Essential English
Page 4
He was born in Alabama. He always arrived punctually at work.
He was born in Alabama. His father came south from New York and opened a drug store with 1,000 dollars he borrowed from a clergyman.
The essence of the matter comes back to limiting the thought a sentence has to carry. This is not something peculiar to newspaper English. There is strictly nothing grammatically wrong with the following sentence but it is incoherent because it is overcrowded with ideas:
The vague and unsettled suspicions which uncertainty had produced of what Mr. Darcy might have been doing to forward her sister’s match which she had feared to encourage, as an exertion of goodness too great to be probable, and at the same time dreaded to be just, from the pain of obligation, were proved beyond their greatest extent to be true.
JANE AUSTEN, Pride and Prejudice
It is hard to read this and hard to be sure what Jane Austen is saying. Is it the suspicions or the match itself which ‘she had feared to encourage’? It is no solution to rewrite the passage in simple sentences. Complex sentences, provided they are clear, can make assertions about a subject more economically. The simple-sentence version that follows requires 88 words altogether and it barely copes with the thoughts:
She had vague and unsettled suspicions. These suspicions had been produced by uncertainty. She did not know what Mr. Darcy had been doing to forward her sister’s match. She feared to encourage these suspicions. She had two reasons. It was very good of Mr. Darcy to help if he was helping. She doubted if anyone could be so good. But she dreaded the idea that he might be so good. She would then have a debt to him. In the event her suspicions were proved to be true.
But a readable, clear and economical version can be produced by splitting the thoughts into four groups and dealing with these in four varied sentences:
She had been filled by vague and unsettled suspicions about what Mr. Darcy might have been doing to forward her sister’s match. She had not liked to dwell on these. Such an exertion of goodness seemed improbable, yet she had dreaded the idea that the suspicions might be just for she would then be under obligation to him. Now the suspicions were proved beyond their greatest extent to be true.
Be Active
Bewildering sentences carrying excess weight are obvious. The text editor has to be more alert to detect the deadening effect of a succession of sentences in the passive voice. Vigorous, economical writing requires a preference for sentences in the active voice.
‘Police arrested Jones’ – that is a sentence in the active voice. The subject (police) is the actor: the receiver of the action (Jones) is the object. We say the verb (arrested) is being used transitively because it requires an object; the verb is said to be used intransitively when it does not need an object. Look what happens to that perfectly good sentence in the active voice with a transitive verb when we write the sentence in the passive voice – when the receiver of the action becomes the subject rather than the object: ‘Jones was arrested by police’. We now have five words where three told the story before.
Here is another newspaper example: ‘A meeting will be held by directors next week’. That sentence in the passive voice has nine words when the active voice requires only eight: ‘The directors will hold a meeting next week’. And better still: ‘The directors will meet next week’. Or: ‘The directors meet next week’.
Very often a weak sentence can be made emphatic by changing the writer’s passive reliance on the ‘there is’ construction into a sentence employing a transitive verb in the active voice:
There were riots in several cities last night in which several shops were burned.
Rioters burned shops in several cities last night.
The active version on the right has only eight words against the fourteen on the left; and it is so much more direct, too. This is one of the beauties of the English language. Clarity, economy and vigour go hand in hand. Of course there are occasions when the passive voice must be used. Some particular word, usually a proper noun in news reports, must be made the subject of the sentence, and that may legitimately demand the passive voice. For instance: ‘A rhinoceros ran over Bill Clinton today’. That is active (and news). But it would be better in the passive voice so that Mr Clinton has precedence over the rhino: ‘Bill Clinton was run over by a rhinoceros today’.
With this proviso, sentences in the active voice should be sought by text editors, or rather text editors should seek sentences in the active voice. Ministers and officials and government reports are the worst perpetrators of the passive. Presumably it has something to do with collective responsibility, the notion that all decisions emanate from some central intelligence.
Official reports reek of the passive: it was felt necessary; in the circumstances it was considered inadvisable; the writer might be reminded; it should perhaps be pointed out; it cannot be denied; it will be recognised. In officialese it does not rain; precipitation is experienced. Often the passive is coupled cripplingly with the conditional tense so that, as Robert Graves and Alan Hodge once remarked, the decision is ‘translated from the world of practice into a region of unfulfilled hypothesis’.4 ‘The Minister would find it difficult to agree if the facts were to be regarded in the light suggested’. Churchill said ‘Give us the tools and we will finish the job’. Officialdom would prefer to phrase it: ‘The task would be capable of determination were the appropriate tools to be made available to those concerned’.
These are no exaggerations. Every day in reporting the doings of government and the law newspapers let through a plethora of convoluted passive English. Here are a few more newspaper examples which are revised in the column on the right.
Early this morning the Automatic Telephone and Electric Company’s works in Edge Lane were entered. A quantity of platinum valued at £25,000 was stolen from a safe which was burnt open. The watchman, Mr Herbert Clarke, aged 57, who is a widower residing at Albany Road, Liverpool, was coshed and tied up.
Thieves coshed the watchman and stole £25,000 worth of platinum at the automatic Telephone and Electric Co. works in Edge Lane early today. They tied up the watchman, Mr Herbert Clarke, aged 57, and burnt open the safe . ..
A petition requesting a reduced speed limit in Clay Road, between Jefferson and Calkin Road, was presented to the Henrietta Town Board last night.
Thirty two householders petitioned Henrietta Town Board last night for a lower speed limit in Clay Road, between Jefferson and Calkin roads.
The second paragraph (below) of the same report illustrates the earlier point in this section on the need for simple sentences. All too frequently a sentence with one flaw is succeeded by a sentence with a different flaw: compare the involved sentence on the left with the revised version on the right.
The Board immediately turned the petition – signed by 32 home-owners– over to its public safety committee for study and possible referral to the State Traffic Commission. Home-owners are asking that the speed limit be reduced from 50 miles per hour to 35 mph.
The Board passed the petition to its public safety committee for study and possible referral to the State Traffic Commission.
They want the 50 mph limit cut to 30 mph.
Or better still:
Thirty-two householders petitioned the Henrietta Town Board last night for the speed limit of 50 mph to be lowered to 30 mph in Clay Road between Jefferson and Calkin roads. The Board passed the petition to its public safety committee for possible referral to the State Traffic Commission.
Be Positive
Sentences should assert. Newspaper readers above all do not want to be told what is not. They should be told what is. As a general rule, a text editor should strive to express even a negative in a positive form. In each case, the version on the right is preferable:
The project was not successful.
The project failed.
The company says it will not now proceed with the plan.
The company says it has abandoned the plan.
Joe Bloggs, wh
o escaped last week, has still not been caught.
Joe Bloggs ... is still free.
They did not pay attention to the complaint.
They ignored the complaint.
Sometimes the editing is more difficult. Here is a sentence which attempts to be positive, but has a negative thought intruding. The subsidiary clauses do not help:
From a military no more than from a political point of view can the successful Vietcong attacks against United States bases in South Vietnam, which killed or wounded 134 Americans, be brushed away in cursory fashion.
This can be revised directly and clearly, though still negatively (below left); it is better still to express the thought positively (right):
The successful Vietcong attacks against United States bases in South Vietnam, which killed or wounded134 Americans, cannot be brushed away in cursory fashion either politically or militarily.
The successful Vietcong attacks against United States bases in South Vietnam, which killed or wounded 134 Americans, have both political and military significance.
The double negative in particular should be avoided: ‘It is unlikely that pensions will not be raised’ means ‘It is likely that pensions will be raised’. Negative expression is frequent in government and company reports. Here (left) is a sentence of barely comprehensible officialese. What it possibly means (we can never be sure) is on the right:
The figures seem to us to provide no indication that costs and prices ... would not have been lower if competition had not been restricted.
The figures seem to us to provide no indication that competition would have produced higher costs and prices.
Such negative expressions are often a substitute for thought and decision. Newspapers which insist on positive expression run some risk of being accused of distortion; and of course accuracy is paramount, especially in direct quotation. But there are penalties, too, in accepting the needlessly negative expression: penalties in bemusing and hoodwinking the reader and debilitating the language. James Thurber, a passionate advocate of the positive statement, should have the last word:
If a person is actually ill, the important thing is to find out not how he doesn’t feel. He should state his symptoms more specifically – ‘I have a gnawing pain here, that comes and goes’, or something of the sort. There is always the danger, of course, that one’s listeners will cut in with a long description of how they feel; this can usually be avoided by screaming.5
Avoid Monotony
The injunctions above, to prefer sentences which actively and positively express a single thought, may sound like a recipe for monotony. This would be to underestimate the possibilities of the English language. Setting a limit of around thirty words to the length of sentences does not mean that every sentence must be thirty words. Some can be as short as eight words. If an eight-word sentence is followed by a longer sentence, introduced by a short subsidiary clause, a variation in pace is apparent – as these last two sentences, I hope, suggest. Sentences may also vary in form, between simple and complex-compound; in function, between statements, commands, questions and exclamations; and in style, between loose, periodic and balanced. This is a rough distinction. It is worth acknowledging, however, because a succession of sentences of the same style produces a distinct effect of rhythm.
Loose sentences run on with fact after fact in natural conversational sequence.
There were the translators in their booths, and the girl secretaries at their tables, and the peak-capped policemen at the doors, and the gallimaufry of the Press seething and grumbling and scribbling and making half-embarrassed jokes in its seats.
That sentence could end and make sense in a number of places. There is no climax. It rolls on. (It is also, incidentally, vivid and effective scene-setting in its observations.)
Periodic sentences, by contrast, retain the climax to the end. The grammatical structure in a true periodic sentence is not complete until the full stop.
At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.
The next sentence could end earlier, but it would also be classified as a periodic sentence:
Liverpool Street is the finest point of departure in the whole of Southern England because wherever you go from it, whether to Southend or, ultimately, to Outer Mongolia, it cannot fail to be an improvement.
Balanced sentences are works of deliberate symmetry.
The crisis in Wall Street is a crisis of confidence.
It will not be done by the law or Government; it cannot be done by Parliament.
Nobody can lay down a formula for varying sentences. It is part of the mystery of language. Sentences must respond to the thoughts being expressed. All that text editors who care about style can do is study the subtleties of rhythm in good authors and to take to ordinary copy a few generalisations which genius, they must understand, can always upset.
The generalisations themselves are based on the idea, again vulnerable to talent, that a prolonged succession of sentences of the same style or the same form is bad. With those cautions, it can be said that a succession of simple sentences is jerky, a succession of loose sentences relaxed or even slovenly, a succession of periodic sentences formal and stiff. The periodic sentence is emphatic but a great many following one another is wearing. The reader is always in suspense, as Mark Twain remarked about the German sentence: ‘Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of the Atlantic with his verb in his mouth’. Or, adapting German grammar: ‘Whenever a literary German into a sentence dives, will one no more of him see, till he at the other side of the Atlantic with his verb in his mouth emerges.’
A loose sentence provides relief. Brewster thought a fair proportion of periodic sentences to loose sentences to be even more formal. Readers feel they are being bullied by some arrogant swot. It sounds contrived; hell, it is contrived. But, of course, the balanced or periodic sentence provides bite to a succession of loose sentences. Particularly monotonous is a succession of loose sentences which are compound in form with two co-ordinated clauses linked by a conjunction:
The firemen climbed their ladders and they rescued all the women. Two doctors came by ambulance and treated all the injured. The ground floor was saved but the top floor collapsed. Firemen warned the crowds while police moved them back. The hotel owner arrived and said he could say nothing.
If in doubt about the rhythm of a piece of writing, try saying it aloud. This passage comes over as a boring singsong.
CHAPTER THREE
Words
Even without improving the structure of a sentence – often there is no time to rewrite – text editors can rescue bad copy by caring for the words. They should prefer the short word to the long, the simple word to the complex, the concrete word to the abstract. They should prefer Anglo-Saxon words to foreign. They should suspect words with prefixes and suffixes, with syllables like pre, re, de, anti and isation, ousness, ation, ality. Text editors may sometimes dawdle but they should never indulge in procrastination. They should publish an order for the release of buses, but never for the derequisition of transportation. Honorariums per diem and per annum they should forgo, but they should accept money daily and yearly. When they see bloody international conflict, they should make war with their pen. And at times they should be parsimonious, not to say miserly, with words. Nothing is so tiring to the reader as excavating nuggets of meaning from mountains of words. Nothing so distinguishes good writing as vivid economy. In a line of a Shakespearian sonnet, every syllable is suggestive.
To come down to earth there is a joke about a fishmonger which makes the point. It is an old joke, but perhaps we can regard it as sanctified by custom; and say it should be recited as an initiation ceremony for text editors.
The fishmonger had a sign which said:
FRESH FISH SOLD HERE
The fishmonger had a friend who persuaded him to rub out the word FRESH – beca
use naturally he wouldn’t expect to sell fish that wasn’t fresh; to rub out the word HERE – because naturally he’s selling it here, in the shop; to rub out the word SOLD – because naturally he isn’t giving it away. And finally to rub out the word FISH – because you can smell it a mile off.
Saving space is one imperative which concentrates the text editor’s mind on saving words. It is not the most important. Words should be saved because good English is concise. In Herbert Spencer’s dictum, the test of style is ‘economy of the reader’s attention’, and economy has never been better defined than by Strunk in his short classic work.6
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should contain no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.