Barton Swaim, "The Charm of Novelty: Farnsworth's Classical English Style," The Wall Street Journal (wsj.com), May 22, 2020 (abridged, emphasis added)
Good writing is efficient writing. The ability to say a thing clearly and directly is rather to be chosen than great riches. All the books on English style say so, and they are right. But efficiency, Ward Farnsworth rightly insists, is only the beginning.
Although “efficiency is the most important value in most kinds of writing,” he writes in “Farnsworth’s Classical English Style,” “it isn’t the only value. Lincoln’s writing is clear, but most writing that is clear sounds nothing like Lincoln’s and has none of its beauty or strength.”
Mr. Farnsworth, dean of the University of Texas law school and the author of two other eponymous titles, on rhetoric and metaphor, has written this latest book to explain what makes efficient writing powerful and memorable. His answer: oppositions and contrasts. Careful writers are usually familiar with the advice to vary sentence length—and sound advice it is—but Mr. Farnsworth counsels other forms of variation, too: between abstract and concrete words, weak and strong endings, and literal and figurative phrases.
The book is loaded with quotations, none of them from writers more recent than the mid-20th century. Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill appear most often; the King James Bible and Shakespeare make a strong showing, as does George Eliot.
The treatment of older prose allows Mr. Farnsworth to include discussions of devices you don’t see much anymore but bear considering anyway. Anacoluthon, for example, is the altering of grammatical structure midsentence, because why wouldn’t you want to keep your reader’s attention by suddenly changing course?
Many style books urge writers to favor simple words over bigger ones, and that is not terrible advice, but Mr. Farnsworth asks us to distinguish between Saxon and Latinate words and to set them against each other to achieve various outcomes.
Saxon words are Germanic in origin and tend to be short (good, light, man, house). Latinate words, typically multisyllabic and more abstract, came to English through French and often appear as different parts of speech (proper, property, propriety, appropriate).
Now consider what Mr. Farnsworth calls the “Saxon finish”: rendering the bulk of a sentence or paragraph in Latinate words, and ending with Saxon plainness. Thus Burke: “Taxing is an easy business. Any projector can contrive new impositions, any bungler can add to the old.” Or Churchill: “The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it, ignorance may deride it, malice may distort it, but there it is.” The last four monosyllables capture the point.
That Sir Winston is one of this book’s presiding spirits makes sense. “Churchill lived by phrase-making,” Roy Jenkins observed in his biography. “He thought rhetorically, and was constantly in danger of his policy being made by his phrases rather than vice versa.” In many Churchillian lines, observes Mr. Farnsworth, “the fancier words make their point up in the air; the simple words at the end plant the speaker’s feet, usually in a way that limits or counters whatever was said more grandly.” Take what are perhaps the most famous of all his words: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
Mr. Farnsworth only proposes one inviolable rule: “Have a reason for whatever you do in your writing.” Drowning the reader in abstract language is not a good idea, but there are circumstances, the author reminds us, in which a fully Latinate syntax can have a wonderful comic effect. Churchill again: In a House of Commons speech in 1909 he wanted to make the point that a certain argument was stale and irrelevant. “So far as the argument is concerned,” he said, “I think we must all admit, without making any reproach in any quarter, that it has not been distinguished by the charm of novelty.”
Calling the argument tired or shopworn may have been accurate but would not have hit the target. This brought to mind an observation made by a late friend, a Presbyterian minister. In a sermon on the Bible’s last and most enigmatic book, he once remarked, in a relaxed and vaguely mischievous tone: “There are of course many interpretations of the Book of Revelation, some sufficiently absurd as to require no refutation.”
My friend might simply have called those interpretations stupid, but his grander phrasing served to push them aside without dignifying them with scorn.
In general, and especially when you want to draw particular attention to a sentence, put the crucial words last. Punchlines work that way for a reason. You want to reveal the meaning all at once, not gradually. . . .
Mr. Farnsworth has written an original and absorbing guide to English style. Or perhaps I should only say—trying out this Saxon-finish business—get it if you can.
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