, keeping the language within the terms of previous cases constitute good legal writing. Keep away from Faulkner, Henry James, and Winston S. Churchill, and lean one's sentences into Hemingway. Hart writes not to worry about challenging the reader with new words. One does not challenge judges with new words, new ideas.

I do use a thesaurus, but not usually with success. Hart warns against its use entirely. Sometimes it jogs my memory, and sometimes it causes me to use entirely different words. I find the dictionary ends my frustrations with a thesaurus.

Without being as formal, I have always had a version of this in my head:

6. The exotic is usually more delightful than the familiar. Be kind to your readers and give them exotic things when you can. In general, life is rather boring, and a writer should try to mitigate that boredom rather than contribute to it.

I give credit for thinking this way to Oscar Wilde. I do worry more about being boring in what I tell than how I tell it.

As to style, I think myself too old to have one, but do like this rule of Hart's:

8. If you must choose between elegance and perfect clarity, allow yourself a period of decorously agonized indecision, and then always choose elegance.

Elegance is not something I attribute to myself, but that sure sounds like a good goal.

Legal writing emphasizes the active voice. When revising "True Love Ways Gone Astray" I did do away with a lot of passive voice, but there are times doing so makes nonsense of what is being told. I think Hart formulates a better rule here:

12. Orwell then commands: “Never use the passive where you can use the active.” This is perhaps the worst rule of style ever proposed by anyone. All of literary history proclaims its imbecility. Instead: “Avoid the passive voice when the active works better and vice versa.” After all, in life we sometimes act and sometimes are acted upon. The causal dialectic between agency and patiency, to use the scholastic terms, is intrinsic to finitude.

The following rule I picked up in prison from our writing groups and from my father going blind.

19. Always read what you have written aloud. No matter how elaborate your prose, it must flow; it must feel genuinely continuous. This is not to say one must imitate natural speech; it is only to say that one must try to capture its rhythms. If what you have written is awkward on your tongue, then it is awkward on the page.

 I always hated reading out loud, I do not like the sound of my own voice, but I had to overcome all that to know how it would sound to my father. It works.

Hart really hates Strunk and White, which was the handbook for my legal writing courses in law school. It does work for legal writing for the very reasons Hart hates it for other writing.

He has more rules but I will close out with this one:

 18. All these vapidly doctrinaire injunctions—urging you to write only plain declarative sentences stripped of modifiers and composed solely of words familiar to the average ten-year-old and demanding that you always prefer charcoal-gray to sumptuous purple—are expressions of everything spiritually deadening about late modernity and its banausic values. They reflect an epoch in which the mysterious, the evocative, and the beautifully elliptical have been systematically suppressed and nearly extinguished in the name of the efficient, the practical, the mechanical, and the starkly unambiguous—in short, in the name of everything that makes existence uninviting and life boring. They are reflections of an age of bloodless capitalist economism, the reign of brutally common sense, the barbarian triumph of function over form, a spare, Spartan civic architecture of featureless glass and steel and plastic, a consumerist society that lives on the ceaseless production and disposal of intrinsically graceless conveniences. Learn to detest all of these things and you will be a better writer for having done so.

I think he hits on what I want to do, and what I am finding disturbing on what I have been reading. 

sch 1/13/23