Plain Style: A Guide to Written English

by Christopher Lasch, Stewart Weaver (Editor)

Plain Style is an amusing and instructive guide to written English by the late Christopher Lasch, author of The Culture of Narcissism , The True and Only Heaven , and many other memorable works of American history and social criticism. Written for the benefit of the students at the University of Rochester, where Lasch taught from 1970 until his death in 1994, it quickly established itself in typescript as a local classic—a lively, witty, and historically minded alternative to the famous volume by William Strunk and E. B. White, The Elements of Style .

Now available for the first time in published form, Plain Style is fundamentally a clear, readable, practical guide to the timeless principles of effective composition. At the same time, however, in ways that Stewart Weaver explains in his critical introduction, it is a distinctive and revealing addition to the published work of an eminent American thinker. No mere primer, Plain Style is an essay in cultural criticism, a political treatise even, by one for whom directness, clarity, and honesty of expression were essential to the living spirit of democracy.

As the teachers and students who have for years benefited from its succinct wisdom will testify, Plain Style is an indispensable guide to writing and, indeed, Christopher Lasch's least-expected but perhaps most serviceable work.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Language, Reference, Criticism

136 pages, Paperback

First published May 3, 2002

About the author

Christopher "Kit" Lasch (June 1, 1932 – February 14, 1994) was an American historian, moralist, and social critic who was a history professor at the University of Rochester.

Lasch sought to use history as a tool to awaken American society to the pervasiveness with which major institutions, public and private, were eroding the competence and independence of families and communities. He strove to create a historically informed social criticism that could teach Americans how to deal with rampant consumerism, proletarianization, and what he famously labeled the 'culture of narcissism.'

His books, including The New Radicalism in America (1965), Haven in a Heartless World (1977), The Culture of Narcissism (1979), and The True and Only Heaven (1991), and The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy published posthumously in 1996 were widely discussed and reviewed. The Culture of Narcissism became a surprise best-seller and won the National Book Award in the category Current Interest (paperback).

Lasch was always a critic of liberalism, and a historian of liberalism's discontents, but over time his political perspective evolved dramatically. In the 1960s, he was a neo-Marxist and acerbic critic of Cold War liberalism. During the 1970s, he began to become a far more iconoclastic figure, fusing cultural conservatism with a Marxian critique of capitalism, and drawing on Freud-influenced critical theory to diagnose the ongoing deterioration that he perceived in American culture and politics. His writings during this period are considered contradictory. They are sometimes denounced by feminists and hailed by conservatives for his apparent defense of the traditional family. But as he explained in one of his books The Minimal Self, "it goes without saying that sexual equality in itself remains an eminently desirable objective...". Moreover, in Women and the Common Life, Lasch clarified that urging women to abandon the household and forcing them into a position of economic dependence, in the workplace, pointing out the importance of professional careers does not entail liberation, as long as these careers are governed by the requirements of corporate economy.

He eventually concluded that an often unspoken but pervasive faith in "Progress" tended to make Americans resistant to many of his arguments. In his last major works he explored this theme in depth, suggesting that Americans had much to learn from the suppressed and misunderstood Populist and artisan movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Reviews

[Gabriel Conroy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of Lasch's suggestions are well taken, and if I followed them, my writing would much improve.

He does not, however, seem to recognize that language changes. People use old words in new ways and people make new words. It happens. "Hopefully" has become, like it or not (Lasch says not), a word that means something like "it is to be hoped that." The most discouraging part is Lasch's guide to pronouncing certain words. He wants speakers to pronounce the voiceless "t" (or [t] in IPA) in the word "congratulations" instead of the voiced [d] (or, one would imagine, horror of horrors, the voiced affricate of [t]). Hint: an intervocalic voiceless plosive tends to become voiced. It's how language evolves.

I recommend Strunk and White over Lasch. Lasch doesn't really offer much new, better than, or different from Strunk and White. And Strunk and White, at least in the more recent editions, have a final chapter in which they acknowledge that language does indeed change and that stylistic prescriptions owe a great deal to conventional notions.

[Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though Lasch primarily wrote Plain Style for the University of Rochester's history department, this primer is useful for anyone wishing to understand the political and ideological implications of written style. The foreword, written by Rochester's Stewart Weaver, provides a compelling history of Lasch's "plain style" in his work as a scholar and teacher, while relating the experiences and beliefs that may have led Lasch to write Plain Style in the first place. In his comprehensive and well-reasoned guidelines, Lasch occasionally interjects a passing thought on the words and writing of his surroundings: two-letter postal codes, he writes, "...are bureaucratic innovations designed to surround the postal service with an illusionary air of efficiency"; of Pauline Kael's movie reviews, "... contractions mingle with the aesthetic, therapeutic idiom of jaded urban sophistication." Fascinating. By far the highlight of this book is a hilariously critical (but constructive) letter of feedback Lasch wrote on an especially unintelligible student paper, courtesy of Weaver. It's worth seeking out Plain Style for his frustrated response alone; no quotation would do it justice.

[William Moriarty]

Know Your Enemy convinced me to read this. If I was a history major at the University of Rochester and this book was given to me as a style guide, I might switch majors. Lasch is well-meaning and clever, but he is also a dick.

[Nasra]

if i was lasch's student id simply drop out

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lot to love about this book, but I'm particularly enamored with the section on often misused words. In particular: "Life style - The appeal of this tired but now ubiquitous phrase probably lies in its suggestion that life is largely a matter of style. Find something else to say about life."

[Connor · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit basic. I wish he wrote more about his personal style

[Kyle Dunham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Witty, insightful, and helpful guide.

[Thalia Phillips · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a writer, this was a helpful grammatical, and (to a lesser extent) rhetorical tool. It was, however, written in a voice staunchly in defiance of the indisputable fact that language evolves.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delightful and helpful.

[Luke · Rating 3 out of 5]

some good advice but also hopelessly filled with silly prescriptivism. worth reading for the biographical essay on lasch at the beginning, which funnily enough opens with a syntactically ambiguous sentence...

[Mills College Library]

808.042 L341 2002