Clear and simple as the truth
Everyone talks about style, but no one explains it. The authors of this book do; and in doing so, they provoke the reader to consider style, not as an elegant accessory of effective prose, but as its very heart. At a time when writing skills have virtually disappeared, what can be done? If only people learned the principles of verbal correctness, the essential rules, wouldn't good prose simply fall into place? Thomas and Turner say no. Attending to rules of grammar, sense, and sentence structure will no more lead to effective prose than knowing the mechanics of a golf swing will lead to a hole-in-one. Furthermore, ten-step programs to better writing exacerbate the problem by failing to recognize, as Thomas and Turner point out, that there are many styles with different standards. In the first half of Clear and Simple, the authors introduce a range of styles - reflexive, practical, plain, contemplative, romantic, prophetic, and others - contrasting them to classic style. Its principles are simple: The writer adopts the pose that the motive is truth, the purpose is presentation, the reader is an intellectual equal, and the occasion is informal. Classic style is at home in everything from business memos to personal letters, from magazine articles to university writing. The second half of the book is a tour of examples - the exquisite and the execrable - showing what has worked and what hasn't.
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What Hacker News says
- - Minto's Pyramid Principle (writing as structure; state your point and then unfold more and more details as you go)
- Clear and Simple as the Truth (writing in the "classic style")
- There is no dearth of books about writing, with many recommendation threads on HN already.
- Research the mental model of the "rhetorical move". You will find that there are several books on using patterns in writing. Many are written for non-native speakers of English engaging in academic writing. But the idea is very useful for all genres!
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You didn't ask for them, but here are some favorite tips:
Think about your writing structurally / architecturally. Be mindful of patterns. Strive for clarity and concision. Know and consider your audience.
Read. Question what you read. What qualities does the writing have? Why? What structures and patterns does the writing have? What are the functions of the parts and the whole? Why and how do the patterns and functions work well?
Question your own drafts. What qualities do you want your writing to have? Why? What is the essence of those qualities? Have you achieved them? Can you design exercises for yourself to develop those qualities?
Write every day. Engage in deliberate practice of certain aspects of writing.
Write and revise several drafts. Let drafts incubate.
Try writing by hand. Try writing on notecards and rearranging them in piles or on your physical desktop. Try dictating and transcribing. Try typing each sentence on its own line (it makes rearrangement easier by moving lines up or down with keyboard shortcuts in a text editor like Sublime Text). Try thinking through and mindmapping your structure before writing the draft. Try drafting in a good outliner, such as Bike or OmniOutliner.
Develop and maintain a professional relationship with a good human editor.
- Regarding the passive: you should read Joseph M. Williams' "Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace" that discusses where the passive voice is preferable to the active voice. Namely when it creates better cohesion and flow.
The whole idea behind Williams' (and Gopen's and McEnerny's – they are all from the University of Chicago) style is that you should arrange your words so that they sit in the correct positions. Namely something old in the beginning of the sentence (paragraph, section...), something new in the end. Something important in the stress position. Something contextual in the topical position. Etc.
The use of the passive is precisely that it lets you rearrange sentences so that certain parts go in "the other" position, that would be unnatural in an active construction, but that is correct in the logic of the sentence.
This is practical style, by the way. Look up Thomas' and Turner's "Clear and simple as the truth" for a discussion of different styles and a tutorial in "classic style".
- Four books have made me a far better writer. I recommend folks read them all:
- Strunk & White
- On Writing Well
- Style: Towards Clarity and Grace
- Clear and Simple as the Truth
I read them in that order and each felt like a revelation.
- > Are you referring to “Classic” style of prose as it is portrayed in the book “Clear and Simple as the Truth”?
No, although that's an excellent book. I'm referring to the essay-writing tradition that started with Michel de Montaigne (who first used the word 'essay' in that sense). He was a skeptic and thought of essays as wandering and exploratory, not probative.
- Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose by Noel and Turner.
I read it when I was trying to find a writing tone that I was comfortable with. Should it be casual, cool, and excited! with lots of exclamations? or detached, clinical, and precise? or, flowery, fluffy, and inserting difficult words, especially "dichotomy" everywhere I could?
One ideal I enjoyed was the 90s hacker writing aesthetic. PG's essays for example. It is easy to say "edit, edit, rewrite", but the tone was not easily pinned down.
Clear and Simple as the Truth is the best writing book that I've read - it answered these questions for me thoroughly, and the writing is delightful. I've read it cover to cover twice, and find myself enjoying a few quotes on occasion.
A quick takeaway among many - it is the sophistication and clarity of thought that matters, not one's facility with the language.
"Great painters are often less skillful than mediocre painters; it is their concept of painting—not their skills—that defines their activity. Similarly, a foreigner may be less skillful than a native speaker at manipulating tenses or using subjunctives, but nonetheless be an incomparably better writer. Intellectual activities generate skills, but skills do not generate intellectual activities."
- George Gopen hails from the same school of writing as Joseph Williams[1] and Larry McInerny[2]. He has also written a book that dives deeper into things[3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Style:_Lessons_in_Clarity_and_...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM
[3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3393233-the-sense-of-str...
Unfortunately, [3] is a bit tedious, IMO, go for [1], which is the best book about writing, bar none.
Second best in principle is Thomas' & Turner's "Clear and simple as the truth", but it is hardly applicable to scientific (or technical) writing. If you're thinking about writing essays, get T&T.
