The Reader Over Your Shoulder

A Handbook for Writers of English Prose

Robert Graves, Alan Hodge

• Publisher: RosettaBooks
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780795350467
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Grammatica e punteggiatura

"The best book on writing ever published" (Patricia T. O'Conner, author of Woe Is I ). When Robert Graves and Alan Hodge decided to collaborate on this manual for writers, the world was in total upheaval. Graves had fled Majorca three years earlier at the start of the Spanish Civil War, and as they labored over their new project, they witnessed the fall of France and the evacuation of Allied forces at Dunkirk. Soon the horror of World War II would reach British soil as well, as the Luftwaffe began bombing London in an effort to destroy the resolve of the English people. Graves and Hodge believed that at a time when their whole world was falling apart, the survival of English prose sentences—of writing that was clear, concise, and intelligible—had become paramount if hope were going to outlive the onslaught. They came up with forty-one principles for writing, the majority devoted to clarity, the remainder to grace of expression. They studied the prose of a wide range of noted authors and leaders, finding much room for improvement. Successful communication could mean the difference between war and peace, life and death, and they were determined to contribute to its survival. The importance of good writing continues today, as obfuscation, propaganda, manipulative language, and sloppy standards are all too common—and this classic guide is just as useful and important as ever. Note: This edition restores the full, original 1943 text. "To see what really expert mavens can do in applying their rule-based expertise to clearing up bad prose, get hold of a copy of The Reader Over Your Shoulder. " —The Atlantic

Part I

THE
READER
OVER YOUR
SHOULDER

1

The Peculiar Qualities of English

The most ancient European languages—those that have longest avoided infiltration by other languages—are the most complicated in their grammar and syntax. The age of a language can be roughly guessed by a count of its declensions, conjugations, moods, tenses, voices, cases, genders and numbers. Latin is clearly less ancient than Greek, since it has no ‘middle voice’, no ‘dual number’ and no ‘optative mood’¹—thus in Latin at least seven words are needed to express the sentence ‘If only you two thieves had drowned yourselves’, but in Greek only four. French is clearly less ancient than Latin, since it has no separate neuter gender and does not decline its nouns; also, its conjugations are far simpler. English is clearly less ancient than French: except for its pronouns, it is free of gender differentiation.

Grammatical simplicity is the mark of a vernacular. The word ‘vernacular’, formed from the Roman historian Varro’s phrase vernacula verba, ‘unliterary expressions used by slaves or serfs’, has often since been used loosely to mean ‘the native language of a peasantry’; but few of Varro’s slaves can have been native Italians—they may have been Greeks, Bithynians, Africans or Germans—and the language they spoke among themselves was a mixed lingo, sometimes called ‘camp Latin’, which later developed in Italy into modern Italian, in Spain into Spanish, in France into French. Properly speaking, then, a vernacular is a lingo, or language of domestic convenience, compounded of the languages spoken by master and alien slave. It has a less complicated grammar and syntax than the languages from which it springs, but rapidly accumulates words as the slaves become freedmen, and their children are born as freemen, and finally their great-grandchildren, marrying into their masters’ families, are accepted as cultured people with full rights as citizens. The historical origins of German, which is not very primitive in structure, are obscure; modern German, however, is not a vernacular in Varro’s sense, but a late artificial compound of several kindred dialects, with a far smaller vocabulary of early borrowings from the Latin and Greek than the other languages of Western Europe.

English is a vernacular of vernaculars. It began in the eleventh century as the lingo used between the Norman-French conquerors and their Anglo-Saxon serfs, and though it became a literary language in the fourteenth century has never crystallized in the way that Italian, French and Spanish have done. A proof of this is that no writer of English would be credited with a perfect literary style merely because he had exactly modelled himself on some native paragon—say, Addison in England, or Emerson in the United States—as Italians, Spaniards and Frenchmen might be after modelling themselves, respectively, on Boccaccio, Cervantes and Bossuet. To write English well, it is generally agreed, is not to imitate, but to evolve a style peculiarly suited to one’s own temperament, environment and purposes. English has never been jealously watched over by a learned Academy, as French has been since the seventeenth century; nor protected against innovations either by literary professionalism, as with Italian, or, as with Spanish, by the natural decorum of the greater part of those who use it. It is, indeed, an immense, formless aggregate not merely of foreign assimilations and local dialects but of occupational and household dialects and personal eccentricities.

The general European view is that English is an illogical, chaotic language, unsuited for clear thinking; and it is easy to understand this view, for no other European language admits of such shoddy treatment. Yet, on the other hand, none other admits of such poetic exquisiteness, and often the apparent chaos is only the untidiness of a workshop in which a great deal of repair and other work is in progress: the benches are crowded, the corners piled with lumber, but the old workman can lay his hand on whatever spare parts or accessories he needs or at least on the right tools and materials for improvising them. French is a language of fixed models: it has none of this workshop untidiness and few facilities for improvisation. In French, one chooses the finished phrase nearest to one’s purpose and, if there is nothing that can be ‘made to do’, a long time is spent getting the Works—the Academy—to supply or approve a new model. Each method has its own advantages. The English method tends to ambiguity and obscurity of expression in any but the most careful writing; the French to limitation of thought. The late Sir Henry Head was once preparing an address on neurology for a learned society in Paris. He wrote it in what he hoped was French, but took the precaution of asking a French professor to see that it was correctly phrased. The manuscript was returned marked: ‘pas français’, ‘pas français’, ‘pas français’, with suggested alterations; but almost every ‘pas français’ could be matched with a ‘pas vrai’, because the amendments in français impaired the force of the argument.

As for the view that English is illogical: it certainly differs greatly in character from French, Italian, Spanish and German, which are claimed to be logical languages. These are all able codifications of as much racial experience as can be translated into speech: theoretically, each separate object, process or quality is given a registered label and ever afterwards recognized by label rather than by individual quality. Logical languages are therefore also rhetorical languages, rhetoric being the emotionally persuasive use of labels, with little concern for the things to which they are tied. English has always tended to be a language of ‘conceits’: that is, except for the purely syntactical parts of speech, which are in general colourless, the vocabulary is not fully dissociated from the imagery out of which it has developed—words are pictures rather than hieroglyphs.

Matthew Arnold, who as a critic did insufficient justice to the peculiar genius of the English language, suggested in his essay on the ‘Influence of Literary Academies’ (1875) that:

‘The power of French Literature is in its prose-writers, the power of English Literature in its poets. While the fame of many poets of France depends on the qualities of intelligence they exhibit, qualities which are the distinctive support of prose, many of the prose-writers … depend wholly for their fame on the imaginative qualities they exhibit, which are the distinctive support of poetry.’

The truth is that the French are not plagued by their metaphors tending to get out of hand and hamper the argument; whereas English writers of prose or poetry find that, so soon as a gust of natural feeling snatches away the merely verbal disguise in which their phrases are dressed, the pictorial images stand out sharply and either enliven and enforce the argument or desert it and go on a digressive ramble. English writers seldom have any feeling for purity of literary form in the Classical sense: it is both their strength and their weakness that imaginative exuberance breaks down literary restraint.

‘Fixed’ English, which may be dated from Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, completed in 1755, fulfils the need of a safer, less ambitious language arranged on the same system and dedicated to the same uses as French—a language of agreed preconceptions. ‘Fixed’ English makes possible a French-English, English-French, or a German-English, English-German dictionary. Each foreign label has its English counterpart: ‘Glory’ is matched (not very satisfactorily) with ‘la gloire’ and ‘der Ruhm’; ‘le matelot’ and ‘der Matrose’ with ‘sailor’. ‘Fixed’ English compares well enough with other languages, but is often more mechanically, and therefore more correctly, employed by foreigners than by those whose mother-tongue it is and who are always inclined to slip back into free English. ‘Fixed’ English is an easy language to learn, like colloquial Arabic; but of free English, as of scholarly Arabic, no wise person will ever claim final mastery—there is no discovered end to either language. ‘Fixed’ English is never more than momentarily fixed. The conventional, hotel-manager English that foreigners learn is always a little stilted and a little out of date by the time that the book from which they learn it is published; and twenty years later the book will read very quaintly.

English, whether ‘fixed’ or ‘free’, has certain unusual advantages in structure. In the first place, it is almost uninflected and has no genders. The Romance and Germanic languages, not having had occasion to simplify themselves to the same degree, still retain their genders and inflections. There is no logical justification for genders. They are a decorative survival from a primitive time when the supposed sex of all concepts—trees, diseases, cooking implements—had to be considered for the sake of religious convention or taboo. Yet even new scientific words have to decide, so soon as coined, on their hypothetical sex. Writers of the Romance and Germanic languages have an aesthetic objection to a genderless language. But when a language is used for international exchange of ideas the practical disadvantages of gender are generally admitted to outweigh its decorative qualities. Gender is illogical, in being used partly to express actual sex, e.g. le garçon, la femme, and partly to dress words up, e.g. la masculinité, le féminisme; le festin, la fête. If one does wish to give sex-characteristics to concrete objects or abstractions (as, for example, masculinity to ‘sword’ and ‘pen’ and femininity to ‘Parliament’), the existing gender is an actual hindrance to any such renewal of mythology. An inflected tense has a certain beauty from which writers in these languages refuse to be parted; but, for merely practical uses, an inflected tense such as je serai, tu seras, il sera, nous serons, vous serez, ils seront seems unnecessary to Britons and Americans, particularly since the French have dropped noun and adjective inflections almost as completely as they have.

The eventual disappearance of Norman-French from England after the Conquest was never in doubt once Anglo-Saxon had been simplified to meet the needs of the French-speaking invaders. Anglo-Saxon was deficient in words to fit the new methods of trade and government, and these had to be borrowed from French, which had a closer connexion with Rome, the source of all contemporary civilization. Passing the stage of Broken Saxon, the new vernacular developed an easy grammar and syntax, a modification of Anglo-Saxon, but with French turns wherever a legal or literary subtlety was needed. The vocabulary, though enormously enriched with Norman-French and Latin words of advanced culture, remained Anglo-Saxon in foundation: English words of Anglo-Saxon origin, though not half so numerous as Romance words, are used about five times as often. One feature of the happy-go-lucky development of English was that adjectives were made to do service for nouns, nouns for verbs, and so on; until by Elizabethan times it could be said that all parts of speech in English were interchangeable.

This interchangeability is a great help to accurate expression; for example, where an adjective formed in the usual way from a noun has wandered slightly from its original sense. If one wishes to discuss the inflections of a verb and does not wish to write ‘verbal inflections’, because ‘verbal’ means ‘of ...