Early Modern Notes

This, in a way, leads on from the last post. Good blogging, after all, is good writing and pleasurable reading, whatever the status of the blogger. Via Arts and Letters Daily, an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education explores ’style’ in writing.

It emerges when writers are comfortable and proficient with their tools. Style is expressed unconsciously, but shaped consciously, in revision. It is a whispering, not a shouting voice; whether readers discern it depends on their familiarity with the writer and their own skill as readers. The writer himself or herself is aware of it; identifying, developing, and shaping it is one of the main pleasures of the craft.

The delectable Tim Burke - whose writing is never less than wonderful, of course, and often inspired, even when you’re not quite agreeing with his argument - also made some highly pertinent comments about academic language recently. He’s right: if you simply parrot the formulae of academic writing, no one will believe that you really know what you’re talking about. That ‘whispering voice’ of your own, distinctive style is crucial to demonstrating that you are master of your subject, not the other way round.

I love writing. No one, I suspect, will believe me, but writing my PhD was one of the most satisfying experiences of my life. (Though I’m fortunate, I think, in that history is a discipline that doesn’t impose many formal rules on the structure of a PhD thesis. I woke up one Sunday morning knowing exactly how I wanted it to be, scribbled it down on the back of an envelope with a very old bit of pencil - I’ve never managed to get into the sensible habit of keeping a notepad by the bed - and once I had that structure, somehow, everything came together.) And one of the reasons I love blogging is that I get to write, to keep practising this peculiar mystery (I use that in the early modern sense of a craft or art), in a way that’s rather different from scholarly articles and papers and all the rest of it - and yet it’s related. How do I find ways to say awkward, complicated things without using awkward, over-complicated language? Can I avoid pomposity when I want to be serious? What’s the best way to string these thoughts together to create a coherent ‘argument’? Hell, is that the time already?

Remarkable, by the way, that twentieth-century (delusional?) belief in the importance of keeping your own opinions out of writing (how can your writing not express your opinions, for heaven’s sake?). Which gives us quotes to ponder such as this, from the Chronicle article: “One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s personality.” Written by… George Orwell.