Anthony R. Garcia
Classic prose style is what emerges when a writer takes a particular stance on the following elements of style: writer, reader, truth, presentation, thought, and language. It’s a style that Steven Pinker strongly endorses in his book, The Sense of Style, where he describes it as “…the strongest cure I know for the disease that enfeebles academic, bureaucratic, corporate, legal, and official prose.”
It’s a versatile style that is a pleasure to both read and write, though its simplicity is a bit deceiving. Mastering the style requires a complete understanding of its underlying conceptual stance. This stance on the elements of style is thoroughly presented by the literary scholars Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner in their book, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose, which is a book best read more than once.
Choices That Lead to Classic Prose Style
Any writing style is a result of the choices a writer makes before she begins writing. But writers most often learn how to style sentences by concentrating on sentence structure and diction–the surface marks of a given style–and not the underlying choices that lead to a style. If learning classic style seems difficult or laborious, it is only because it is not easy to break from this tradition of analyzing, almost exclusively, the surface marks of a given style.
While I don’t share Thomas and Turner’s level of antipathy toward studying the surface marks of style, I’m convinced that understanding the conceptual stance of a given style is key for being able to use that style in a rhetorically effective way. More important than what a style looks like is what a style does, and how it helps define the rhetorical situation.
Here is a brief overview of the conceptual choices that lead to classic prose style, followed by some examples.
The Role of the Writer
In classic prose, the writer assumes equal footing with the reader. She acts as though she and the reader share the same viewpoint, and she directs both of their attention toward the subject. The writer is not trying to gain anything from the reader; rather, her interest is strictly in presenting the subject.
This positioning differs from that of other styles, which commonly place the writer and reader on unequal footing (usually the writer is positioned above the reader). For example, an instructional style positions the writer as teacher, the reader as learner. A persuasive style positions the writer as wanting something from the reader (the reader’s agreement) and compels the writer to use overt persuasive tactics to achieve her goal—perversions of this style present the writer as an overbearing arm-twister. An expressive style positions the writer as having unique experience or superior insight, which he tries to convey to the reader. A bureaucratic style positions the writer as both authoritative and guarded, the reader as both subordinate and unprivy to the knowledge the writer holds.
Even when persuasion is the writing purpose, the classic writer does not use overt signals of persuasion, but rather employs what Thomas and Turner call stealth argument by means of presenting truth about a subject.
Assumptions About the Reader
The classic writer assumes the reader is competent and needs no special pleading to accept the insights and judgments presented in the writing. The reader is regarded as an equal participant in a conversation, equally capable of seeing things exactly as the writer sees them. Even in cases where the writer writes about a subject the reader has never experienced, the writer assumes that if the reader had experienced the subject for himself, the reader would draw the very same conclusions.
Making these assumptions about the reader allows the writer to write with a conviction free from heavy persuasive tactics, a conviction whose seductive qualities, when paired with truth and logic, are themselves persuasive.
Truth
Thomas and Turner state that “There is probably nothing more fundamental to the attitude that defines classic style than the enabling convention that truth can be known.”
For many writers, especially academic writers, the statement that truth can be known can cause a visceral reaction, one that leaves the writer shaking her head in disagreement or chuckling at the naivety of the statement. But the key phrase is enabling convention.
It turns out that making the presumption that truth can be known helps create clarity and confidence in a writing style. It allows the writer to write in a style devoid of self-consciousness—the classic writer typically eschews expressions of uncertainty or hesitation known as hedging. While hedging is a great tool for moderating claims, it can also be a tool for obfuscating positions and limiting a writer’s liability for those positions. It can also be distracting.
For the classic writer, anything that distracts the reader’s attention from the subject does not belong in the writing.
Readers are more sophisticated than some writers give them credit for, and they are fully capable of realizing the natural and common limitations involved with making claims without having them called to their attention. Pinker takes up this point in The Sense of Style, quoting from Thomas and Turner:
When we open a cookbook, we completely put aside—and expect the author to put aside—the kind of question that leads to the heart of certain philosophic and religious traditions. Is it possible to talk about cooking? Do eggs really exist? Is food something about which knowledge is possible? Can anyone else ever tell us anything true about cooking?…Classic style similarly puts aside as inappropriate philosophical questions about its enterprise. If it took those questions up, it could never get around to treating its subject, and its purpose is exclusively to treat its subject.
Presentation
For the classic writer, the purpose of writing is presentation, and the “model scene” is that of a conversation, which is sustained by what Thomas and Turner call “classic joint attention,” where the writer directs the reader’s gaze onto a subject as if both are looking through “an undistorting window”.
If writing is a conversation, then it should be devoid of characteristics one never encounters during a conversation, such as signposts, in which a writer draws unnecessary attention to the writing itself by using metadiscourse:
In the next chapter I will be talking about…
After that we will be examining…but before that we must look at….
In this essay I will discuss the following three points, followed by examples which support those points, followed by a summary of the counterargument, followed by my response to the counterargument, followed by…
Additionally, classic prose constructs the communication scene as a perfect conversation. The writer must imagine a conversation in which he communicates truth about the subject using inevitable language, language that is clear and elegant and completely adequate for expressing that truth. Of course, pulling off this “fiction,” as Thomas and Turner call it, requires preparation, planning, and refined thinking, but this hard work is not evident (or called to attention) in the writing.
Thought and Language
Another fiction held by the classic writer is that thinking and writing are not the same thing. In classic style, thought precedes writing. The thought is fully formed, refined, and once recorded in writing, able to stand alone as a perfect presentation of the reality or truth it conveys about the subject.
Classic writing is not a presentation of the writer thinking things out, and it does not rely on other texts to be understood. As Thomas and Turner state, “Classic writing is never “notes toward”…nor is it the fifth part of a systematic inquiry that is unintelligible to someone unfamiliar with the previous four parts.”
Language is also sufficient to express the refined thought. The classic writer does not make the language appear as though it is struggling. It can express any meaning, even when the subject is complicated and abstract. The classic writer writes about abstract concepts the same way he writes about concrete objects, grounding them in a scene within the physical world and relying on image schema, or familiar mental patterns of space, force, and movement (and others) that readers recognize and which serve as aids to comprehension.
Examples of Classic Prose Style
The following examples illustrate the stance of classic prose style. The first sentence is from a longer passage of Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, which is quoted in Clear and Simple as the Truth:
“When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman.”
Twain directs the reader’s gaze toward a scene from his childhood. The reader, as if looking through a window, can observe this scene clearly: Twain and his young contemporaries from the village near the Mississippi want to one day work on a steamboat. Twain presents the “permanent ambition” he shares with his comrades as indisputable truth; anyone who was there would see the same thing and make the same observation. Of course, it is disputable. There is no way Twain knows for sure that this ambition was permanent for all of his comrades, or that it was even held at all. (Perhaps a few of them secretly hated being on a steamboat but wanted to fit in, or perhaps the ambition was a wavering one) But Twain appropriately ignores these possible contradictions for the sake of simplicity, clarity, and elegance.
Here’s another example. This one from C.S. Lewis’s, The Discarded Image:
At his most characteristic, medieval man was not a dreamer nor a wonderer. He was an organizer, a codifier, a builder of systems. He wanted “a place for everything and everything in its place.” Distinction, definition, tabulation were his delight. Though full of turbulent activities, he was equally full of the impulse to formalize them.
Here we see the confidence of classic style. Describing the disposition of people who lived centuries ago cannot be done with certainty, yet Lewis treats interpretations and abstract concepts (i.e., the intellectual tendencies of medieval man) as clear and observable fact. If readers were to time travel to a medieval scene, they would come to the same conclusion about the disposition of medieval man. Lewis does not acknowledge the limitations of his assertions (e.g., the limitations of evidence, counterexamples, gender and cultural biases that shape his assertions , etc.). He gives readers credit for understanding that he is only making an argument, and he shows no apprehension in placing that argument under the guise of truth.
Surface Features of Classic Style
In the two passages above and in other examples of classic prose, you notice the absence of hedging and notes of anxiety. The writing is confident and assured. You don’t see phrases like “as far as I know,” “it seems to me that,” “In my opinion,” or “As far as I remember, my comrades carried a permanent ambition….”
Because the classic writer’s aim is to present undistorted truth, the writer is compelled toward clarity, which is attained through an economy of words. Sentence are often clear, simple (not simplistic), and vivid. Classic style contains all the elements of plain style but transcends it by introducing “…a refinement, a qualification, [or] a meditation.” If you take a refined thought and attempt to present it in a plain style without sacrificing intelligence and insight and nuance, you often end up with a style that looks classic.
Classic presentation lives and dies by fine conceptual distinctions. – Thomas and Turner
When to Use Classic Prose Style
Classic style is a great tool for communicating ideas across discourse communities. Thomas and Turner recommend it especially to writers who are not well practiced at communicating their field-specific knowledge to wider audiences:
“Even the best-educated members of society commonly lack a routine style for presenting the result of their own engagement with a problem to people outside their own profession. Writers with a need to address such readers invented classic style.”
As with any style, classic style is not for all occasions and purposes, nor is it for all audiences. For example, while classic style may be refreshing to some readers who are reading for practical purposes, most practical readers would likely tire of classic style’s purposeful and consistent rejection of the writing principles that characterize practical genres. It’s always a risk to break reader’s expectations. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
Classic style can also feel monotonous, especially in longer works, where it can begin to fall into self-parody, a term Thomas and Turner use to describe one of the faults critics attribute to the style.
The aphoristic quality of the style enhances the effect of presenting deep insight and truth, but when the insight is in actuality dull and commonplace, the aphoristic quality generates an ostentatious, almost comedic solemnity.
Important to remember is that you can slip in and out of classic style as needed. Thomas and Turner give a perfect example in their analysis of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration does not use classic style in its opening and closing sections (and rightfully so), but it does use classic style in the passages in between to great effect.
Such versatility makes classic prose style a valuable writing tool—one that belongs on the belt.