A striking sentence from “An Approach to Style,” the E.B. White-authored final chapter of The Elements of Style :
Style takes its final shape more from attitudes of mind than from principles of composition, for, as an elderly practitioner once remarked, “Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.”I long suspected that the elderly practitioner might have been White himself. Heber Taylor’s post quoting the practitioner’s sentence prompted me to find out. Yes, it was White, in “Calculating Machine,” a short piece in The New Yorker (February 24, 1951). The subject: Rudolph Flesch’s Reading-Ease Calculator (“a celluloid card with a dial,” White calls it, developed by General Motors), a device to score readability by counting words and syllables:
Communication by the written word is a subtler (and more beautiful) thing than Dr. Flesch and General Motors imagine. They contend that the “average reader” is capable of reading only what tests Easy, and that the writer should write at or below this level. This is a presumptuous and degrading idea. There is no average reader, and to reach down toward this mythical character is to deny that each of us is on the way up, is ascending. (“Ascending,” by the way, is a word Dr. Flesch advises writers to stay away from. Too unusual.)I have sometimes thought that a good way to salvage The Elements of Style would be to package its final chapter as a short, beautifully designed book, omitting all the prohibitions (e.g., flammable for inflammable ) and outdated guidelines (margins, hyphenation, citations). But the book as is continues to sell, and sell, and sell. Maybe someday.
It is my belief that no writer can improve his work until he discards the dulcet notion that the reader is feebleminded, for writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar. Ascent is at the heart of the matter. A country whose writers are following a calculating machine downstairs is not ascending — if you will pardon the expression — and a writer who questions the capacity of the person at the other end of the line is not a writer at all, merely a schemer.
Related reading
All OCA Elements of Style posts (Pinboard)
[Flesch’s invention lives on in the Flesch-Kincaid readability tests. Try an online version. I found “Calculating Machine” in White’s Poems and Sketches (New York: Harper & Row, 1981). And yes, I shared my discovery with Heber several weeks ago.]
When writing, I ask myself if I have seen the word (or fact) more than just once or twice. I recently edited out "coed" because I hadn't seen the word since the old Readers Digest Campus Comedy section, back in the 1970's.
ReplyDeleteFor facts, someone who reccommends my essay web site to others tells them that some of the essays she just doesn't understand.
For speaking, I try to be like a good spy and not use big words that people don't know, but I am aware that I still do although nobody corrects me at the time.
My college department head would similarly hold back: She told us that she knows she's tired when she starts using big words.