How to Write Clearly

How to Write Clearly, by Edwin
A. Abbott

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Title: How to Write Clearly Rules and Exercises on English
Composition
Author: Edwin A. Abbott
Release Date: September 14, 2007 [EBook #22600]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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HOW TO WRITE CLEARLY.
RULES AND EXERCISES
ON
ENGLISH COMPOSITION.
BY THE
REV. EDWIN A. ABBOTT, M.A.,
HEAD MASTER OF THE CITY OF LONDON SCHOOL.
[Illustration: QUI LEGIT REGIT]
THE AUTHOR'S COPYRIGHT EDITION.
BOSTON: ROBERTS BROTHERS. 1883.
UNIVERSITY PRESS: JOHN WILSON & SON. CAMBRIDGE.

PREFACE.
Almost every English boy can be taught to write clearly, so far at least
as clearness depends upon the arrangement of words. Force, elegance,
and variety of style are more difficult to teach, and far more difficult to
learn; but clear writing can be reduced to rules. To teach the art of
writing clearly is the main object of these Rules and Exercises.
Ambiguity may arise, not only from bad arrangement, but also from
other causes--from the misuse of single words, and from confused

thought. These causes are not removable by definite rules, and
therefore, though not neglected, are not prominently considered in this
book. My object rather is to point out some few continually recurring
causes of ambiguity, and to suggest definite remedies in each case.
Speeches in Parliament, newspaper narratives and articles, and, above
all, resolutions at public meetings, furnish abundant instances of
obscurity arising from the monotonous neglect of some dozen simple
rules.
The art of writing forcibly is, of course, a valuable acquisition--almost
as valuable as the art of writing clearly. But forcible expression is not,
like clear expression, a mere question of mechanism and of the
manipulation of words; it is a much higher power, and implies much
more.
Writing clearly does not imply thinking clearly. A man may think and
reason as obscurely as Dogberry himself, but he may (though it is not
probable that he will) be able to write clearly for all that. Writing
clearly--so far as arrangement of words is concerned--is a mere matter
of adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs, placed and
repeated according to definite rules.[1] Even obscure or illogical
thought can be clearly expressed; indeed, the transparent medium of
clear writing is not least beneficial when it reveals the illogical nature
of the meaning beneath it.
On the other hand, if a man is to write forcibly, he must (to use a
well-known illustration) describe Jerusalem as "sown with salt," not as
"captured," and the Jews not as being "subdued" but as "almost
exterminated" by Titus. But what does this imply? It implies
knowledge, and very often a great deal of knowledge, and it implies
also a vivid imagination. The writer must have eyes to see the vivid
side of everything, as well as words to describe what he sees. Hence
forcible writing, and of course tasteful writing also, is far less a matter
of rules than is clear writing; and hence, though forcible writing is
exemplified in the exercises, clear writing occupies most of the space
devoted to the rules.
Boys who are studying Latin and Greek stand in especial need of help

to enable them to write a long English sentence clearly. The periods of
Thucydides and Cicero are not easily rendered into our idiom without
some knowledge of the links that connect an English sentence.
There is scarcely any better training, rhetorical as well as logical, than
the task of construing Thucydides into genuine English; but the flat,
vague, long-winded Greek-English and Latin-English imposture that is
often tolerated in our examinations and is allowed to pass current for
genuine English, diminishes instead of increasing the power that our
pupils should possess over their native language. By getting marks at
school and college for construing good Greek and Latin into bad
English, our pupils systematically unlearn what they may have been
allowed to pick up from Milton and from Shakespeare.
I must acknowledge very large obligations to Professor Bain's treatise
on "English Composition and Rhetoric,"