Rainier Moreno-Lacalle’s Reviews > Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose > Status Update

Writing is an intellectual activity. To achieve good prose styles, writers must work through intellectual issues, not merely acquire mechanical techniques. The heart of classic style is the root scene of classic joint attention. The actual scene of writing is blended with the classic scene so that writing is treated as speech.

Clarity is a prime virtue within classic style or practical style, and it is easy to begin judging other styles by the standards of one of these general styles, especially for writers who actually use one of them on a regular basis.

Classic style is highly attentive to nuance, and as a consequence is highly sensitive to the schematic structure of expression. In the classic view, nuance is neither arbitrary nor decorative; it is meaning. Nuance is recognized through discipline and precision and can be lost sight of through carelessness. Classic style lives on fine distinctions.

Classic style and practical style have important areas of overlap; both styles place a high value on clarity and directness. Classic style values clarity because it sees itself as a transparent medium for the presentation of truth. Practical style values clarity because it places a premium on being easy to parse.

There are styles of writing that suggest that while words are inadequate, there is nothing else available, so writers do the best they can without expecting their language to do more than approximate their thought. Classic style takes the opposite stand. There are not merely better and worse ways of expressing particular thoughts, there is a best way.

An individual discovers hypocrisy through his experience, but hypocrisy well observed and well described in one time and place will be recognized across cultures and across centuries, since to observe well and describe well in classic style is always to transcend contingent situations. Circumstances change; truth abides.

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.

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 what he knows to a reader. The style does not limit the writer’s subject matter or efface his individuality...

Classic style is in its own view clear and simple as the truth. It adopts the stance that its purpose is presentation; its motive, disinterested truth. Successful presentation consists of aligning language with truth, and the test of this alignment is clarity and simplicity.

The most persuasive of all rhetorical stances is to write as if one is not trying to persuade at all but simply presenting the truth. The most seductive of all rhetorical stances is to write as if of course the reader is interested in what is being presented, as if Theo sue could never possibly arise.