The Last Word
Friday, February 11, 2005
Editor's Note: David Lambuth was one of the most legendary members of the Dartmouth faculty; he taught at the College during the first half of the twentieth century. Budd Schulberg 1938 said that Professor Lambuth was "what a college English professor should look like." He flung himself "into battle against the hordes of bad writing flying the enemy flags of pretension and verbosity." Professor Lambuth, indeed, found himself in deep abjection on account of the slovenly quality of undergraduate writing—one suspects it has hardly improved these days—and put together a pithy little handbook called The Golden Book on Writing, published in 1923. From this the following selections are drawn, and they remain still fine counsel. "It is said, with good reason, that no one can teach anyone else how to write," Schulberg wrote. "Well, if Lambuth cannot make you drink, at least he turns you in the general direction of the water."
Good writing... comes only from clear thinking, set down in simple and natural speech, and afterwards revised in accordance with good usage. The adequate vocabulary and the feeling for this good usage and idiom which are so essential to good writing can be acquired only by wide and intelligent reading. And in no other way whatsoever.
The clouds were black and boiling. There was a gust of wind. Then lightning flashed from zenith to horizon. Fragmentary writing of the kind illustrated above is quite properly called "impressionistic," and is perhaps the most effective development of usage in both modern prose and poetry. But it takes a fine sense of writing and of life to handle it with power. Too frequently used, it loses all its effectiveness and becomes little more than gibberish.
The more closely the parts and clauses of a sentence can enter about one dominating subject, the simpler that subject is for the mind to grasp. Such simplicity is one of the first requirements of careful writing... Your first duty in writing is to make it as easy as possible for your reader to follow your thought. Obscurity is not profundity. Neither is it art.
When a sentence doesn't seem to be going well it is a good thing to stop and ask yourself "What is it I am really talking about in this sentence?" When you have discovered exactly what this central idea is and have put it down as the subject of the sentence you will usually find that the thought unrolls itself far more easily—and far more intelligibly for the reader... If you have a nail to hit, hit it on the head.
You understand just what you mean so clearly at the moment when you are doing the writing that it is exceedingly hard for you to recognize ambiguities. Not even the best writer can weigh judicially a page that is hot from the pen—or the typewriter. After the writing is "cold" the ambiguities stare you in the face—at least they ought to. Later revision of this kind is much better than writing with painful slowness in the first draft. Snail-pace writing never catches up with spontaneity—which is one of the greatest of the literary virtues.
Good writing, whether in an article, a story, or a business statement, must be clear, accurate, and vivid. Whether you are clear or not depends to a considerable degree upon the clearness of your sentence structure, but your accuracy and vividness depend on the words you use... The only satisfactory way to enlarge a poverty-stricken vocabulary is to read widely. You really come to know words and their shades of meaning only by meeting and getting acquainted with them in their proper context, for the sense for words is an instinctive feeling rather than any self-conscious and laborious achievement.
Specific words are always more vivid than general words. Specific words paint pictures of particular, individual objects; general words lump these individual objects together more or less vaguely into a class. The difference between the two is the difference between the photograph of some particular pretty girl and the composite photograph of a thousand pretty girls. One is clear-cut; the other is hazy.
The purpose of punctuation is to suggest the way in which the written word should be read aloud so as to make it as intelligible as possible. In a secondary sense, of course, punctuation helps to clarify, but this it does primarily by providing directions for the handling of the voice, the placing of emphasis, and the correct reproduction of the movement of the thought. The period indicates the end of a complete and independent thought...
A writer's style is his own distinctive way of expressing his personality in vocabulary, idiom, and sentence structure. Another man's style cannot be consciously copied without plagiarism. In fact, trying to imitate another's style is much the same thing as trying to disguise one's identity behind a paper-mâché mask that looks like Bernard Shaw or G. K. Chesterton. It might be amusing for a fancy dress ball, but only a lunatic would attempt to go about that way in ordinary life.
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