Clear and Simple as the Truth - Writing Classic Prose

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Used Price: $2.95 Collectible Price: $88.88 Third Party New Price: $36.95 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Binding: Hardcover Dewey Decimal Number: 808.042 EAN: 9780691036670 ISBN: 0691036675 Label: Princeton University Press Manufacturer: Princeton University Press Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 240 Publication Date: 1994-12 Publisher: Princeton University Press Sales Rank: 716899 Studio: Princeton University Press Related Items: Shakespeare's Sonnets (Arden Shakespeare: Third Series) Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace (9th Edition) Complete Short Fiction (Penguin Classics) 99 Ways to Tell a Story : Exercises in Style On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction (On Writing Well) see more Editorial Review: Amazon.com: These days, discussions of writing style are generally limited to superficialities such as serial commas and approved abbreviations. It's a pity. While consistency in writing does make for more pleasant reading, no amount of rule-abiding can mask poorly wrought prose. In Clear and Simple As the Truth, Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner argue that "writing is an intellectual activity, not a bundle of skills." The first half of their book is a probing examination of classic style, the form popularized by 17th-century French prose writers such as Descartes, Pascal, and Madame de Sévigné and best typified contemporarily by much of the writing in the pre-1985 New Yorker. The authors liken classic style to those theorems in mathematics valued for being "brief, efficient, clear, elegant, and pure." The classic sentence appears effortless, "as if it could have been written in no other way," and while "the writer may speak with a technical mastery not possessed by the reader ... his attitude is always that the reader lacks this mastery only accidentally." While one can hardly hope to distill the essence of classic style into a sentence, Thomas and Turner describe it most succinctly as expression that is "clear and simple as the truth, but no clearer or simpler." The second half of the book is a "museum" of classic prose, by Thomas Jefferson, Descartes, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Richard Feynman, Oscar Wilde, Philip Larkin, and many others, accompanied by commentary from the authors. Book Description: Winner of the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature franaccedil;aises 1996, from the French Academy. The authors of this book provoke the reader to consider style not as an elegant accessory of effective prose but as its very heart. In the first half of Clear and Simple, the authors introduce a range of styles - reflexive, practical, plain, contemplative, romantic, prophetic, and others - contrasting them to classic style. The principles are simple: The writer adopts the pose that the motive is truth, the purpose is presentation, the reader is an intellectual equal, and the occasion is informal. The second half of the book is a tour of examples showing what has worked and what has not. Customer Reviews Average Rating: Rating: - One of the best on the vexing topic of style Turner and Thomas (T&T) offer an overview of that which requires a lifetime of practice: writing as a activity done in a certain manner with the aid of a certain set of enabling conventions. Contrary to the usual surface-level gimmicks, quasi-metaphysical hooey, and self-contradictory cliches that plague the teaching of style, T&T offer an approach that can actually be useful, coherent, and intellectually polished. They make no bones about their so-called classic prose's strengths and weaknesses. ... Read More Rating: - How to Think about Style Thomas and Turner offer a provocative approach to writing style. This is not a manual or reference book that you can consult for simple directions on correcting grammar or streamlining sentences. Instead, the authors examine the fundamental questions that underlie the stylistic choices we make. (For example, what is the nature of truth? what is the relationship between language and the truth?) The book focuses on the style they call "classic prose," but they also describe (and give both good and bad ... Read More Rating: - Challenging Discussion of Epistemology This book is unique in a useful and interesting way. I agree with the negative reviews, to the extent that the book's structure as a 'useage' description was more confusing than it needed to have been. And I agree with the positive reviews, to the extent that I also recognize the philosophical issues within forceful, memorable prose. Since few other books, and virtually no intellectual traditions, look at the issues involved here, the strengths of the book are more important than the failings within ... Read More Rating: - Delightful, informative, and useful Contrary to other reviewers, I have found this book wonderfully useful. It was not written as a how-to book, but the style -- indeed the whole philosophy that the truth is both pure and simple -- is refreshing and enticing. While Oscar Wilde didn't believe it, neither did he believe half of what he himself said. The writing is clear and pure. Classic style does not portend to talk down to the reader, but assumes that she is capable of understanding the concepts presented. It is a style to intelligently ... Read More Rating: - A Good Example of How NOT To This book is puzzling. It's a contorted read that breathes platitude after platitude, but does more to demonstrate how to write obscurely than with clarity. At first, I thought the book was a satire, deliberatly using ambiguity, the absence of punctuation, and the lack of clarity to make its points. But, that's clearly not the case. The authors seriously believe they are about making "truth" clearer, but then fail to make a single argument to support any of its propositions. This is one of the worst books ... Read More see more Browse for similar items by category: Literature & Fiction Authors, A-Z Books & Reading British Classics

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