12
The Principles of Clear Statement—III
Principle Seventeen
Sentences and paragraphs should be linked together logically and intelligibly.
It should always be clear whether a sentence explains, amplifies or limits the statement that it follows; or whether it introduces either a new subject, or a new heading of the original subject.
From a newspaper feature, All the Year Round in Your Garden:
‘Picking over seed-potatoes in the potting shed is a pleasant job. You will find many with ugly blotches and scabs and not be sure whether they will favour your prospects of a good crop….’
The connection between these two sentences is blurred. Either the second should begin a new paragraph, to show that the gardener’s anxieties about his crop do not illustrate the pleasantness of the job; or else it should be introduced with a ‘But’.
From memoirs published in a provincial paper:
‘On leaving the hospital of Saint Antoine, I remember, the Empress Eugénie was carried almost to her carriage by the crowd, who eagerly pressed around her, weeping, kissing her hands and heaping blessings on her head. But the most comical event of the day was when a coal-black negro from Dahomey presented himself at the Palace with a basket of freshly caught fish….’
Here the ‘But’ is illogical, because it suggests that the simple enthusiasm of the crowd was also comical.
From a book review by Basil de Sélincourt:
‘Having loved Ruskin unsubdued, he [Sydney Cockerell] was ready to love and be loved by everybody; as the girl friend who later became a nun wrote to him from her novice cell: “You do seem to have a remarkable capacity for meeting distinguished people.” That is it; they are all here; Hardy, Doughty, Lawrence, Blunt, Mrs. Hardy, Lady Burne-Jones, Charlotte Mew….’
The phrase ‘as the girl friend wrote’ purports to justify the statement that Sydney Cockerell was ready to love and be loved by everyone; but all that it provides is a (possibly ironical) reference to his being ready to love and be loved by distinguished people.
Here is part of an article by Admiral C. J. Eyres:
‘The Germans in the last war, in the use of lethal gas and unrestricted submarine warfare, acted disgracefully and immorally, just because the German Government had formally, by Treaty, denounced their use, and were dishonouring their bond.’
The ‘just because’ should be ‘for’ or ‘since’. Either of these words would explain why the Admiral considered the Germans to have acted ‘disgracefully and immorally’. The ‘because’ suggests that the motive for the Germans’ disgraceful and immoral actions was merely to flout a previous renunciation by their Government of the use of certain weapons. (He probably means ‘renounced’, not ‘denounced’.)
From an address to the University of Oxford by Viscount Halifax, its Chancellor:
‘What has, for example, been the driving force behind the Nazi movement in Germany? It has been German youth…. Their point of view stands in stark opposition to yours. They do not understand your way of thinking. Your ideals mean nothing to them….
The real conflict, therefore, to-day is not between age and youth, but between youth and youth….’
The ‘therefore’ is illogical, unless Lord Halifax is washing his hands of the conflict on the ground that it is not of his making.
Principle Eighteen
Punctuation should be consistent and should denote quality of connexion, rather than length of pause, between sentences or parts of sentences.
There is a widespread ignorance among writers of English as to the use and usages of punctuation. Many of them leave their commas, semi-colons, and the rest of the more difficult signs, to be corrected by their typists, or by the printers. The trouble is that there are two conventions for English punctuation, which contradict each other. The older convention is that punctuation-marks denote duration of pause between parts of a sentence or paragraph. This was stated as follows by J. Mason in his Elocution (1748): ‘A comma stops the voice while we may privately tell one, a semi-colon, two; a colon three; and a period four.’ (Here ‘period’ means ‘full stop’.) The more sensible and more modern convention, which we recommend, is that all punctuation-marks that do not (like the question and the exclamation mark) merely denote tone of voice, show in what relation to one another sentences, or parts of a sentence, are intended by the writer to stand.
The Comma
The original meaning of ‘comma’ is not the tadpole-like comma-sign, but a distinct part of a sentence, which should be cut off from the other parts by comma-signs. If the part to be cut off comes in the middle of a sentence, as in this one, a pair of comma-signs is put to show how much is being cut off. But a part cut off from the beginning or end of a sentence has only one comma sign, as in this case. The cutting-off of part of a sentence prevents two or more parts from running together in a way that might disturb the sense.
The commonest example of sense being disturbed by the omission of a comma is a sentence containing ‘because’. ‘I did not go to the party, because I was not wanted’ means that I did not go, and that my reason for not going was that I was not wanted. But ‘I did not go to the party because I was not wanted’ means that I did go, but that my reason for going was not that I wished to spite the people there who did not want me to go.
Here is a rather complicated example of a ‘because’ sentence, taken from J. W. N. Sullivan’s Bases of Modern Science, 1928:
‘Our aesthetic and religious experiences need not lose the significance they appear to have merely because they are not taken into account in the scientific scheme.’
This might mean:
‘Our aesthetic and religious experiences need not have their apparent significance cancelled by the mere failure of Science to include them in its scheme.’
Or, less probably, it might mean:
‘Our aesthetic and religious experiences need not lose the appearance of significance which is given them by the mere failure of Science to include them in its scheme.’
If Mr. Sullivan, wishing to prevent his readers from taking the second of these two alternatives, had put a comma at ‘have’, then he would have offered them a third and still more improbable meaning:
‘Why our religious and aesthetic experiences need not lose their apparent significance is merely that Science has failed to include them in its scheme.’
How, then, should he have punctuated the sentence? He should have written it along the lines of one or the other of our first two alternative versions.
Here is a typical example of under-punctuation from a newspaper:
‘Harton Miners’ Lodge have sent a protest to the Durham Miners’ Association because a number of ex-miners transferred a month ago to Harton Collieries from vital war work under the Government back to the pit scheme and since drawing the guaranteed wage of £3 9s. without having any work to do were given fourteen days’ notice immediately they were put on the pay-roll.’
To help the reader to pick his way through this long but well constructed sentence there should have been commas after ‘ex-miners’ and ‘work to do’, and ‘back to the pit’ should have been ‘back-to-the-pit’.
Here is an example of over-punctuation, which is far less often found, from a leader by Edward Hulton in his Picture Post:
‘The world has long, in fact, been, whether we like it or no, not really a series of countries, but one country in a state of grave disharmony.’
Each of these commas can be justified, but when a sentence comes so thickly studded as this it should be rewritten in a simpler way. For example:
‘Whether we like it or no, the world has in fact long been a single country in a state of grave disharmony, not an aggregate of mutually hostile countries.’
The Long Dash
In some cases, comma-signs are not quite strong enough to mark the cutting-off of part of a sentence from the remainder. Where a very strong separation has to be made between a part and the main body of the sentence, the long dash can be used. Take, for example, the news-item:
‘Only one house in the row was left standing with all its windows intact.’
The sense of the context in which this sentence occurred proved that it meant:
‘Only one house in the row was left standing, but this was undamaged: it even had all its windows intact.’
not:
‘Only one house, of those left standing in the row, had its windows intact.’
A comma after ‘standing’, in the original version, would not have done justice to this freak occurrence. Instead, a long dash was needed, thus:
‘Only one house in the row was left standing—with all its windows intact.’
Here is another news item, which at first sight reads mysteriously:
‘Ex-Sergt. Oliver Brooks, v.c., hero of Loos, who has died at Windsor, aged 51, was decorated by King George V, who was in bed in a train following the accident when he fell from his horse in France.’
No, the train was not following Sergt. Brooks’ accidental tumble from his horse in France; neither was King George V. The facts were: that King George was in bed in a hospital train as the result of falling from his horse while reviewing troops in France, and that he called Sergt. Brooks to his bedside for a decoration ceremony. But it would not be enough to put a comma after ‘train’: a long dash is needed to show that the rest of the sentence is another story tacked on to the account of the bedside decoration.
The long dash is also used to join together short sentences of headings which do not quite deserve a full stop. For example:
‘I have been in such trouble lately—Mrs. Purdell calling about the little shoes—not done, of course—and then a load of soot falls down the chimney, bang on top of the muffins warming in the grate—how the lodger carried on!—and I lost my wedding ring, washing—it was twenty-two carat gold—and now this!’
The Parenthesis
Another substitute for the comma is the parenthesis. Parenthesis-signs are always used in pairs. They denote an explanatory comment or aside of such a sort that, in speaking, one would naturally lower one’s voice slightly to show that the comment was not part of the main argument of the sentence. Where the explanatory comment does not need this lowering of the voice, it is customarily put between long dashes. Thus:
‘Mr. Hollins (he always seemed “Mr.” to me, even when he was an Earl) nodded to us in his friendly way.’
But:
‘Mr. Hollins—generous, open-hearted Mr. Hollins!—nodded at us in his friendly way.’
Parenthesis-signs are curved, brackets are rectangular. Brackets are used for critical interpolations: that is, for explanatory or corrective remarks inserted by an author in a passage quoted from someone else’s work or from previous work of his own. Thus:
‘Young William Hunter wrote: “It is easy to be a Company man” [this was while the East India Company still ruled in Calcutta] “and yet be superior to the common run; but it is impossible to be first class and fritter your evenings away in walking cuadrills [sic] and consuming ices”.’
When one parenthetical remark occurs within another, brackets are sometimes used to prevent the reader getting confused between them; but this practice is not to be recommended, because the brackets then seem to be enclosing a critical interpolation. If one has to put one parenthetical remark within another (for example, in the present—admittedly rather clumsy—instance) it is more safely enclosed between long dashes, as here.
The Full-Stop
A full-stop, also called a ‘period’, ends a sentence. (If the sentence does not end, what seems to be a full-stop is merely a single dot. We will discuss the dot separately.) There are degrees in the value of full-stops. Sentences end with full-stops; but when paragraphs end with full-stops the rest of the line is left blank—the next paragraph beginning on the following line, after a slight space (or ‘indentation’) which indicates that this is a new paragraph. A paragraph should concern only one phase of a narrative or argument. This phase may be large or small, but must be self-contained. In a novel, for example, a paragraph may contain either a brief summary of the heroine’s early life (or declining years), or merely perhaps a complete account of her reflections as she passed on some occasion from the music-room to the conservatory. In a critical work, it may contain, for example, a concise account of Shakespearean forgeries in the eighteenth century, or merely, perhaps, one self-contained part of an argument intended to prove that Ireland, one of the forgers, possessed a copy of the Hamlet First Quarto.
The newspaper practice of trying to brighten an article by printing ordinary sentences as if they were paragraphs often confuses the reader: he does not know where one subject ends and another begins. The following is an example of ’false paragraphing’ (1941):
‘According to the Nazi High Command, German forces, driving from Gomel across the Desna River and from the Dnieper on both sides of Kremenchug, have met at a point 130 miles east of Kiev. The Germans say that four Soviet armies have been caught between the arms of these giant pincers.
Even if the German claim is true, it will take them weeks to mop up the Russians in the huge area enclosed in the pincers. Already their advance had been slow, painful and costly in the extreme.
This is shown in the Berlin admission that at many points the Russians are still launching fierce counter-attacks across the Dnieper and in a Moscow report that a German troop-train with ammunition was blown up by Russian bombers near Dniepropetrovsk.
Meanwhile, Marshal Timoshenko’s victories at Yelnya and Yartsevo in the Smolensk region have removed, at least temporarily, the direct German threat to Moscow.
In one sector alone his forces have destroyed 60 Nazi tanks in the last four days, and during eight days’ fighting the Nazis lost 10,000 dead and wounded.’
The impropriety of the paragraphing here is seen in the fifth sentence. Because it begins a paragraph, ‘This is shown’ seems at first sight to relate to the prophecy made in the third sentence, that the Germans will take weeks to mop up the Kiev armies—rather than to the historical comment, made in the fourth sentence, that they have been meeting with great difficulties in their Ukraine offensive considered as a whole. With proper paragraphing the passage would have read as follows:
‘According to the Nazi High Command, German forces, driving from Gomel across the Desna River and from the Dnieper on both sides of Kremenchug, have met at a point 130 miles east of Kiev. The Germans say that four Soviet armies have been caught between the arms of these giant pincers. Even if their claim is true, it will take weeks to mop up the Russians in the huge area enclosed by the pincers.
Already their general advance in the Ukraine has been slow, painful and costly in the extreme. This is shown in the Berlin admission that at many points the Russians are still launching fierce counter-attacks across to the west bank of the Dnieper, and in a Moscow report that a German troop train with ammunition was blown up by Russian bombers near Dniepropetrovsk.
Meanwhile, Marshal Timoshenko’s victories at Yelnya and Yartsevo in the Smolensk region have removed, at least temporarily, the direct German threat to Moscow. In one sector alone his forces have destroyed 60 Nazi tanks in four days and during eight days’ fighting the Nazis lost 10,000 dead and wounded.’
It is sometimes said that one should never start a sentence with ‘And’ or ‘But’—that these conjunctions are only for internal use. This is not so. One may start a sentence with ‘But’ if to tack it on to the previous sentence after a semi-colon would not be appropriate. For example:
‘Uther ap Mathonwy was King of Thulë. According to Gandolph the Jongleur he lived in a palace wholly paved with gilt ginger-bread and hard plum-cake. But this is not the Thule of Heine’s ballad: it is situated rather within the confines of fabulous Cockagne.’
Here it would have been wrong to tack on the third sentence to the second, since the ‘But’ refers back to the first.
Similarly:
‘Uther died of grief in his palace after the loss of his daughter Reynardine who accidentally swallowed fern-seed and disappeared from mortal gaze. (According to Gandolph, the fern-seed had been brought in on a careless page’s hunting-shoes and trodden into the ginger-bread and plum-cake.) And that was the end of the Royal House of Thulë.’
Here it would have been wrong to tack the third sentence on to the second, not only because there are already two ‘and’s’ in the last seven words, but because ‘And that was the end’ refers to Uther’s death, not to the page’s carelessness. And the word ‘And’ could not be omitted without a loss of narrative grace. One should not, however, begin a paragraph with an ‘And’ or a ‘But’. If one did, it would mean that the preceding paragraph was not a complete one.
The Asterisk
A row of asterisks implies an omission. It may be an omission that cannot be avoided—as, for example, in the following passage:
‘The letter as it survived the fire was only decipherable in places. It ran:
Dear Godf … have you really broken off … coming as it does between the first squalid app … but never mind—all will be well, when all is forgotten.
Your loving Sally.
P.S. The kitten swall * * *’
Or it may be a deliberate omission, especially where intimate narrative details are left for the reader to supply. For example:
‘“It is our marriage-night,” he mumbled in confusion. Very deliberately she came over to him, kissed him dispassionately, sat on the edge of the poor iron bedstead, and began briskly to unlace her shoes.
* * *
The Dot
Single dots are used to mark the end of an abbreviated word, such as ‘Mr.’, ‘etc.’, ‘Ltd.’. A row of dots has two legitimate significances: either that the person who is supposed to be speaking is hesitating with ‘er … um … er’, or that it would be tedious or irrelevant for the writer to write out the sentence or paragraph in full.
For example:
‘“Let me see …”, Mr. Quennell remarked, “it would be … yes … seventeen … no! exactly eighteen shillings! Thank you, Madam, I’m sure!”’
Or:
‘The law provided that: “any person found guilty under the aforesaid Act of killing or maiming any domestic animal, to wit, horse, mare, gelding, mule, hinny … hound or dog, shall be mulcted of fifteen marks, unless aforesaid person be a knight of the shire, burgess, pot-walloper … or yeoman worth £10, and shall be confined to the stocks for the space of thirty-six hours, where the beadle shall be at pains …”’
The Exclamation Mark
Exclamation marks, also called ‘notes of admiration’, should be sparingly used. Queen Victoria used so many of them in her letters that a sentence by her that ends with a mere full-stop seems hardly worth reading. Exclamation marks do not necessarily close a sentence, as a full stop does.
For example:
‘And then, horror! in marched Mrs. Blackstone with the little corpse held out accusingly between the pincers of the kitchen fire-tongs!’
The Question Mark
A question mark, similarly, can appear in the middle of a sentence without necessarily ending it. For example:
‘That she had asked herself, was he really there? or was she imagining things? now troubled her conscience.’
The Semi-Colon and the Colon
A sentence joined only with commas (or the equivalent of commas in parenthesis-signs, brackets, long dashes and the like) is a single sentence. But sentences are often twins, triplets or even quintuplets, sextuplets and septuplets—semi-colons and colons make them so. A ‘colon’ originally meant a separate limb of a sentence, as a ‘comma’ was a piece cut off from the limb or trunk.
In modern usage, a semi-colon is no longer a pause of the time-value of half a colon—or two-thirds, as Mason suggested: it has an entirely different function. The chief modern distinction between a semi-colon and a colon is that parallel statements, if united in the same sentence to show their close connection, are (as in this sentence) separated with a semicolon; whereas two statements, the second of which is looked forward to by the first, are separated with a colon. Examples:
‘Mr. Jones went laughing up the hill; Mrs. Jones, in tears, down to the mill-pond. The dew was heavy on the grass of Farmer Turvey’s four-acre field; above her head no stars were visible; somewhere an owl hooted. An idea entered Mrs. Jones’ puzzled pate: she would refresh herself with a few drops of old and mild. She called out: “Child, child, run home and fetch me a pot of beer!” But it was not a child after all, as it proved: it was only the village pump!’
Care should be taken, when using colons and semi-colons in the same sentence, that the reader understands how far the force of each sign carries. Take, for example, the following sentence:
‘It was as I anticipated: the Friendship came up with the rest of the fleet at about six bells; the privateer then thought better of it and sheered off, lying about two leagues to windward.’
Here the reader would not know whether the narrator had anticipated merely that the Friendship would come up with the rest of the fleet, or also that the privateer would then sheer off. A full stop at ‘six bells’ would make things clear.
A long dash may be put after a colon, for emphasis. For example:
‘The Captain arose and said: “Come, Antonio, amuse the men, and tell them one of your favourite stories!” Antonio arose, rolled the quid from side to side in his coarse mouth and, after a pause, began thus:—
“About the year 1874, in Lisbon …”’
Commas may do the work of colons and semi-colons in very short sentences. For example:
‘He ran off, I followed. He stumbled and fell, I overtook him. He cried, “Are you mad?” I assured him, “Certainly I am not.”’
In each of the first two of these sentences the comma should, strictly, have been a semi-colon; in each of the last two, it should have been a colon. (In German no such relaxation is permitted; the colons and semi-colons would have to be used.)
The Hyphen
The hyphen is used to link words which, if separated, might possibly have some other meaning than the one intended, or confuse the reader’s eye.
The following is an example of an obvious lack of hyphens, from an American antique-dealers’ journal:
‘High prices are still paid for pre-Christian Seltzer Pennsylvania Dutch chests, if painted with flowers in the fractur style.’
These were not pre-Christian Dutch chests. Christian Seltzer was a late-eighteenth-century painter of chests, fire-boards and such-like for the ‘Dutch’, or Germans, of Pennsylvania. The sentence should therefore have run:
‘High prices are still paid for pre-Christian-Seltzer Pennsylvania-Dutch chests, if painted with flowers in the fractur style.’
The accidental omission or insertion of a hyphen often makes nonsense of a passage:
‘In the Southern States slave-owners of property were expected to give their masters a proportion of its yield.’
Here ‘slave-owners’ should be ‘slave owners’—i.e. slaves who were owners of property.
‘A child photographer yesterday celebrated his silver wedding at Herne Bay: he was Mr. John Tulse, one of the first to specialize in the use of gauze filters.’
Mr. Tulse was really a child-photographer.
Adjectives should not be joined to their nouns with hyphens except in such special cases as blue-book, large-black pig, French-polisher, small-sword—where to omit the hyphen would be to endanger the sense.
Principle Nineteen
The order of ideas in a sentence or paragraph should be such that the reader need not rearrange them in his mind.
The natural arrangement of ideas in critical argument is:
Statement of problem.
Marshalling of evidence, first on main points, then on subsidiary ones—the same sequence kept throughout the argument.
Credibility of evidence examined.
Statement of possible implications of all evidence not wholly rejected.
The weighing of conflicting evidence in the scale of probability.
Verdict.
The natural arrangement of ideas in historical writing is the one recommended in Alice in Wonderland by the King of Hearts to the White Rabbit:
‘Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’
The natural arrangement of ideas in familiar correspondence—unless some all-important news pushes its way forward to the first place—is:
Acknowledgement of previous letter.
Comment on the points raised in it, in order of importance—the recipient’s interests being given priority.
New information in order of importance—the recipient’s interests being given priority.
Questions.
Postscript.
It would take up too much space to analyse a mishandled argument in full. But readers will be familiar with the sort of argument that, if it ever commits itself to a statement of the problem, does not do so until a mass of jumbled evidence on subsidiary points has been adduced, after which it gives the verdict, and then evidence on the principal point, and then an irrelevant report on ‘what the soldier’s wife said’, and then contradictory statements about evidence on subsidiary points, and then perhaps a reconsideration of the verdict, and then fresh evidence, and finally a restatement of the verdict. Doubts are cast by modern mathematicians on the universal validity of the conclusions reached by Euclid in his propositions; but at least he knew how to handle an argument, and always wound up with ‘This conclusion should be tested by practical experiment.’
We shall, however, quote part of a carelessly constructed argument by Major-Gen. Sir Andrew McCulloch. It is from his answer to an editorial question (October 1941): ‘Do you think that any form of British invasion of Europe would be possible during the next weeks or months?’
‘I think it feasible to force an entry into Europe. This opinion, however, is of little value, because I do not know what force is available. If I knew as much as Mr. Churchill or the Chiefs of Staff my views might be of value. As it is, my opinions are in the realm of dreams. For this reason I shall take a purely imaginative situation, and on this premiss shall discuss the relative merits of landing at various places on the coast of Europe.’
The logical order of ideas in this passage is:
1 If I knew as well as Mr. Churchill or the Chiefs of Staff
2 what forces are available
3 my views might be of value;
4 but I do not know,
5 and, when, therefore,
6 after discussing the comparative merits of various landing-places,
7 I pronounce it feasible to force an entry into Europe,
8 my premisses
9 must be recognized as no less imaginative
10 than if I had dreamed them.
The order in the original is 7, 4, 2, 1, 3, 10, 5, 9, 8, 6.
Readers are familiar with the long badly arranged family letter—everything jumbled together so confusedly that they have to read it through several times to find their way about it. No need to quote an example here. We shall, however, quote examples of newspaper reporting in which, because the historic order of events does not correspond with the order of what is held to be their dramatic importance, the reader’s sense of what happened is distracted. Here is part of a report by Joan Slocombe of her experiences in Unoccupied France:
‘But Vichy is dreary beyond words. I preferred Marseilles. In Vichy there is no plump madame of the green-grocery store for ever remarking on my accent. She asked, “Are you English?” and then drew me into the inner room, where over twenty people were listening to the B.B.C. French broadcast.
That happened to me in a cheerful, sunny little street in Marseilles one evening.’
The natural order of events is:
1 Marseilles was dreary enough
2 But a plump madame who kept a green-grocery store
3 in a cheerful little street
4 was always remarking on my foreign accent and one
5 sunny evening
6 asked me: ‘Are you English?’
7 When I said ‘Yes’ she
8 drew me into an inner room where over twenty people were listening to the B.B.C. French broadcast.
9 There was none like her in Vichy,
10 which is dreary beyond words.
The order in the original is: 10, 1, 9, 2, 4, 6, 8, 3, 5 (with 7 omitted). The length of the two versions is the same.
But confused sequence of ideas is not confined to journalistic writing. Here is a hasty sentence from Rose Macaulay’s essay on Virginia Woolf:
‘With her conversation was a flashing, many-faceted stream, now running swiftly, now slowing into still pools that shimmered with a hundred changing lights, shades and reflections, wherein sudden coloured fishes continually darted and stirred, now flowing between deep banks, now chuckling over sharp pebbles.’
To suit the antiqueness of ‘still pools that shimmered’, ‘a hundred changing lights’, and ‘wherein sudden coloured fishes’, as well as to show the reader his way about the sentence, a conventional eighteenth-century treatment would have been appropriate here. Miss Macaulay might well have told with antithetical care how the water ran alternately deep and shallow, fast and slow, wide and narrow, through level fields, down rocky inclines. The principal imaginative figure, the pools of coloured fish, should have been placed at the end: this would have avoided the suggestion that the sudden coloured fish chuckled over the pebbles. Thus:
‘With her, conversation resembled a changeable bright stream that now widening, chuckled over sharp pebbles, and now narrowing, flowed smoothly between steep banks; now it cascaded over rocks; now it lagged and deepened into still pools (shimmering with a hundred reflected lights and shades) wherein coloured fishes suddenly appeared, slowly swimming, and as suddenly darted from view.’
The exact position of subordinate clauses in relation to the main body of a sentence has never been fixed in English. However, there is this difference between modern English and Classical Latin usage: that, in Latin, subordinate clauses are put before the main body of the sentence, though sometimes the first of them may be artfully designed to hold the chief meaning of the sentence—even so complicated a writer as Cicero observes this general rule; whereas in English the rule is exactly reversed. We will show what we mean by rewriting the foregoing sentence in the Latin style:
‘This, however, that in Latin, exactly in reverse manner to English usage, unless some subordinate clause, being artfully designed to hold the chief meaning of the sentence, comes first, all subordinate clauses—such is the general rule observed by even so complicated a writer as Cicero—are put before the main body of the sentence: this, I say, is a difference between modern English and classical Latin.’
It will be noted that this version recalls the prose of Milton, who tried to impose Latin syntax on English.
Principle Twenty
No unnecessary idea, phrase or word should be included in a sentence.
This does not mean that one should write with as much compression as if one were sending a cable, when short of cash, and scheming how to make one word do the work of three—for the reader will take far longer to get the sense of a skeleton message than that of the same message written out in full: it means that irrelevancies, at least, should be cut out. It is difficult to define what an ‘irrelevancy’ is in narrative, because most British readers enjoy almost any sort of incidental anecdote or reflection, tacked on to a story with only the feeblest excuse; but there are certain proprieties to be observed. For example, the following sentence from a recent history of Peter the Great of Russia seems to us improper:
‘In his progress through this province Peter may have passed through the little town where, some two centuries later, his successor the Czar Nicholas II was to be murdered. We wonder what Peter’s feelings would have been had he been granted prevision of this dastardly crime! Arrived back at his Capital ….’
Since it is not even certain that Peter passed through the town, his hypothetic feelings do not seem relevant to the story, especially as the author has made no attempt to reconstruct them.
From a Tobruk despatch by J. H. Hodson, a war correspondent (1941):
‘After that we breakfasted on sardines, biscuits, and tea in an atmosphere that seemed (fictitiously, no doubt) as peaceful and quiet as a beach in Devon.’
The parenthetic ‘fictitiously, no doubt’ belongs to some other story—e.g.: ‘our hosts told us (fictitiously, no doubt) that they often borrow the enemy’s spoons to stir their tea-cups.’
From a novel by James Hilton:
‘… sometimes on these delectable Fridays he would cycle for miles along the flat fen roads with the wind behind him, and return in the afternoon by crawling romantic-looking branch-line trains which always managed to remind him of wild animals, so completely had the civilized thing been submerged in the atmosphere of what it had sought to civilize.’
The idea of white men ‘going native’ in remote savage districts which they came to civilize is irrelevantly superimposed on the idea of domesticated animals that escape from civilization and run wild.
From a newspaper article:
‘That, plainly, is the only way open to us of dealing with India, or with any other colony or mandated territory that is capable of looking after its own affairs.’
The word ‘other’ is irrelevant: India is not either a colony or a mandated territory of Britain.
In the following example, from Sir Walter Citrine’s My Finnish Diary, the unnecessary words are due to geniality:
‘The ice lay in patches somewhere about a dozen feet across in all sorts of shapes. The steamer made easy work of it and soon cut a channel through, guided by the red and green lights which we saw swinging out at us. There was a lighthouse beyond, shooting out its rays through the darkness.’
Since nobody expects ice to stand up on edge or to form in geometrical figures, and since lighthouses do not usually flash in daylight, this boils down to:
‘Guided by red and green swinging lights the steamer easily cut a channel through the patches of ice, which measured on an average two or three yards across. Beyond, a lighthouse flashed.’
From an article by the Marquess of Crewe:
‘The British Empire is no parvenu creation. The Tudors justly claimed that even then the Crown of England was an Imperial Crown, for it ruled several nations.’
When was the ‘even then’ time to which the Tudors referred in their claim that the Crown of England was an Imperial one? None has been indicated. If ‘even then’ is omitted, this problem does not arise.
Principle Twenty-One
All antitheses should be true ones.
This means that all antitheses, or contrasts, should be between opposing ideas of the same order. Here is an example of an antithesis between ideas of different orders, from Hansard’s report of a speech by Mr. Arthur Greenwood, m.p. (Aug. 1939):
‘Our spirit has not weakened; our spirit has deepened.’
Here ‘has deepened’ should have been ‘has strengthened’.
An example, from a gardening book, of an antithesis between similar ideas of the same order:
‘Good soil deserves digging, bad soil needs it.’
The antithesis should not have been between what bad soil needs and what good soils deserves. Both soils need digging; both deserve digging. The intended antithesis here is perhaps:
‘Good soil needs digging, to get the best crops out of it; bad soil needs digging, to get any crops out of it at all.’
An example from an article by Negley Farson:
‘Bevin has just made a startling, yet bold … speech when he declared that positions in the Diplomatic Corps should be thrown open to working-class boys.’
Bold speeches are usually startling.
From a book review by Desmond MacCarthy:
‘Certainly I have never come across a better letter-writer than Lady Wentworth either in envelopes or print.’
He means presumably: ‘Certainly, I have seldom come across better letters, published or unpublished, than Lady Went-worth’s.’
From a novel by Graham Greene:
‘Drover was not reading; they spied on him through a little window the size of a postcard in the cell door. He was asleep upright on his chair, clenched hands hanging between his knees. He might have been sitting for his portrait in the grey loose unaccustomed clothes, seen at better advantage than half hidden by a bus’s hood, but in his dreams he seemed to be in a bus still; a foot pressed the floor, the hands opened a little and twisted.’
In the last sentence there are four sets of true antitheses telescoped into a single false one. The first is: ‘he might have been sitting for his portrait, but he was asleep.’ The second is: ‘he was wearing grey loose clothes, unlike his busman’s uniform.’ The third is: ‘sitting in this chair his figure showed to advantage; but when he drove a bus he was half hidden by the bus’s hood.’ The fourth is: ‘he was asleep, but in a position suggesting that he was driving a bus in his dreams.’
Principle Twenty-Two
Over-emphasis of the illogical sort tolerated in conversation should be avoided in prose.
In conversation people say: ‘There are dozens of octogenarians in our village’ [meaning, nine] ‘and hundreds of children who have never seen the sea’ [meaning, fifty or sixty] ‘and a parson who invariably goes to sleep while preaching’ [meaning, ‘who openly smothered a yawn last Sunday’]. Yet, reading a prose study of Our Village, one would take such remarks literally and feel aggrieved if they turned out to be misleading.
Here are examples of conversational emphasis that we consider inadmissible in good prose.
From an editorial of the British Medical Journal:
‘That food is more important in the preservation of health than housing was shown by the late Dr. M’Gonigle at B——, but this is by no means to say that housing is not of the first importance.’
If food is more important than housing, housing cannot be of the first importance.
From a book review by A. G. Macdonell:
‘The Voyage seems to be an incomparably better book than Sparkenbroke. Mr. Morgan has cut out almost all the dead-wood which used to encumber his writing and make him so difficult to read. There is still the misty silvery atmosphere of spiritual exaltation which Mr. Morgan can evoke as no one else since Conrad, but now the men and women are clear and vigorous against the mist and silver.’
It was not an incomparably better book—as Mr. Macdonell proved by the comparisons in the two succeeding sentences.
From two newspaper reports:
‘The route from America is now a more essential artery to us than it has ever been.’
‘Sir Horace Wilson, head of the Civil Service, has circulated to all departments a demand for man-power economy by the stringent cutting-out of less essential work.’
There are no degrees in essentiality: a thing is either essential or unessential.
Here is a characteristic example of forensic over-emphasis in a newspaper leader:
‘The outrages committed by the German forces in the present war are almost identical with those they committed in the last except that they are even more atrocious; the excuses with which they are accompanied are exactly similar except that they are even more shameless. Mr. Churchill, in a flash of genius, divined this when he declared the present war to be “a continuation” of the last.’
Here the over-emphatic ‘almost identical’ and ‘exactly similar’, by restricting the possible differences between German behaviour in the First World War and the Second, take the wind from the sails of ‘even more atrocious’ and ‘even more shameless’. Also, ‘a flash of genius’ is praise which leads the reader to expect a satisfyingly original epigram from Mr. Churchill instead of a sensible commonplace.
Principle Twenty-Three
Ideas should not contradict one another, or otherwise violate logic.
The practice of oratorical disputation in mediaeval schools, though it led to absurd logic-chopping, and though little attempt was made to verify the truth of the facts used in the arguments, did at least make people conscious of the logical consequences of what they said. A modified form of such disputation might usefully be revived in English education. Schoolchildren would soon be able to put their fingers on logical flaws and would gradually learn to avoid absurdities themselves.
From the Historical Introduction to the Oxford English Dictionary:
‘In this way began the system of voluntary readers, without whose help the material for the Society’s Dictionary could never have been collected at all, except at a prohibitive cost of time and money.’
But if the cost had been prohibitive, the material could not have been collected.
From a novel by John Masefield:
‘Do you see him?
There went the fox, indeed, a little red flashing thing, looking much smaller than he was, because he was already fully extended.’
If the fox was fully extended, it might possibly look larger than it really was—as a cat does when it puffs out its fur to frighten dogs or as a horse does when it ‘goes full out’—but not smaller.
From the autobiography of David Kirkwood, m.p.:
‘Sir William Joynson-Hicks had made a stupid blunder by instructing a raid on “Arcos”, the headquarters in London of the commercial section of the Russian Government, for the purpose of discovering an imaginary document which wasn’t there.’
If the police knew that the document was not at ‘Arcos’ and indeed that it existed only in their imagination, their purpose could not have been to discover it. (But perhaps the passage is ironical.)
Principle Twenty-Four
The writer should not, without clear warning, change his standpoint in the course of a sentence or paragraph.
What grammarians call ‘false sequence of tenses’ (e.g. ‘He would not have come if he saw me coming too’) and ‘false concord’ (e.g. ‘Common-sense and honesty is all I ask’, or ‘I gave the wether her feed’) are becoming increasingly common in English. The Latin grammarians took a more serious view of false sequence than the Greeks: the famous Greek historian Thucydides, especially when quoting speeches, often started a sentence with one construction and finished it with another. The Latins were right to be strict, for the eye is always delayed by a false sequence or concord.
Here is a typical example of false concord from a notice issued by a Head Warden of ‘Rural Areas F. Division’.
‘A new organization has been formed and is known as the “Fire Guard”. The object of this body is to recruit every available person to fight fires in their own homes.
A meeting will be held at the Galmpton Institute on Wednesday September 10th at 8 p.m., when the Chief Officer of the Totnes Rural District Fire Services will attend to fully explain the scheme. It is hoped that everyone who can will attend, even if they are already members of a stirrup-pump party.’
It should have been: ‘… very person to fight fires in his own home’, ‘everyone will attend, even if he is already a member’.
In English one may legitimately refer to a Council, a firm or a society as either ‘they’ or ‘it’—as one may refer to Great Britain, or Germany, or The Church, or a ship, as either ‘she’ or ‘it’—but whichever form is chosen should be consistently used. Here are examples of inconsistency.
From a report by the Committee of Convocation (1931):
‘Further, we would stress the debt of the Church for this provision of some form of worship for her sons scattered over the seven seas in ships and lighthouses, on the Continent, in the Australian back-blocks, in Canadian clearings, in loneliness in tropical Africa, where the Church itself is unable to supply regular ministrations.’
Because of ‘her sons’ it should be ‘the Church herself’.
From a leader by J. A. Spender:
‘All eyes are on Great Britain, which has announced that she does not recognize partitions of territory carried through by violence in the middle of war.’
It should be ‘who has announced’, because of the ‘she’ that follows.
Here are typical examples of false sequence of tenses. From the American news-magazine Time—an account of Napoleon’s Moscow campaign:
‘Before his troops marched last week, Hitler may—and very likely did—pause to review this pertinent chapter of history.’
This should be ‘may have paused and very likely did’.
From a newspaper article, in which the past and historic-present are improperly mixed:
‘Now, while Marx’s activist theory of knowledge curtailed the view that human beings are continuously changing, when he comes to treat them historically he conceives of them as uniform.’
It should be ‘came’ … ‘conceived’.
From Why Britain Is at War, by the Hon. Harold Nicolson, m.p.:
‘Would it really mean for us a loss of prestige and power if all our African colonies were placed under the mandatory system and administered in the interests of the natives and of humanity as a whole? That in fact is the system which we are already adopting. We should notice little change.
And in return for this we should achieve a world which is worth fighting for.’
The ‘is’ in the last sentence may be justified as a Thucydidean usage which gives greater emphasis to the sentence. But, grammatically, ‘would be’ is correct.
Most changes of standpoint are due to the writer’s forgetting how his sentence started. (The grammatic term is ‘anacoluthia’.)
From a book review by Desmond MacCarthy:
‘There are a few things in his letters which Time has made to look more foolish and some more wise than they were when uttered.’
This should have been either:
‘Time has made a few things in his letters look more foolish, and a few wiser, than when they were first written.’
Or:
‘Some things in his letters now look more foolish, and some wiser, than when they were first written.’
From an article in a gardening journal:
‘These markings are caused partly by natural etiolation, sometimes because of frost, but generally from a microscopic pest.’
This should be either ‘partly … partly … mostly’; or ‘sometimes … sometimes … most often’; or ‘in some cases … in others … generally’. In each case it should have been ‘by’, not ‘because of’ or ‘from’.
From a Ministry of Information advertisement:
‘To-day, the fanaticism of the Nazis is matched by a faith that is stronger and more enduring than their own, …’
Either: ‘matched with’, or ‘opposed by’.
From a parish notice:
‘Scrap metal, tins, paper will be collected the first Monday of every month; refuse will also be collected on alternate Tuesdays of each week.’
Very few of the parishioners noticed anything unusual about this—until Tuesday.
From a novel by Agatha Christie:
In his mind phrase after phrase succeeded each other.
Either:
‘… phrase succeeded phrase’
or:
‘… many phrases succeeded one another’
From The Long Week End, by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge:
‘Samuel Butler, a prophet before his time, had suggested in his Note-Books …’
Either ‘a shrewd prophet’ or ‘who was in advance of his time’. Admittedly, many prophets including (so Biblical scholars say) Jeremiah have been prophets after their times—i.e. some of the prophecies credited to them were written after the events to which they referred—but this was not what we meant.
Principle Twenty-Five
In each list of people or things all the words used should belong to the same category of ideas.
For example, one does not write: ‘Various sorts of animals—carnivorous, herbivorous, fructivorous, marsupial, rodent.’ The first three sorts of animals are classified according to their diet, the fourth according to its order in natural history, the fifth according to its family.
An Oxford butcher advertises himself as ‘Family, pork and general butcher.’ ‘Family’ denotes a particular class of custom; ‘pork’ denotes a range of commodities sold; ‘general’ may denote either that he butchers all animals fit for human consumption or that he sells to casual buyers as well as to families. The correct description is: ‘Family and General Butcher; Specialist in Pork’.
From a B.B.C. news bulletin:
‘The combined operations in Libya were a notable example of land, air, and naval coöperation’.
This should have been ‘land, air and sea coöperation’.
From a local paper:
‘The hotels have been taken over by the military, the Navy and the R.A.F.’
In popular usage the initials ‘R.A.F.’ have no counterpart: for ‘R.N.’ is not used and the Army as a whole has no initials. Since ‘the military’ is in a category by itself—such forms as ‘the naval’ and ‘the aerial’ not being used—this sentence should have read:
‘The hotels have been taken over by the Navy, Army and Air Force.’
The form ‘by the Royal Navy, the Army and the Royal Air Force’ calls unnecessary attention to the Army’s lack of royal patronage despite its seniority to the Royal Air Force.