Re: Writing as an "ethical act"
I have run across what struck me as an interesting argument, in a writing course manual. In my opinion, the author is right on target in his analysis of the underlying essence -- or "ethics" -- of good expository prose style. (Imaginative prose -- fiction -- is another kettle of fish.) What do you folks think? And what do you think constitutes the essence of a truly great prose style, as distinct from a good one?
....We write and revise our earliest drafts to discover and express what we mean, but in the drafts thereafter, we write and revise to make it clear to our readers. At the heart of that process is a principle whose model you probably recognize:
Write for others as you would have others write for you.
When we do that, we do not impose on our readers more difficulty than our ideas warrant. But neither do
we oversimplify and thereby misrepresent those that are genuinely complex: If we are responsible readers, we don't need condescension: We will work hard to understand what we read, but only if we think a writer is being straight with us, treating us not as eavesdroppers to his out loud thinking, but rather as the other half of a working partnership. If we think that a writer hasn't given a thought to our problems in understanding, if we think he hasn't spent time revising with us in mind, well, the number of our days is too brief to spend on the gratuitously complex prose of those indifferent to our best interests. Or, for that matter, on the prose of those who, by dumbing down their ideas, misrepresent their real complexity. Out of that principle of our reading falls a principle of writing: If we don't like to read that kind of prose, then we ought not write it.
Of the two extremes, over-complexity is the bigger risk. Few of us deliberately set out to baffle our readers (though as we shall see, some claim to see in complexity a political value, and in clarity an ideological risk). It's just that we are all inclined to think that our writing is so clear and our ideas so good that if our readers have to struggle to understand them, the problem is not ours but theirs.
But that indifference to readers risks more than their refusal to read what we've written. It risks what
rhetoricians since Aristotle have called a writer's ethos. Your ethos is the character your readers infer from your prose: Does your writing makes them think you are thoughtfully tentative or arrogantly certain?amiably candid or impersonally aloof? Your ethos is crucial to your career because it is what your readers remember about you long after they've forgotten what you've written.
When criticized for the difficulty of his writing, for example, one writer responded,
Instead of admitting that he is not familiar with the range of concepts used in my sentences and does not wish to bother to acquire the knowledge necessary to comprehending the text, he proposes that the failure of communication is the result of the presence, beginning in the first sentence, of unusual punctuation and "buzzwords."
He has a point: Before abusing his prose, his critic should have learned something of his subject. But were we the object of that kind of dismissal, we would shrink up a little, and remember it. Even more important, when readers weigh competing claims that seem equally plausible (or equally uncertain), they rely on the writer who seems more thoughtful, more reliable, more aware of his readers. A writer's ethos is as important to his credibility as the quality of his reasons and evidence.......
What is finally at stake here is an ethics of prose....The social contract between thoughtful writers and readers implies a good will exchange fair to all and in the long term best interests of everyone. If so, then we should not only write to others as we would have others write to us--in ways we judge to be clear and candid, but we should also read their writing as we would have them read ours--in ways that are equally careful and generous........
...I offer no definition of ethical beyond this: An action is ethical when as its agent, we would in principle be willing to trade places with the person who is its object, or vice versa. Writing in particular is ethical when as a matter of principle, we would be willing to trade places with our intended reader, to read prose of the same quality we produce, motivated by the same kind of intention, and then to experience what our reader does, with the same kind of result. Some among us unknowingly write prose complex beyond the needs of its substance, leaving us confused and frustrated. Others use language deliberately to hide their intentions, even to deceive us, leaving us scornful and angry. Since none of us would willingly submit ourselves to such writing, then none of us should willingly write that way. It's just a specific application of "Do unto others . . . "
www-college.uchicago.edu
The author concludes his essay on "The Ethics of Prose" with what I think is a neat quotation from Alfred North Whitehead:
Finally, there should grow the most austere of all mental qualities; I mean the sense for style. It is an aesthetic sense, based on admiration for the direct attainment of a foreseen end, simply and without waste. Style in art, style in literature, style in science, style in logic, style in
practical execution have fundamentally the same aesthetic qualities, namely, attainment and restraint. The love of a subject in itself and for itself, where it is not the sleepy pleasure of pacing a mental quarter-deck, is the love of style as manifested in that study. Here we are brought back
to the position from which we started, the utility of education. Style, in its finest sense, is the last
acquirement of the educated mind; it is also the most useful. It pervades the whole being. The administrator with a sense for style hates waste; the engineer with a sense for style economizes his material; the artisan with a sense for style prefers good work. Style is the ultimate morality of mind.
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