MERVE KILIÇOĞLU

010413030

It is bad manners to waste time. Therefore brevity first, then, clarity.

It is bad manners to give needless trouble.Therefore clarity. . . .

And how is clarity to be achieved? Mainly bytaking trouble and by writing to servepeople rather than to impress them.

The social purpose of language is communication--toinform, misinform, or otherwise influence our fellows. .. .

Communication more difficult than we may think. Weare all serving life sentences of solitary confinementwithin our bodies; like prisoners, we have, as it were, totap in awkward code to our fellow men in theirneighboring cells. . . .

In some modern literature there has appeared atendency to replace communication by a privatemaundering to oneself which shall inspire one'saudience to maunder privately to themselves--rather as if the author handed round a box ofdrugged cigarettes.

Just as the art of war largely consists ofdeploying the strongest forces at the mostimportant points, so the art of writing depends agood deal on putting the strongest words in themost important places.

One of the most important things, to my mind, inEnglish style is word-order. For us, the mostemphatic place in a clause or sentence is the end.This is the climax; and, during the momentary pausethat follows, that last word continues, as it were, toreverberate in the reader’s mind. For us, the mostemphatic. It has, in fact, the last word.

As the police put it, anything you say may be usedas evidence against you. If handwriting revealscharacter, writing reveals it still more. You cannotfool all your judges all the time. . . .

Most style is not honest enough. Easy to say, buthard to practice. A writer may take to long words,as young men to beards--to impress. But longwords, like long beards, are often the badge ofcharlatans.

Or a writer may cultivate the obscure, to seemprofound. But even carefully muddied puddles aresoon fathomed. Or he may cultivate eccentricity, toseem original. But really original people do not haveto think about being original--they can no more helpit than they can help breathing. They do not need todye their hair green.

This, indeed, is one of the eternal paradoxes of both life and literature that without passion little gets done; yet, without control of that passion, its effects are largely ill or null.

One learns to write by reading

good books, as one learns

to talk by hearing good talkers.

My point is merely that the sophisticated do notnecessarily express themselves better than thesimple--in fact, may often have much to learn fromthem.

Every author's fairy godmother should provide him not only with a pen but also with a blue pencil.

Apart from a few simple principles, the sound andrhythm of English prose seem to me matterswhere both writers and readers should trust notso much to rules as to their ears.