The C.R.I.S.P. Method (1) — The C.B.S. Philosophy of Style
Our major problems today concerning clear, effective, well-styled writing are at least threefold.
First, we have, to far too great an extent, become a society of non-readers (at least compared to the last many generations of the Age of Print that arose — along with the ideal of general literacy — with public education systems). This is largely due to the impact over the twentieth century and since of various communications technologies in the audio-visual media: telephone, radio, movies, television, the various uses of “the web” and the digital revolution, interactive media, and social media in general.
We don’t read as much or as well as our ancestors; hence, we encounter the skilled and well-styled use of the written language (and that is different from the spoken language) less and less. As one consequence, we don’t write as well as our grandparents and great grandparents. Letter writing has become almost a dead art, revived to less distinctive existence only relatively recently by the technology of emails and text messaging, neither of which comes close to the epistolary art of the great age of personal letter writing.
Second, “composition” [I prefer “rhetoric”] has been taught less and less according to traditional models that look AT words working and also at how MEANING happens THROUGH the words working. Instructors of rhetoric have lately paid more attention to invention and self-expression than to tried and true tactics of structure and patterns of style, proven over millennia as effective devices of language.
Third, instructors have been asking more and more for a QUANTITY of words or pages (500-word theme, 15-page paper, etc.) than for QUALITY of communication and EFFECTIVENESS of expression. Along with this, professorial prose is all too often full of convolutions, multi-syllables, Greek, Latin, and French borrowings and expansive language — rather than founded upon the language base of native English and the “Plain” or “Common” style advocated during and since ancient times.
If you did what I did the first time I got one of those 500-word essay assignments, it went something like this: I wrote my paper. Then — not realizing that my teacher was not really going to count all the handwritten words in each and every student paper — I counted the words, found that my “masterpiece” had only 473 words. “SHUCKS! I exclaimed — or something like “SHUCKS.” I realized I was doomed. Then it hit me. I simply changed every “I think” to “It is my considered opinion after carefully considering the matter that,” and ended up with the right word count or “even better.”
But I had simply fluffed up the pillow. There were really no more “feathers” in it than before. And — what I didn’t realize until later — I had made the essay more of a struggle to wade through and had given my reader no extra meaning or significance as a reward for the additional drudgery of MORE WORDS.
Today, I would cross out the “I think”s and save my reader that trouble. If you write it, you probably think it. Ask which is stronger and more assertive: “I think that Hamlet is Shakespeare’s master work.” OR “Hamlet is Shakespeare’s master work.” I really needed no “I thinks.”
AND I left myself out of it, and simply and directly stated my opinion.
“If thine ‘I’ offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thy sentence.” (sorry for this blasphemy in paraphrasing a verse from Matthew.
So, the principles of what the great modern rhetorician Richard Lanham calls “the C. B. S. Philosophy of Style”: Clarity, Brevity, Simplicity. Plain language, directly and simply stated. Common language containing uncommonly good thought and power. As the medieval scholar Geoffrey of Vinsauf has it: “Speak as the many, think as the few.” Tom Paine didn’t need any big words in opening Crisis #1: “These are the times that try men’s souls.”
Also, as professors of language, literature, and rhetoric, we English instructors and other professors and educators in the K-12 systems often use excessively verbose structures ourselves. We write things in “Professorese.” Our good short texts or pamphlets or brief monographs too often become boring textbooks. We have forgotten that, most often — less is more.