I’m generally allergic to style guides and how-to writing manuals, presumptuous vade mecums churned out by writers whose own writing you neither respect nor trust. E.B. White, for instance. In my experience, you learn to write well by reading and writing for many years. In a footnote to The Honest Rainmaker (1953), Liebling formulated the only writer’s credo I could ever endorse: “The way to write is well, and how is your own business. Nothing else on the subject makes sense.”
Still, it’s nice to find
exceptions to general rules. Ambrose Bierce published Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults in 1909, five years before his disappearance
and likely death in Mexico. It’s little more than a pamphlet between hard
covers, seventy-four pages of alphabetically arranged entries. Bierce tells us
in his introduction, “Aims and the Plan,” that his goal is “to teach precision
in writing.” He defines good writing as “clear thinking made visible,” and adds
a sort of disclaimer:
“In neither taste nor
precision is any man’s practice a court of last appeal, for writers all, both
great and small, are habitual sinners against the light; and their accuser is
cheerfully aware that his own work will supply (as in making this book it has
supplied) many ‘awful examples’—his later work less abundantly, he hopes, than his
earlier. He nevertheless believes that
this does not disqualify him for showing by other instances than his own how
not to write. The infallible teacher is still in the forest primeval, throwing
seeds to the white blackbirds.”
That final sentence
suggests Bierce was more than a cynic or a facile writer of gags. The book
it most reminds me of in tone and organization – and in readerly amusement --
is Kingsley Amis’ The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage (1997).
Actually, there’s another – Bierce’s own Devil’s Dictionary (1906). Few
writers are better at slyly infusing comedy – often grim or philosophical –
into what appears to be business-like prose. Here is his entry for “Limited
for Small, Inadequate, etc.”:
“'The army’s operations
were confined to a limited area.’ ‘We had a limited supply of food.’ A large area
and an adequate supply would also be limited. Everything that we know about is
limited.”
And more than a century ago
Bierce was preaching against a grammatical misdemeanor I encountered just this
morning in an online magazine article. Here is his entry for the simple word to:
“As part of an infinitive
it should not be separated from the other part by an adverb, as, ‘to hastily
think,’ for hastily to think, or, to think hastily. Condemnation of the split
infinitive is now pretty general, but it is only recently that any one seems to
have thought of it. Our forefathers and we elder writers of this generation
used it freely and without shame—perhaps because it had not a name, and our
crime could not be pointed out without too much explanation.”
Bierce is a subtly
effective stylist who worked for decades as a journalist. His short stories about the
Civil War are the best fiction written by a participant in the conflict. He
served for four years in the Union Army, saw action at Shiloh and was severely wounded at the
Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. In his Devil’s Dictionary he defines war
as “a by-product of the arts of peace.” Imagine if his prose -- his sensibility -- had as pervasive
an influence on American writing as did a later writer of fiction who also took war as his subject, Ernest
Hemingway. No wonder Mencken loved him.
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