Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose - Second Edition

The periodic table of chemical elements is implicitly modeled on the alphabet. The chemical elements are a kind of alphabet of the physical world. The Roman alphabet, used to write English and most European languages, is itself a set of elements. With just twenty-six letters, we can write every word in these languages, even words that are obsolete,

The truth of things can be perceived by attentive people of any age or condition. Human experience reveals the same conflicts, the same needs and desires, the same weaknesses and virtues. To pay close attention to personal experience is to see through it to truths that run through all such experience.

Universal truths are eternal and will always be verified by normal experience. They are eternal in two senses: they are discovered, not created, and future experience will always corroborate past testimony. An individual discovers hypocrisy through his experience, but hypocrisy well observed and well described in one time and place will be recogniz

DISCOURSE ON THE METHOD of rightly directing one’s Reason and of seeking Truth in the Sciences.

The feature of classic style that makes it a natural model for anyone is its great versatility. The style is defined not by a set of techniques but rather by an attitude toward writing itself. What is most fundamental to that attitude is the stand that the writer knows something before he sets out to write, and that his purpose is to articulate wha

Despite a lifetime of speaking, we can remain unaware of having a style of speaking. Yankees in Maine or Good ol’ Boys in Louisiana think that people from Brooklyn talk funny. WASPS in the Chicago suburbs think that Poles or Lithuanians in Chicago speak English with an accent, as if the suburban WASPS, the Yankees, and the Good ol’ Boys speak just

Truth is perfect. It can gain nothing by being perceived. It is therefore disinterested. It has no motive for deception. It cannot present itself falsely because it does not present itself at all. Self-presentation is for human beings. Human beings are not completely visible; we come with packaging. The package is always shaped by human contingenci

self-interest leads to self-deception;

All of the features of classic style pertain: the motive is truth, the purpose is presentation, the scene is informal, language is adequate, truth can be known, speaker and hearer are competent, and so on.