Book/Clear and Simple as the Truth
Properties
- logseq-entity
- Logseq/Entity/Book
- created-by
- Person/Francis-Noël Thomas, Person/Mark Turner
- date-created
- 1994
Clear and Simple as the Truth
About
- Subtitled Writing Classic Prose. Published by Princeton University Press in 1994; the Princeton Legacy Library reissued it in 2017.
- The book treats style as a set of decisions about the writer's relationship to the subject and to the reader, rather than as polish applied to sentences that are already written. Its argument against rule lists is that attending to grammar, sense and sentence structure produces effective prose no more reliably than knowing the mechanics of a golf swing produces a hole-in-one.
- Classic style rests on four things the writer assumes: that the motive is truth, that the purpose is presentation, that the reader is an intellectual equal, and that the occasion is informal. Prose written on those assumptions reads as a window onto something the writer has seen, and the writer does the work so that the reader does not have to.
- The first half sets classic style beside reflexive, practical, plain, contemplative, romantic and prophetic styles, which have different standards. The second half is a museum of examples, from Thomas Jefferson and Mark Twain to an undergraduate's observations.
Why it is here
- My/AI/Rule/How to Communicate Effectively With Me/Talk to me like a friend, not in vague aphorisms names this book as one of two tests a phrase should pass before it is written.
- Several of the garden's writing rules say something close to classic style's account of who does the work, the writer or the reader. My/AI/Rule/How to Communicate Effectively With Me/Never make the reader resolve a reference puts it as "Resolving a pointer is work a reader has to do and a writer could have done once." My/Pref/Writing/Use Plain language ends "Cut the reader's mental effort." The rules against ornament belong to the same argument: My/Pref/Writing/Avoid Distractors such as Awkward or Superfluous Metaphors, My/Pref/Writing/Don't be an Attention Vampire; Lower the Drama, My/AI/Rule/How to Communicate Effectively With Me/Do not coin phrases unless asked and My/AI/Rule/How to Communicate Effectively With Me/I am allergic to word salad.
- One place the book and the garden part company: Thomas and Turner hold plain style apart from classic style, because plain style assumes a truth held in common and distrusts individual distinction, while classic style presumes a writer who has seen something personally. My/Pref/Writing/Use Plain language tables readability targets, and nothing in the book's account of classic style supports measuring prose that way.
- Worth reading against Book/The Elements of Style, which is the kind of prescription list this book is framed as answering.
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