devices, and it’s brilliant. Forsyth explains that we often use these rhetorical devices but
we use them haphazardly. We just happen to say something beautiful, and we don’t
know how we did it. We are like blindfolded cooks throwing anything into the pot
and occasionally, just occasionally, producing a delicious meal.
Forsyth’s aim is to explain the figures of rhetoric to his readers, so that they can speak and
scribble with ‘a big recipe book and [their] eyes wide open.’ It’s a great idea, and he does a
great job.
There is one paragraph at the end of the book, however, where he gets it wrong for his
readers. He writes:
Above all, I hope I have dispelled the bleak and imbecilic idea that the aim of writing
is to express yourself clearly in plain, simple English using as few words as possible.
This is a fiction, a fallacy, a fantasy and a falsehood. To write for mere utility is as
foolish as to dress for mere utility. Mountaineers do it, and climb Everest in clothes
that would have you laughed out of the gutter. I suspect that they also communicate
quickly and efficiently, poor things. But for the rest of us, not threatened by death
and yetis, clothes and language can be things of beauty.
This is Mark Forsyth all over: hilarious, eccentric, and buoyantly eloquent. Yet it’s also
misleading. The aim of writing may not be ‘to express yourself clearly in plain, simple
English using as few words as possible’, but for the most part it’s jolly close.
Take simplicity. Being able to express yourself simply is a foundation of being able to write
well. Those who can’t write simply are like jazz musicians who haven’t learnt their scales,
or like boxers who can’t do elementary footwork. No matter how skilled they may be in other
ways, their performance will always be clumsy. So too with writing plainly and efficiently:
the better you can do it, the better you understand your argument and your language. A
writer who can’t is enormously disadvantaged.
Of course, jazz scales on their own are as dull for an audience as Spot the Dog sentences are
for a reader. But if you can’t do the basics, you don’t yet know your craft.
And there are libraries filled with craftless, artless books. I think of the jumbled essays on
public policy I’ve read recently and the hours I wasted deciphering overly-complex articles at
university. You know the ones I’m talking about because you had to read them too. Such
works exasperate their readers, frustrating their learning and squandering their interest.
Adding figures of speech to these pieces would be as helpful as spreading icing on a turnip.
It’s not as if simple English is unenjoyable either. I don’t mean clinical or stuffy English, but
straightforward English that uses the language of everyday speech. Some of the most
enjoyable English I’ve ever read is written that way. Simplicity has its own elegance.
Which brings us back to Martin Forsyth. Read his paragraph again, and you’ll notice that his
– genuinely delightful – writing exhibits the very virtues he downplays. He may be eloquent,
but his writing has a conversational simplicity. He’s also pretty efficient, saying in a few
lively sentences what a worse writer might’ve stretched to paragraphs and pages. And he’s
unwaveringly clear. He uses no double negatives, only one subordinate clause, and short
sentences. He may not exactly ‘express [himself] clearly in plain, simple English using as few
words as possible’, but he nearly does, and it makes him a pleasure to read.
Yet most of us are not nearly so able, and he’s doing us no favours by being so unenthusiastic
about clarity and simplicity. To go back to boxing, Mark Forsyth’s like someone who’s boxed
until boxing’s in his bones, who bounds effortlessly round the ring and whose punches are
swift as sunlight. He could perform basic footwork or throw textbook punches, only he’s
moved quite beyond that. But he doesn’t help us us amateurs when he gives so little credit to
the fundamentals. It’s enough to put you off your footwork drills.
Ultimately, I suspect, his paragraph won’t do much harm. Readers will probably be
influenced less by Mark’s argument than by his infectious style. His style is lithe and lucid,
and readers will be doing very well if they copy him.
Nevertheless, his paragraph hasn’t done as much good as it could have. I think he should’ve
said that simplicity and brevity and clarity are good, but gooder still is writing that’s clear
and beautiful. A more accurate (but less funny) analogy than his might be this. Winter gives
trees an austere elegance, but spring’s leaves and summer’s fruits give trees beauty. Trees
never stop being trees, just as good writing is always influenced—if not pervaded—by clarity
and co. It’s just that in spring, trees come to life.
