The plain style or the ornate?

Is it best to write simply?

The next Shakespeare bookclub is now **19th May**—it was pointed out that 12th is Mothers’ Day in the USA… sorry! You can find all the other Shakespeare posts here.

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Some of you will have seen the controversy on Twitter about writing simply. Paul Graham (whose own writing I analysed recently) said that, for most people, using the simplest possible words to express what they mean is the best way to write. Obviously he received a good deal of bad feedback from other users. Let’s put all that to one side and think about how this idea fits in to English prose more broadly.

Graham was advocating for what’s called the plain style. This is contrasted to the ornate style. They are pretty much what they say. The plain style is direct, simple, unadorned. The ornate style is… ornate. Some people will tell you that the history of English prose is one of moving from ornate to simple. This is too simple. Izaac Walton wrote in the plain style in the seventeenth century and Samuel Johnson wrote in the ornate style in the eighteenth. Some people point out that nineteenth century prose was convoluted and that Hemingway was not. They surely must be averting their gaze from James Joyce whose ornate prose stands like a huge cage of rococo cockatoos next to Hemingway’s spare elegance.

One mistake is to confuse syntax with style. Just because a writer uses long, complex sentence, with left-branching sub-clauses, parenthetical clauses, and so on, doesn’t make them ornate. Of course, it can make them ornate, but long sentences alone is not the issue. To make this clear, I’m going to offer you some examples of the two styles.

First, look at Walton, doing very fine work here.

In another walk to Salisbury, he saw a poor man with a poorer horse, that was fallen under his load: they were both in distress, and needed present help; which Mr. Herbert perceiving, put off his canonical coat, and helped the poor man to unload, and after to load, his horse. The poor man blessed him for it, and he blessed the poor man; and was so like the Good Samaritan, that he gave him money to refresh both himself and his horse; and told him, “That if he loved himself he should be merciful to his beast.” Thus he left the poor man; and at his coming to his musical friends at Salisbury, they began to wonder that Mr. George Herbert, which used to be so trim and clean, came into that company so soiled and discomposed: but he told them the occasion. And when one of the company told him, “He had disparaged himself by so dirty an employment,” his answer was, “That the thought of what he had done would prove music to him at midnight; and that the omission of it would have upbraided and made discord in his conscience...”

Modern writers would use more full stops, fewer semi-colons. But otherwise this is as simple as simple can be. It has no rhetoric, no metaphor, makes no claims beyond what it describes: it is direct. Can you believe that Walton extract was published in 1670?