Writing Style 9

Last updated on: August 19, 2011 at 7:45 am by Joel Willitts

Writing Style 9 2011-08-19T07:45:48-04:00 Joel Willitts

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“Elegance” would not be the first word that would come to anyone’s mind that read my writing style. If I were to evaluate my own perception of my writing, I would say I’m as elegant as Fred Flintstone. Elegance is the subject of Lesson 9 in Williams and Colomb’s useful book on writing style Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace (10th Edition).

“Elegance”, however, is not what you might think. Here’s how Williams and Colomb’s define it:

I incline toward those who think that the most elegant elegance is disarming simplicity—and so when you think you have written something particularly fine, I second Samuel Johnson’s advice: strike it out.

A phrase that stuck with me after reading the lesson is “elegant clarity”. We should aim for elegantly clear prose.

I think elegance in writing, like artistic ability, is certainly a gift. Some have it in spades and others don’t. In fact, it doesn’t take long to determine whether your elegant or clunky. I remember taking art class in High School and becoming painfully aware that I simply did not have an artistic bone in my body. One particular assignment was to recreate a picture from a magazine. I chose to draw Michael Jordan off a Sports Illustrated cover. Let’s just say, you’d have only recognized it as Jordan because his tongue was sticking out as he was suspended in the air under the basket.

Still even artistic ability can be honed and improved with effort, guidance and practice. That’s why we have an art major at North Park. I also believe that while not all of us will write like C. S. Lewis, we should still strive to write in a way that is more than baldly clear and dry. Sure, bald clarity is preferable over dense ambiguity, but those who pursue writing vocationally—academic or popular—should not settle for just over an idea.

Williams and Colomb’s offer a few suggestions on improving elegance, but admit that this is more caught that taught. They note that elegant passages typically have three characteristics:

Simplicity of characters as subjects and actions as verbs
Complexity of balanced syntax, meaning, sound and rhythm
Emphasis of artfully stressed endings.

I’ve noticed another contributing factor to elegance, the breadth of one’s reading over a lifetime. While I’m sure there are exceptions, some of the most elegant writers I’ve read are those who have been exposed to great writing from childhood. Through reading good writing, their ear has been unconsciously trained to hear elegance. They put their thoughts together in elegant ways. Some of us have not had this privilege and need to train our ears (see Writing Style 8).

Elegance then is both a discipline and a grace. I suspect that while I can improve my elegance beyond what it is at the moment, it will rarely be said of my writing: “Wow that’s elegant!”

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