The next Shakespeare bookclub is SUNDAY 19th May, 19.00 UK time—You can find all the other Shakespeare posts here. I’ll send a link over the weekend.
Earlier this week, I showed you some examples of how the plain and ornate styles have been used in English, and how it can be effective to switch between them. Today I am going to present some examples of the plain style being used in maritime non-fiction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What I hope to demonstrate is that the plain style can be highly affecting and greatly dramatic. Sometimes when you have a very powerful, compelling subject the best prose is the plainest.
But, this doesn’t mean minimal or over-simplified. One thing you will notice about these extracts is that, unlike the modern plain style, they are elegantly composed and finely balanced; the sentences are artfully structured with complex punctuation. The standard advice today is to make everything short, to break sentences down with full-stops (periods). But these travellers and navy men, who were writing for the public, didn’t need to do that in order to maintain a splendid plain style.
Perhaps it is true that audiences today require short sentences. But the idea that everyone’s attention span is getting shorter is abysmally stupid. If the claims made were true, no-one would be able to concentrate for long enough to take them in, let alone evaluate them. The whole genre of “attention span” writing is well-designed to flatter that audience that their attention spans aren’t the problem, or that if they are bad at concentrating, it isn’t their fault. It’s not you, it’s your evil phone! No, we are not writing short sentences because of a lack of attention, but because they fit better to the medium of the internet and because most news works best in headline form.
Look at this front page of the New York Times from 13th April 1945. What a masterclass in headline writing. I count fifteen. Each a marvel.
It wasn’t Twitter that invented this sort of thing. Telegraphing the news is literally centuries old. Scarcity of paper necessitated this form of writing long before that too. Genghis Khan and his men were illiterate: messages were sung and in that way spread through the vast troops of horsemen. Once you knew the melody is was easy to fit short messages to it and thus make them memorable.
But, the rest of us do not have to be staccato all the time. It doesn’t suit the purposes of all writing.
Here is a passage from the ‘Biographical Memoir of the Right Honourable Lord Nelson of the Nile, K.B.’, published in the Naval Chronicle in 1800. It describes a journey through the “polar circle”, i.e. the arctic, and in this section the ship is beginning to face difficulties after being caught in the ice. (The aim was to find a trading route that went over the arctic and would thus save time relative to travelling round the Cape of Good Hope; they failed, as many had done for centuries before them.)
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