Wrapping Up the Look at Style

The original purpose of this style series was to weigh in on an off-hand comment elsewhere about using Shakespeare and the King James Bible as a basis for contemporary style. The reasoning behind that comment is that Shakespeare and the King James Bible were the basis of Modern English, so its time to return to the source. My initial objection rested upon the linguistic shift and the subtle differences between Shakespeare's Early Modern English and today's Modern English. (Oh what a difference fifty years makes.) But as I poked into various elements of style, I realized my objection was based on a realization that any discussion of style would only add to the initial selections of Shakespeare and the King James Bible instead of offering alternatives. Fortunately, the investigation proved profitable.

I am in no way suggesting that writers should not read Shakespeare and the King James Bible. Saying that would be attempting to defend the indefensible. Basic cultural literacy demands familiarity with both. And the core claim that Shakespeare and the King James Bible created Modern English is indisputable. My objection rested solely on how the Great Vowel Shift that occurred while Shakespeare was writing tended to obscure the rhyme, meter, and, occasionally, meaning. But I soon learned that rhythm and rhyme were not the only aspects of style.

While exploring rhetorical devices, it soon became clear that Shakespeare and the King James Bible would be excellent sources for learning these advanced grammars. After all, these foundational English works are used time and time again to illustrate specific rhetorical devices. There is more to dynamic language than just cadence, after all.

And if I think that Shakespeare and the King James Bible should be lifelong studies instead of for a season, the distinction is so slight to not merit argument in this matter.

The question now becomes what Modern English works to augment this impressive canon with. Unfortunately, I now have more questions than answers.

I first turned to Poe, as he is the father of contemporary short fiction and an example of the Romanticist roots of pulp. Between Castle of Otranto and Poe's detective fiction, I had been viewing the Romantic period through rose-colored lenses. For while modern mysteries and fantasy originated during this time, so did the simplification of style that led to today's terse, transparent style, sometimes called Hemingway's even as it lacks his longer sentences. B. R. Myers pointed out that the inability to construct the long sentence is one of the leading challenges for today's style-minded writers, unlike in the period between Shakespeare and the Romanticists. Then, the fashion of long, complex sentences nested in series of successive clauses thrived in an era where beauty on the page was unencumbered by the demands of performance and oration. The Romanticists' issue with this style echoed Harrison Ford's complaint about Star Wars' script: "You can type this shit, but you can't say it." Now, thanks to 200+ years of literary fashion, the written word needs to reflect everyday speech. Reconciling the demands of the long sentence with those of the spoken word is now the fundamental challenge of the would-be stylist. And, as the current age continues to be shaped by texting, chat programs, and other social media, to learn complex language, one thing is clear:

You have to go back.

But to where and when?

"A Reader's Manifesto"

In his 2001 "A Reader's Manifesto", B. R. Meyers takes five of his contemporary writers to task over how stylish affectations destroyed clarity of thought. While most of his article consists of pointing out just how the sentence cult had poor sentences in technical detail, several of his general observations merit consideration by any student of style--if not outright warnings of future pitfalls. Below are some of Meyers' observations that resonated with me. The entire article is worth reading.

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It has become fashionable, especially among female novelists, to exploit the license of poetry while claiming exemption from poetry's rigorous standards of precision and polish.

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The decline of American prose since the 1950s is nowhere more apparent than in the decline of the long sentence. Today anything longer than two or three lines is likely to be a simple list of attributes or images.

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I doubt that any reviewer in our more literate past would have expected people to have favorite sentences from a work of prose fiction. A favorite character or scene, sure; a favorite line of dialogue, maybe; but not a favorite sentence. We have to read a great book more than once to realize how consistently good the prose is, because the first time around, and often even the second, we're too involved in the story to notice.

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Anyone who doubts the declining literacy of book reviewers need only consider how the gabbiest of all prose styles is invariably praised as "lean," "spare," even "minimalist."

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At the 1999 National Book Awards ceremony Oprah Winfrey told of calling Toni Morrison to say that she had had to puzzle over many of the latter's sentences. According to Oprah, Morrison's reply was "That, my dear, is called reading." Sorry, my dear Toni, but it's actually called bad writing.

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Clumsy writing begets clumsy thought, which begets even clumsier writing. The only way out is to look back to a time when authors had more to say than "I'm a Writer!"; when the novel wasn't just a 300-page caption for the photograph on the inside jacket. A reorientation toward tradition would benefit writers no less than readers. In the early twentieth century it was fashionable in Britain to claim that only a completely new style of writing could address a world undergoing an unprecedented transformation—just as the critic Sven Birkerts claimed in a recent Atlantic Unbound that only the new "aesthetic of exploratory excess" can address a world undergoing ... well, you know. For all that Georgian talk of modernity, it was T. S. Eliot, a man fascinated by the "presence" of the past, who wrote the most-innovative poetry of his time.

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The emphasis in the last is mine. Not only does Meyer reinforce canon, he offers hope for the various SFF reformers looking back to the past of Piper, Campbell, and the pulps. To go forward, look back.

It Ain't Necessarily So...

In response to yesterday's post, The Frisky Pagan takes the received wisdom on Hemingway out to the woodshed:

Now, I don’t think this is the style of today’s popular literature. If anything, Fitzgerald is closer to what is now popular (because it’s more natural) than Hemingway. There’s really nothing natural or short about Hemingway. Oh, sure, he did write some (very famous) short sentences, and you can’t write a whole book only with half-page sentences anyway, and he did play with sequences of short sentences, then followed by unholy, 200-word abominations, but he did NOT write in journalese or like a “telegraph.” It’s true, however, that he had a DIRECT style (and a phobia of commas, I guess,) with little to no abstraction, emotions, or introspective digressions. Perhaps from there his fame of writing concise, direct literature comes from, but you certainly can’t jump from there to “he wrote short, simple, clear sentences, like today’s bestsellers.“

He provides a few examples from Hemingway's writing that do torpedo the claims made yesterday. Or at least show that some strange telephone game happened between what Hemingway's actual technique and what everyone thought he was doing. It isn't the first, and as the Frisky Pagan brings up, it isn't the last:

It’s also clear that writers like those (and there are many) are constricted, terrified of something, so afraid of breaking some unnamed writing law that they mutilate their texts and don’t allow them any freedom. And it gets even worse when action scenes kick in since some fool once said that short sentences enhance the immediacy and strength of action, and now everybody writes stuttering, two or three-word action-scene sentences.

(That fool might be Mary Robinette Kowal.)

The focus on such things is First and Second Things all over again, with good writing using technique, so the use of technique means that this should be good writing. But, when second things get placed first, you don't get first or second things, which explains why, in an age where technique is bandied about online so readily, there's precious little good writing. Here at my blog included.

Anyway, thanks to the Frisky Pagan for setting the record straight in an article well worth reading.

How Did We Get Here?

This long series on style was kicked off by the growing discontentment within some parts of the PulpRev over the current style of invisible prose currently used. So, before I start defending the indefensible this week, let's take a look at how English fiction prose got to its current state. And, like most of the social upheavals of the past century, this change has its roots in the 1920s. Tom Simon explains:

In fact, the most successful experimental writer of the 1920s and thereabouts is not even recognized as experimental anymore, because his experiments succeeded too well. That was Ernest Hemingway. The essence of his genius was to apply ‘telegraphese’, the compressed and allusive language of the transatlantic cable reporters, to the short story and the novel. Look at any of Hemingway’s novels side by side with his contemporaries, such as Fitzgerald, Woolf, or Joyce himself, and then with a randomly chosen bestseller from any later period up to the 1980s or thereabouts. You will probably find that Hemingway’s language is much more like the latter-day bestseller than any of his contemporaries. They were still writing the self-consciously ‘bookish’ language of the Victorian novel, allowing of course for the changes of dialect over time. Hemingway wrote a compact and elliptical language that showed more than it told, and hinted at more than it showed, and derived its patterns of grammar and diction from spoken rather than written English. Few later authors could equal the pith and force of Hemingway’s style, but they imitated it as well as they could, until it became the default ‘transparent’ style for even garden-variety commercial fiction. Heinlein’s enormous reputation as a science fiction writer rests partly on his being the first writer to successfully apply the Hemingway technique to SF.

In short, it's Hemingway's world, we all write in it. But the trend towards "patterns of grammar and diction from spoken rather than written English" did not start with Hemingway. Like all American fiction, it finds its roots in the Romantic age's return to nature. Prior to them, written English was dominated by the fashion of layers and layers of clauses--hypotaxis. Unfortunately, the trend towards spoken English in prose has been accompanied by the drive towards realism in fiction and the subsequent decay of rhetorical devices in prose. Somehow, reflecting what people actually say turned into reflecting what the People say, even though no version of the People actually resembled the man on the street.

Curiously enough, Hemingway's style is an outgrowth of poetry: From reading Rudyard Kipling Hemingway absorbed the practice of shortening prose as much as it could take.  It mixes "'declarative sentences and direct representations of the visible world' with simple and plain language." But what is unsaid matters, too:

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.
—Ernest Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon

One could easily say that the prevalent style is a mimicry of Hemingway's simple and plain language divorced from Hemingway's discipline. For while there is an app to teach the mechanics of Hemingway's style, his iceberg theory of composition is usually honored in the breach.

Telegraphic Description

And, of course, no digression into matters of style is complete without some negative examples:

The Planetary Defense Commander describes a common affliction in science fiction:

Anyway, what I really can’t deal with in this book is a writing style that:

1. Treats the reader like he/she has brain damage.
2. Breaks the flow of the story.

I’ve been seeing this style from a lot of indie authors lately, but this is the first traditionally-published novel that I remember seeing it in.  I’ve mentioned it before in my review of a novel by Evan Currie, and I think it may have been present in the two books I DNFed before this one. 

I listened to the novel while driving, so I don’t have quotes, but here’s my impression of the writing style, during a scene where a character is fleeing armed hijackers in a spaceship’s engine room: 

Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a toolbox.  The toolbox would probably have tools inside it.  The crew would need tools to maintain the ship’s engines.  Without engine maintenance, the engines might stop running, and then the ship wouldn’t be able to reach its destination. 

Meanwhile, I’m driving, yelling at my car’s speakers, “STFU!  Toolbox!  All you had to say was toolbox!  I know what a #%*(# toolbox is for!  Wasn’t someone chasing you with a gun?  STFU!”

To which the comments expand further:

I sometimes call it telegraphic description, which I guess is similar to blow-by-blow descriptions, and it’s pretty common in starting or amateur writers: if some character opens a door, this kind of writer will tell you that he placed the hand on the knob, clutched it, and then turned it. 

By the way, you are cursed now, you have noticed it and now you will see it everywhere. 

Conversations on Style

I'm not the only one talking about style these days in our little corner of the pulp world. Style is a hot-button conversation right now. Much as with Appendix N, the conversation is less which style is correct, but that something is missing in the current fashions of the day. 

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The Frisky Pagan weighs in on the right proper use of profanity--and the abuse of it in science fiction:

A few hours ago, in a sudden masochistic impulse, I went to the website of the science fiction & fantasy magazine Uncanny and clicked on their latest story. I read a few sentences and, as expected, recoiled in horror. But something else happened: I became painfully aware of something that, although I had noticed before, I had never managed to hold onto as a concrete thought: these fucking fuckers swear too fucking much. 

I can already hear the usual howling: “Why are you curtailing our style! That’s how people talk!” First of all, you have no style, which is why all your stories are the same and you have to pad them out with fucks, references to Trump, and silly nonsense.

I can't help but be reminded of Orson Scott Card's observation on the juvenile nature of shock.

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Misha Burnett continues his series on poetry for the prose writer with a discussion of meter:

English, as I said in my last article, is a stressed language. Syllables in english words are either stressed or unstressed, and when you string a bunch of English words together to make a sentence you can plot the rhythm of the sentence by marking the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. 

This is called meter, and poetry geeks divide meter into metrical feet of two syllables and give each type a name. Two unstressed syllables is a dibrach, an unstressed followed by a stressed is called an iamb, a stressed followed by an unstressed is called a trochee, and two stressed syllables is called a spondee.

To put that into context, let’s turn to Shakespeare, from Hamlet’s famous soliloquy: 

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprise of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry

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Over at Cultural Rumbles, there is a list of books that may help unlock poetry from an exercise in doggerel into proper appreciation. 

And JimFear has asked for suggestions of poems that may help a non-poetry fan develop his prose and appreciation.

Misha Burnett: Poetry for Writers: What Not to Read

As the ongoing conversation on prose style develops, many writers have been turning to the old advice of reading poetry. However, poetry has a diminishing part of the English language for years now, leaving a daunting task for those looking for an introduction to the art form. Where to begin?

Misha Burnett offers some advice to help narrow down that task;

This series of articles will be focusing on poetry strictly as an aid for developing a fiction author’s feel for composition and rhythm with an eye for producing more readable prose. Consequently, I will be discussing different forms on the basis of how they suit that end, and leaving aside the weightier issue of what is good poetry or (horrors!) What Is Poetry? 

With that in mind, I advise avoiding the following not because they are bad (I’ll be adding some of my favorites to the codex expurgatorius) but because they are not helpful. 

First, don’t read Blank Verse. 

I’ll be honest, if I were suddenly granted Godlike powers I would prevent any poet from writing Blank Verse until she or he could prove mastery of at least three different strict forms.  When Modernist masters (people like cummings, Eliot, and Pound) wrote Blank Verse they wrote in a way that concealed the deep structure (what Baudelaire called “the secret architecture”) of the poem. The rhythm of the language overwhelms the layout on the page. 

Modern poets, for the most part, write Blank Verse to avoid the bother of having any structure whatsoever, deep or shallow. They write Blank Verse not because it is an advanced way of using the language but because rhyme and scansion are hard work. 

Sadly, it can be very difficult to tell the difference between verse which is beyond formal structure and verse that is beneath it until you have a solid grasp of poetic structure. So I advise authors who are trying to learn how to use the structure of language in prose to avoid Blank Verse altogether. 

Second, don’t read Non-English Poetry. 

Unless, of course, you plan on writing prose in other languages. 

Check out the rest of Misha's article.

Parataxis and Hypotaxis

Style, again. This time, rhetorical devices, including Hemingway's simple style:

Parataxis is the natural way of speaking English. It’s the way English wants to be spoken. English is a basically uninflected language. Everything depends on the word order. It’s all subject verb object. The man kicked the dog. The cat sat on the mat. The angels have the phone box. In Latin and German it’s different. Words can be moved around, but you still understand the sentence because of the endings. “Nauta amat puellam” and “Puellam nauta amat” both mean “The sailor loves the girl.” English isn’t like that. It’s paratactic. It’s linear. It’s one sentence. Then it’s another. 

The alternative, should you, or any writer of English, choose to employ it (and who is to stop you?) is, by use of subordinate clause upon subordinate clause, which itself may be subordinated to those clauses that have gone before or after, to construct a sentence of such labyrinthine grammatical complexity that, like Theseus before you when he searched the dark Minoan mazes for that monstrous monster, half bull and half man, or rather half woman for it had been conceived from, or in, Pasiphae, herself within a Daedalian contraption of perverted intention, you must unravel a ball of grammatical yarn lest you wander forever, amazed in the maze, searching through dark eternity for a full stop. 

That’s hypotaxis, and it used to be everywhere. 

Forsyth, Mark. The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase (pp. 60-62). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Forsyth blames the Romantics for turning away from hypotaxis, with their search for all things natural in speech.

Hypotaxis is unnatural in English; nobody would ever say a sentence like the one above. You have to think calmly for a long time to come up with a good hypotactic sentence, and so a good hypotactic sentence tells the reader that you have been thinking calmly for long time. 

Forsyth, Mark. The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase (p. 64). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Those looking for an alternative to Hemingway's style might consider the layers of subordinate clauses found in hypotaxis. But beware, it will be a hard sell for such writing to pass the ear test.

UPDATE: Out on social media, Neal gives a useful application of how to use both parataxis and hypotaxis:

Formula for a great speech to an audience of all educational levels. Parataxis with Anglo-Saxon (PAS) words. Restatement and addition of new information in hypotactic structure with introduction of latinate words. Restatement of new information in PAS. Iterate, finishing in parataxis.

Also, parataxis and hypotaxis are not rhetorical devices, such as, say anaphora, aposiopesis, chiasmus, or homeoteleuton are. The are syntactical forms, the use of which (along with assorted devices) can be used to characterize a style.

I believe the shorthand way of referring to ensembles of rhetorical style, back when people had more classical educations, where Ciceronian (hypotactic) and Senecan (paratactic).

 Note how he connects English's dual vocabulary to rhetorical effects--and famous public speakers.

The Double Vocabulary of English

Style, again.

As mentioned earlier, English has parallel vocabularies, based on the origin of the root words, such as the Germanic "drink" and the "Norman beverage".  In gross terms, the Germanic version is more forceful and everyday, the French more sophisticated, and the Latin and Greek more scholarly. (There are exceptions. This is English we're talking about. There's always an exception.)

Here's a video explaining more about these parallel tracks.

Anglish

Yep, back to style.

Little things make a mighty stir in little towns, which is why that Kingsford folk talked all that spring and summer about the three unacknowworth bodies, frightful cut as with many seaswords, and frightful twisted as by the tread off many ruthloose bootheels, which the tide washed in. And some folk even spoke off things paltry as the forsaken roadwain found in Ship Road, or true unmennish screams, most likely off a lost wight or northfaring bird, heard in the night by wakeful burgars. But off this idle town gossip the Fearful Old Man took no heed at all. He was by lund withdrawn, and when one is old and weak, one’s withholding is twice as strong. Beside, so eldern a seaheadman must have witted scores off things much more stirring in the faroff days off his unbethought youth.

--H. P Lovecraft, "The Fearful Old Man" 

Meet Anglish, the deliberate pruning from English of all those pesky loan words our magpie language has hoarded away over the centuries. Like the competing trend among grammarians to force Latin grammar on a Germanic language, Anglish is an attempt to shift English into an aesthetically "purer" form, conveniently ignoring the language as it is spoken.

But, for the writer, it provides an interesting exercise in style and word choice. English might be Germanic in origin, but it is also a blend of French, Latin, and Greek, owing to a mix of English peasants, Norman French nobles, and Latin-speaking clergy. This has built up parallel vocabularies, based on the origin of the root words, such as the Germanic "drink" and the "Norman beverage".  In gross terms, the Germanic version is more forceful and everyday, the French more sophisticated, and the Latin and Greek more scholarly. (There are exceptions. This is English we're talking about. There's always an exception.)

Anglish allows a writer to better understand connotation and the interplay of how language of origin affects word choice. In most cases, this is a mere writing exercise, but attempts are underway to convert such works as Shakespeare's plays, Lovecraft's Mythos, and famous orations into this more Germanic form.

Perhaps the prized example of Anglish comes from science fiction. Appendix N alumnus Poul Anderson explained atomic theory in his "Uncleftish Beholding" in one of the occasional thought exercises that sneak into science fiction. Here's how an Anglish speaker might explain the ways of worldken:

For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life. 

 The underlying kinds of stuff are the *firststuffs*, which link together in sundry ways to give rise to the rest. Formerly we knew of ninety-two firststuffs, from waterstuff, the lightest and barest, to ymirstuff, the heaviest. Now we have made more, such as aegirstuff and helstuff.

That said, Anglish has survived as a concept for over 300 years, but has never truly caught on beyond scholarly and writing exercises.

The Clave: A Contrast

Fourth in a series on style:

As mentioned earlier, language has an effect on music and thus poetry. In the previous post, we listened to the shuffle, the expression of syncopation in English popularized by Afro-American musicians.

Below is a video on the clave, the Afro-Cuban expression of syncopation in Spanish. It is a five-beat rhythm that does not match the two-syllable heartbeat of the English iamb. Instead, the pattern lends itself to the more lyrical Romance languages. This disparity between an odd-numbered rhythm and English's even-numbered heartbeat also explains why English language haiku is lacking when it attempts to follow the 5-7-5 syllable pattern of the Japanese form.

The lesson here for the stylist is to match the rhythm to the native pulse of the language.

The Shuffle

More groundwork for the musicality of style.

It comes as no surprise that the language that built its lyrical poetry on the da dum heartbeat rhythm of the iamb would popularize the same rhythm in the swings and shuffles of blues and jazz.

Listen to the bass in the video below for the same heartbeat rhythm in Shakespeare's Sonnet 18:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:

It takes a little work, but you can sing the sonnet at tempo to the accompaniment of Freddie King and have it retain the life of spoken language without sounding like a robot--or an elementary school language arts teacher. The challenge is to keep the recitation from sounding rote.

Missing Letters: Thorn

Here is a second video laying groundwork for a discussion of style.

Another example of stylistic shift over time affecting pronunciation and thus meter.

Of particular interest here, is the letter "thorn", a strange letter that looks like a lowercase "b" mashed with a "P" (check the video for an example). This letter did not survive the onset of printing, as, much as English printers tended to replace German umlauts with uncontracted vowels "ae", "oe", and "ue", Continental printers replaced the thorn with y. So "thee" and "thou" turned into "ye" and "you" on the page, obscuring the last remnants of the informal "you" grammar inherited from Anglo-Saxon. (It wouldn't surprise me to learn that it sped up the elimination of the informal tense as thee and thou became ye and you, and eventually just you.)

Shakespeare: Original Pronunciation

Rather than get swept up in the recent personality clashes in the PulpRev, I'd rather focus on an idea somewhat tangential to that discussion: how to learn style, or what to do when Hemingway's prose just doesn't carry the rhetorical weight needed in a passage.

But before I can get to those thoughts (And because I haven't mastered how to get multiple videoes on Blogger), I am going to lay a little groundwork prior.

In English, Shakespeare towers above all, in lyrical meter, rhetorical grammar, and characterization. But 400 years of linguistic shift obscures some of the puns and the meters used in his poetry. Thus many scholars have attempted to discover the original pronunciation of the plays from period sources.

Original pronunciation (OP) changes the meter of Shakespeare--or rather restores it from years of pronunciation drift. Any attempt to study Shakespeare for style needs to consider this, as to best understand drama and poetry is to hear it performed instead of reading it on the page.

For instance, the vowel shift on the word sleep, from sla-ep with an unstressed long A to slEEP with an accented long E, affects the stress on the word and the rhythm of the sentence.

For more on OP, including snippets of performances, check out the video below.