Dr. Michael Platt
“Words are not to thought what garb is to the body, but what the body is to the soul. They are the incarnation of thought.” (after Wordsworth)
I. Words: Take the pledge: “Never, never, never shall I use a word I do not know the meaning of” and then, from time to time, study:
James C. Fernald’s (1838-1918) English Synonyms, Antonyms, and Prepositions Funk & Wagnalls, 1914 & ff. which unlike Roget’s presents families of words, to be distinguished by illustrative sentences; see also his Connectives of English Speech (Funk & Wagnalls, 1904 and ff.); Expressive English (Grosset & Dunlap, 1918) copyright by Funk & Wagnalls and his English Grammar Simplified (Funk & Wagnalls, 1968, paper reprint)
George Crabb’s English Synonyms Harper, 1917 (first edition in 1817); prefer the edition done by families of words; and prize the ones that leave in his citations from the great authors.
Richard Chenevix Trench, The Study of Words (late 19th century, many editions) and on their history, other than the big OED (Oxford English Dictionary), take a look at, J. Copley, Shift of Meaning (Oxford U P, 1961); Owen Barfield, History in English Words; and C. S. Lewis Studies in Words, which gives full treatment of some of our richest words: e.g. ‘sad,’ ‘nature,’ etc.
On correct usage, consult the crotchety but discerning H. W. Fowler, Modern English Usage; and also Wilson Follett, Modern American Usage. Watch out, however, for modern dictionaries, such as Webster III, compiled by modern demotic linguists who don’t care if we lose subtleties, shades, distinctions, for example between a disinterested and an uninterested judge. The thoughts lodged in words are a treasury not to be wasted by us inheritors. Think of what we owe to the unnamed maker of the conjunction “since,” the noun “sake,” and the verb “slay.” And to Shakespeare for hundreds or phrases, such as “the mind’s eye,” and words, such as “radiance.”
Do not stop at clarity; try for more; for vivacity; and even joy. Use figures. Similes and metaphors are a glory, even dry Aristotle says so, and has wonderful ones, such as that nature is like a soldier in an army in flight, who turns, and stands, and faces the enemy, and now another, and another join him. Get a copy, then, of Arthur Quinn’s Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase (Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith, 1982) a spritely book, with choice examples, mostly from the Bible and Shakespeare. And practice using them. For exercises in imitation see Edward P. J. Corbett, Classical Rhetoric of the Modern Student (Oxford UP, 1965).
For education in vivacity of phrase, nothing surpasses lyric poetry, and English is rich in it; in the Bible there are the Psalms; and in Shakespeare all the speeches are lyric; memorize your favorites, and in dark times, when life is a rod to you, they will be a staff. For a new one a day, you might sign up to receive “The Writer’s Almanac,” though some verse is “free” meaning without form, “like playing tennis with the net down,” as Robert Frost said.
II. SENTENCES:
To know all that a sentence can be, read the aphorisms, maxims, and proverbs, in which the sagacity of humanity is saved up for us. I first feasted in W. H. Auden & Louis Kronenberger’s The Viking Book of Aphorisms and there met many authors now favorites; try also (1962); John Gross, The Oxford Book of Aphorisms (1987); and H. L. Mencken’s A New Dictionary of Quotations (Knopf, 1942); and in the Bible, the Book of Proverbs, and also Erasmus’ Adagia.
Useful also for progressing in a language are all those anthologies of aphorisms and good passages, with a translation on the facing page, such as Norbert Guterman’s Latin one and his German one (both from Doubleday); as well as introducing one to the authors through their best pithy thoughts, these collections when arranged chronologicly constitute brief histories of the literature in that language. If you find you esteem one author’s aphorisms specially, now you know to seek him whole. And there are some authors who just naturally bedeck their books with the gems and songs and thoughts of others, Montaigne for example; and to me Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition was like a chest set on the sea with messages from the ancients; there I first came upon Aristotle’s “That man who lives outside the city [polis] must be either a beast or a god.” There are, however, great authors almost entirely without pithy or witty remarks, Tolstoy and Thomas Aquinas for example.
On the importance of writing well, for your soul, for your friends, for your children, for your country, for your civilization, see Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”; Richard Mitchell’s Less Than Words Can Say (Boston: Little Brown, 1979); and all Jacques Barzun, who shows in detail that poor writing is bad thinking; try Teacher in America; The House of Intellect; and A Word or Two Before You Go. The same scrutiny of foggy writing is practiced by Roger Scruton—so perfectly named— in his Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands (Bloomsbury, 2015), but on a score of celebrity nihilists of our times (Sartre, Foucault, Deleuse, Said, Adorno, etc.), who write nonsense deliberately, and not just to gain repute with their fellow intellectuals, but to destroy reason in our civilization; and yet Scruton is so judicious as to mark out some gems in their mire.
III. LARGER ORDERS: There is an ocean of guides for Freshmen and their teachers. Most sink swiftly to the bottom, not just by giving rules that good writers are an exception to, not just by deeming writing free of errors excellent, rather than just passable, but by treating writing as a skill, a technique, a means, a decoration, and not thought itself, a portion of the Logos the philosophers cultivate it and John in his Gospel hails as Christ Himself (1.1). They think it can be taught apart from the soul being engaged in some high, challenging, and fulfilling activity, such as reading great literature or philosophy, or writing about it.[1] Addressed to students at a great books college (St. Thomas Aquinas), by tutor John W. Neumayr, the Writing Manual begins with Bacon’s advice, “Reading maketh a full man, conference [conversation] a ready man, and writing an exact man.” Knowing the first to be provided by the College’s curriculum, the second encouraged by its seminars, both formal and informal (and the latter unceasing), Neumayr aims to help the students achieve the third with his guide, but it is hard to obtain. If you buy only one guide, let it be: Jacques Barzun’s Simple and Direct (Harper, 1975; however, a later edition has extra exercises added); its premise is: good writers teach themselves, they seek good writing, and learn from it, thus the inclusion of examples, including the delicious parody of our Declaration in Eisenhowerese). For researching, go on to Barzun & Henry Graft’s The Modern Researcher (latest edition), easy to consult by topic. Barzun was an editor at Scribner’s for fifty years. (On how Barzun would edit a book, read grateful Helen Hazen’s memoir of his part in her endless rewriting of her Endless Rapture: http://theamericanscholar.org/endless-rewriting/#.U82Dj1akbKj
Of course, enjoying good writing comes before doing it. What you do not delight in, savor, and esteem, you will not be able to imitate. You will not want to. That we learn best from loving the best writers is the truth both urged and lived in Francine Prose’s vivacious Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them; each chapter shows why a chosen piece of good writing is good; and each chapter is a good class, with a good teacher—she goes to class in love with what she brings and in love with what she might take away, and this love elevates everything. Criticism can sometimes help, but only from loving what is good and great, do we grow. As Adam Zagajewski says, “Young Poets, Please Read Everything” in his wonderful In Defense of Ardor (the reading of which prompted me to meet him in Krakow a month later).
The best books for us humans are the great books; as it happens they are mostly by the dead; although they are distant, they make very steady friends. Read and reread them, though not for imitation. Good writers can be imitated, but the great ones can hardly be; their books are singularities, nothing else truly like them, and it is harder to learn writing from them. If they teach, it must be through awe, by filling you with it.
For writing about great things, books, wonders, discoveries, mysteries, I know of no guide. Brief let me be, as I must. No expository model will do; unless you are great you have no right to assume the pose of assertion, still less in the form of the three or five paragraph paper so commonly recommended; “I will be wise; see I am wise: and look how wise I’ve been,” is at once arrogant and boring. Instead, start with a question, for questions confess at once ignorance and express desire. And only desire carried forward in inquiry, searching here, searching there, will reward your soul, and your reader’s, even if it is only with a better question.
On the life of the mind itself, read A. G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life (Cath. U. P. 1987) and Gilbert Hammerton’s with the same title, in the form of letters to a younger person. And of course its heroes, Socrates, and the great Socratics, Montaigne and Nietzsche. No great writer has written a book on how to write, except in the sense that all of them have done so, by writing what they wrote, believing that achievement suffices for those with ears and eyes, hearts and minds, to behold and strive to be. Learning is, after all, far more important than teaching.
Dr. Michael Platt Friends of the Republic
Caboose:
Fellow Teachers,
This essay, on the place of lyric poetry, and its memorization, in a liberal education, strikes me as sound, and potentially important in learning to write well, provided one realizes that writing about great works is not only almost unimaginably more demanding than writing about good ones, but requires a wholly different order, beginning with no assertion, which in relation to something great would be arrogant and laughable, but with a question, a genuine one, which one does not yet know the answer to but very much wants to, thus issuing from desire, made of humility and ardor.
http://faculty.isi.org/blog/post/view/id/504
by one James Matthew Wilson (Villanova, Humanities)james.m.wilson@villanova.edu
I think I should add an exhortation< buy books,
And do mark them, with pencil
Some quotations:
I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.
—Jorge Luis Borges, writer (1899-1986)
Churchill, “If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them – peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.”
― Winston S. Churchill, Painting as a Pastime
Erasmus: he who owns two pairs of pants, sell one and buy a book.
You make a living by what you earn; you make a life by what you give. Churchill
Correspondence on teaching of writing:
Sugar Hill, Box 444
East Wallingford, Vermont
05742
10 September 1990
Dear Rose,
Your questions have caused me to reflect on my experience teaching writing and writing. I hope they are of some help. I know the books on the list will.
see Reading, Conversing, and Writing
Well, these are my thoughts. Whether they are helpful, even with adjustments for young children, I do not know. Reflecting on what I’ve written, I see that I hold that writing springs from, even as it promotes, a rightly ordered soul. You and Danny already promote that in your children. Even without the backdrop of my recent experience at Middlebury, it is a pleasure to see your eldest son, in the bus when we were waiting to get gas, pitching in to calm his rambunctious sister, and the similar demeanor of your eldest daughter, like him aware of bonds of care toward younger ones and bonds of respect to elders. Now of course it is occurring to me that you know all this. Well, then my tips and lists of books, enclosed, may still be of some help.
And let this then express my thanks for my visit, and the hope that next time you voyage out to South Bend, you will also sail on to Sugar Hill.
In His love,
P. S. You should be able to find most of the books
on the list, at Moe’s in Berkeley for example,
where I found several on my “Most Wanted List.”
If you have trouble, I could provide some at what
they cost me
Sugar Hill, Box 444
East Wallingford, Vermont
05742
6 January 1991
Dear Danny,
Since you are starting your course, I will write in haste.
I think it vital to raise the highest incentives in such a course. So, choose something you very much want to study, perhaps some great book you have not studied, but you have the greatest reasons to, but also one from such a group that you feel you can convince students to study with commensurate aspirations.
You know my reasons. First, reading and writing go together. There are no good writers who are not good readers. Discernment that leads one to write well cannot but have appreciated similar beauty and substance in others.
Second, writing is not a technique, it is a discipline of the soul. As Willa Cather says, the violinist can have a bad night and get through on technique, but not the writer. What you did yesterday cannot be fallen back upon. So, your students must have the highest incentives. Would that they would all have a beloved in Alaska, far from a phone, and all be competing with each other for her love! Lacking that, you must choose some great work for them to try to understand.
Yes, your idea of sharing your own writing and doing all the assignments would be good. Last fall, after reading all the students’ essays on “Who of the other interlocutors would Socrates be least unwilling to be ruled by? I wrote my own response to the question and gave them all copies.
Enclosed are some helps, including a letter to a mother intending to home-school her children.
On the “exact word” I remember the Guinness World Book has an example of a comma misplaced, in a decree of Catherine the Great?, that changed a sentence so a man was executed rather than freed. (If you find it, could you send me a xerox?)
Keep me posted on your progress, if you wish, or perhaps we can talk when we are down, around Easter (including APSA in San Antonio). As to first chapter, send it but Carl’s novel is ahead of you, and I am far behind on it.
You got the copy of my “Souls Without Longing”?
In haste,
P. S. You have an opportunity for a great course—you can choose the book regardless of discipline or field and according to desire and read it with proper slowness.
On Clichés:
Today, however, those who cannot write well will be captivated by images —one image is worth a thousand lies— or glide contentedly on the surface of an ocean of clichés. Kept afloat by them, they will enjoy lots of warm fuzzy communication, or hot fuzzy political dispute, but howsoever quarrelsome will always be united with others like themselves, safe from straying into thought. They are like passengers on a cruise ship who think they are “seeing the world” as they put it (in a cliché); who don’t care to know the language where the ship stops; who are satisfied with the little the tour guide says in front of the David; who spend more time buying things to impress others back home; and before dark hurry back to the comfort and drinks on board; and who in the nights, rings-off cruising, will never meet a friend worth keeping or an experience worth recounting. Thought lies deep in the ocean, but the layer of clichés has been thickened immensely in the last hundred years by the vast media-news-entertainment complex. A century ago, immersing yourself only in the Bible and Shakespeare would render you thoughtful, now so much intervenes. And our ubiquitous advertising, which combines false images and false words, by admitting it is seduction, weakens our very fidelity to truth. What others feel ashamed of, advertisers glory in. The highest ambition of an ad man is to coin a cliché. The NAZIs gloried in their production, and the Soviets too.[i] Except for the pleasure of satirizing them, all writers abhor clichés. In Mme. Bovary Flaubert shows how a whole life may be lived in clichés —and not.[ii]
Compare it to: slime, slurry, slop; stench; like cholesterol in the blood; or crude oil in … the Prince William Sound; Co2 in the air; it is the Anti-Midas touch, changing everything it touches to dust.
CABOOSE: A guide new to me, lively and even feisty, is The Art of Persuasion,
by Linda Bridges and William F. Rickenbacker, with an into by William Buckley.
[1] Two, that being well written (a rare thing in this genre) repay some attention, are: Thomas Cain, Common Sense About Writing (Prentice-Hall, 1967) and John R. Trimble, Writing With Style: Conversations on the Art of Writing (Prentice-Hall, 1975); and the Strunk and White booklet has a touch of Stuart Little.
[i] For the Nazi production of clichés, read Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich (1946) trans. Martin Brady; Athlone Press, 2006) and for the Soviet production of clichés consider the effort of Solzhenitsyn to purge them from his Red Wheel series; for the clichés arrayed by celebrity intellectuals, hostile to Western civilization, read Roger Scruton’s Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands (2nd ed. Bloomsbury, 2015).
[ii] Indefatigable in his correction of clichés is Jacques Barzun, in all his writing, and often explicitly. Worthy of attention are the writings of Frank Sullivan, especially his avuncular (fictional) Dr. Arbuthnot, cliché expert, and his dialogues with novice cliché lovers; enjoy for example his “Jay Talking” and “The Cliché Expert Testifies on Politics” in his collection, A Rock in Every Snowball (Little Brown, 1946). Since some clichés never die, and more are born each era, someone should carry on the Herculean work of Scruton, Barzun and Sullivan.
Friends Of The Republic 