The writing style of writing style guides

I am obsessed with writing style guides. Really. I have dozens of them, lined up on my shelf. These guides range from the technical to the philosophical, from the instructional to the conversational. They provide practical tips for refining one’s writing style, but also inspiration for getting words on the page in the first place. Some of the advice is boilerplate, such as the recommendation to use the active voice whenever possible. Some of it is more eccentric, such as Strunk and White’s inexplicable distaste for certain verbs (‘prioritize’, ‘chair a meeting’) and adjectives (‘ongoing’, ‘off-putting’). Yet all of the advice is useful for thinking about how we can make our writing more powerful, more persuasive, more pleasurable to read.

We’ll be returning to the substance of this advice in future blogposts. What I want to address here is another question, a kind of meta-question about books like The Elements of Style. It’s this: what is the writing style of writing style guides? Posing this question forces us to read style guides on a deeper level. It’s a practice Roy Peter Clark calls ‘X-ray reading’, which involves penetrating the soft tissue of a text and revealing its inner workings. The point isn’t to strip writing of its magic or wonder. The point is to think about all the choices available to us during the writing process – and how each choice affects the reader in a different way.

Let’s start with The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams, originally published in 1995. A classic of its genre, the book lays out the principles of writing for academic publication. Here’s a short extract about identifying and resolving problems in a text:

To diagnose: 

1.     Draw a line under the first six or seven words of every clause, whether main or subordinate, at the beginning, middle, or end of a sentence.

2.     If those first six or seven words are subjects that are not characters but abstractions, and if the verb is a general one like have, do, make, be, and so on, that sentence is one you should probably revise.

To revise:

1.     First, locate the characters you want to tell a story about. If you can’t find any, decide who ought to be the main characters. 

2.     Next, look for what those characters are doing. If their action is in a nominalization, change it into a verb (i.e., ‘denominalize’ it) and make the character its subject.

(Booth, et al., 1995/2003:269-70)

This is pretty sound advice. If your text is full of lifeless abstractions, inject it with propulsive actions; if it is full of deadening nouns, liven it up with energetic verbs. Ask yourself who’s kicking (or karate-chopping) whom – and rewrite your sentence accordingly.

But notice the writing style. It’s dry and mechanical, like the assembly instructions for an IKEA bookcase. The advice is conveyed to us with maximum efficiency and zero frills. There is no warmth or personality, and that’s by design. ‘Here is the lesson’, the authors are saying. ‘Now let’s get down to work’.

Compare this to a passage from Stylish Academic Writing by Helen Sword:

Stylish academic writers…often play around with language: they vary their vocabulary, mix up their syntax, and veer back and forth between short sentences and long. Passive verb constructions may even be allowed into their prose from time to time. They follow no set formula or rule book; but nor do they throw grammar and coherence to the wind. Whatever their stylistic choices, they always make us feel that every word counts. (Sword, 2012: 60)

The message is clear: stylish academic writers learn the rules but do not slavishly follow them. Their work is playful and creative, not paint-by-numbers.

But pay attention to how Sword communicates the message. Sword doesn’t just tell us what it means to ‘make every word count’; she also shows us. The paragraph starts with the main character (stylish academic writers), it sets the story in motion (play around with language), and it uses strong verbs to propel the narrative forward (vary, mix up, veer, follow, throw). In other words, the passage practices what it preaches (passive verb constructions may even be allowed).

Here’s a final example. It’s from The Elements of Academic Style by Eric Hayot, a book about writing in the humanities. In one chapter, Hayot is weighing up the pros and cons of academic jargon. Listen to this paragraph:

Anyway. Whatever your official and highly theorized position on the jargon wars, you will need to master a professional discourse in order to succeed as an academic writer. This means learning, at some point, how to use ‘problematic’ in a sentence or ‘stage’ as a verb. Ideally it means later on deciding to stop using ‘problematic’ (I still kind of like the admittedly shopworn ‘stage’). But really it’s up to you, within the broad range of professionally acceptable ways of writing, to decide on the levels of complexity, the types of syntax, and the style of language use that will matter to you. (Hayot, 2014: 178-9)

Hayot is saying that all academics will need to use specialist language to enter a scholarly conversation. But exactly how we use this language is a choice we must each take alone.

What do you notice here, stylistically? You may have been struck by the casual remark in parenthesis. And you probably will have raised an eyebrow at the first word of the paragraph. But you should also be alert to the subjective tone of the passage. As we read, we have the sense of following a monologue as it moves sideways (anyway), backwards (I still kind of like), and forwards (really it’s up to you). Hayot isn’t writing an instruction manual, but neither is he presenting at-a-distance observations. He’s narrating his own train of thought.

The three passages above exemplify different styles of writing. Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner would classify them respectively as ‘practical’, ‘classic’, and ‘reflexive’. These writing styles exist for us to use, master, and make our own. They help us set the temperature in the texts we write, a temperature the reader can almost feel on their skin.

Read writing style guides. Learn how to generate heat, express warmth, and convey coolness in your own writing. And don’t be afraid to tinker with the thermostat.