Clear and Simple as the Truth, the best book I've read in years, explains the virtues and lies of a very popular writing style. Excerpts: A [writing] style is defined by its conceptual stand on truth, presentation, writer, reader, thought, language, and their relationships. … Classic style is in its own view clear and simple as the truth. It adopts the stance that its purpose is presentation; its motive is disinterested truth. Successful presentation consists of aligning language with truth, and the test of this alignment is clarity and simplicity. The idea that presentation is successful when language is aligned with truth implies that truth can be known; truth needs no argument but only accurate presentation; the reader is competent to recognize truth; the symmetry between writer and reader allows the presentation to follow the model of conversation; a natural language is sufficient to express truth; and the writer knows the truth before he puts it into language. …
I don't think the solution has to be in the same domain as the stated symptom of the problem. The problem is a sort of implied canonicity of your perspective; classic style is just one way in which that's instantiated skillfully. One solution is make an active effort to seek out and engage with criticisms of the framing you're using, and your implicit premises, and not just objections within the terms you've set.
> Montaigne's style did feature the personal inspirational anecdotes you smuggle into the concept of classic prose.
Whether his style centered on it does not prove that classic style forbids personal anecdotes.
If anyone thinks Diamond is not up to his usual comment-section bullshit in berating me here and claiming I am clueless, diametrically wrong, and sowing confusion - well, I simply suggest that they read the online guide of the book (it's not *that* long, and some of the pieces are quite funny), and count how many of the museum pieces draw upon the writer's personal experience, life, anecdotes, or discuss how they came to think such thoughts.
Look, gwern, you've already sowed tremendous confusion in this thread. Your premise was diametrically wrong, and while you tried to minimize the implications, the fact is that Montaigne's style did feature the personal inspirational anecdotes you smuggle into the concept of classic prose.
Given that you're clueless on the subject and have appeared authoritative in dispensing misapprehensions, you should at least allow me to lead you (and any readers) to the correct answer.
[It would be useless to speculate on the confusions that made you think your extended quote was relevant. Give me a personal inspirational anecdote in classic prose. I've tried to be careful, but I doubt you'll find a single one. Why not, for the benefit of readers, clear up your misunderstanding.]
I don't know what you mean by the "quotes you provided," but my intent was to try to focus on a single example. You're correct that "important" is vague, but I'm trying to get at the misapprehension that led you to think Montaigne was a classic prose stylist. At this point, I'm not sure we mean the same thing by "personal anecdote."
Could you direct me to a single anecdote that I can inspect. If you want to use Pascal's provincial letters, give me a letter and a paragraph. I'm quite curious about what would lead you to think classic prose commonly uses "anecdotes," and I'd appreciate an example (just one) of the kind of thing you have in mind. [When I say just one, I'm not disparaging your ability to provide more; I'm only saying one good one is both necessary and sufficient for me to get your point.]
You're ignoring the quotes I provided, and almost every single piece in the Museum - for example, *every single* Liebling piece (Liebling, who is praised so often in the book!) centers on his experience, as does the Provincial Letters excerpt from Pascal (what is that excerpt *but* Pascal's personal anecdotes bouncing from disputant to disputant?).
> where personal anecdotes play an important role?
You're equivocating on 'important' here. I never claimed personal anecdotes defined the classic style, and as the quotes I supplied show, neither do the authors - but very often the classic style will start in personal experiences and anecdotes before moving to the generalizations and overall truth. The classic style permits and even encourages use of personal anecdote & explaining how one got interested in the topic, which is what I was replying to Finney about and which you seem to be studiously ignoring.
"To convince another competent person of what is being said does not involve ... anything other than a simple presentation of the order of reason leading to that conclusion, so that someone else can also reach it independently."
Personal anecdotes don't (usually) help someone else reach your conclusion independently--rather (to use Hansonian language) they facilitate the reader's "association" with the writer. They are prevalent in forms of the plain style.
Can you provide a single piece from the Museum where personal anecdotes play an important role?
Yes, my bad, I should've said Pascal (who Montaigne is repeatedly contrasted with), not Montaigne. But do you disagree with my actual point, not just a namecheck...?
Consider the comparison they make with the practical style, and the prophetic style; personal autobiography and how one came to be interested in it would be wildly out of place. The classic style is not oracular but personal and earned, even if the ultimate destination is accessible to all and universal:
"Paradoxically, classic style thus requires a strong revelation of personality even as it subordinates what is merely personal. The classic writer is not interested in mirroring the personal processes of her thought; certainly she is not interested in mirroring her personal sensations or emotions. Yet, since her only motive for speaking is the felt importance of what she has to say, she reveals herself through the topics she chooses and what she says about them....We can contrast a political text like the Declaration of Independence—whose model scene though not its actual scene is one individual talking to another—with unclassic political speeches such as the typical State of the Union address to Congress or the typical inaugural speech by a governor. There is always a jolt of passion behind the real classic writer, a little excitement because there is a personal conviction and commitment that is often completely missing from a plain statement of what politicians say when they have no intention of acting on it. In the typical State of the Union address, the president of the United States not only can but must speak pieties clearly inconsistent with his actions. Who believes what he is saying? Who thinks he means anything related to action when he says it? In the course of reading the Lettres provinciales, it is possible to believe Pascal is wrong, but it is not possible to believe he is saying something he does not really believe, something he would not act on himself....The classic writer stands fully behind what she has to say because she has thought it out independently. It may be that in thinking something out independently she has come to a common conclusion, but in expressing it she is neither joining a chorus nor embracing a platitude. Her conclusion is the product of her own thought. As a consequence, even when a classic writer reaches a common conclusion, it has the freshness of discovery. It does not come from camaraderie or conformity. She does not expect its common acceptance to be the evidence that causes it to be believed. It is possible to repeat clichés or say what you think you must to get people to believe you, but the classic stylist appears to have nothing to do with these activities.It is not the accumulated acceptance of other people—even if these other people are right—that gives force to classic writing. It is the writer’s conviction that she has earned a conclusion. To convince another competent person of what is being said does not involve appeals to authority or traditional wisdom or anything other than a simple presentation of the order of reason leading to that conclusion, so that someone else can also reach it independently.This sort of thing happens every day. When a high school geometry student proves the Pythagorean theorem, she is not breaking new ground in mathematics. But if she has actually worked out the proof herself, she—not Pythagoras—stands behind the theorem. She can respond to any possible challenge by presenting her authentically personal—even if quite common—proof. Someone who copies the identical proof without understanding it cannot stand behind it. Under challenge, the inauthentic geometer has nothing better to offer than lame appeals to widespread acceptance: “Every geometry book since Euclid says this theorem is true, so it must be.”"
(Particularly if you look through the Museum, it's hard to imagine any long classic style piece which *doesn't* "Include anecdotes, talk about how you came to consider a topic"!)
No, gwern; you are completely, 180 degrees wrong. You have an inaccurate conception of the classic style, confusing it with a very different style: Montaigne's reflexive style.
The following is quoted approvingly in the paper version of Clear and simple as the truth:
"Montaigne already had found in his Cascony and in his tower at Montaigne a style of genius, but a completely individual one that drew no followers. Pascal discovered a style at once individual, marked by genius, completely his own, that no one could take from him, and yet a general style, logical and regular with the force of law, one that everyone can and should more or less adopt as a standard: he established French prose." (at p. 176 of 1st edition).
Pascal, not Montaigne, founded modern French classic style.
[Personal anecdotes are usually out of place in classic style.]
> But for blog postings, you could adopt a more warm, humanistic approach. Include anecdotes, talk about how you came to consider a topic. Discuss the uncertainties and confusions that you went through as you came to your conclusions.
That's compatible with the classic style; in fact, for many topics, the classic style would encourage talking about how a topic became interesting to you and including the personal anecdotes - Montaigne is a sterling example of the classic style. Hanson's excerpts may not've covered that aspect, but if you look at http://classicprose.com/csg... (not sure if it was online in 2009), you see it's heavy on personalized writings and particularly praises 'how you came to consider a topic'.
Here's a recent talk by Steven Pinker on writing style and science communication. (Pinker's forthcoming book will be a style manual informed by cognitive psychology.) He relies heavily on, and speaks highly of, Clear and Simple as the Truth.
Interesting. Especially interesting in the context that the classic style is basically derived from Cicero's writing style in Latin. Cicero was probably the first writer who crafted his political and legal arguments precisely to convince the judge or the voter that his "purpose is purely the presentation of the truth. Neither writer nor reader has a job to do. The writer writes and the reader reads not for the sake of some external task--solving a problem, making money, winning a case, getting a rebate, selling insurance, fixing a machine--but rather for the sake of the subject--in this case, the birds--and for the sake of being united in recognizing the truth of this subject." But of course inherent in the classical style is that this purely fact-based, utterly rational manner is in fact the most persuasive of all, which is why Cicero's style became the mainstay for rhetorical argument over the centures.
The postmodern style takes the opposite tack: Assume everything is ambiguous; instead of refusing to acknowledge doubt, refuse to acknowledge certainty; instead of transparency, attempt to draw attention to the style; instead of communicating truth, communicate that there is no truth.
Yet it has the same function. It "is flattering to the writer, flattering to the reader, and intellectually collusive. It takes the stand that there is no external pressure on the writer and certainly nothing that the writer is trying to beat out of the reader... The writer is unquestionably competent, absolutely interesting, entirely disinterested, at leisure, and articulate."
In some situations you are pretty much forced to write in classic style, such as an academic paper. But for blog postings, you could adopt a more warm, humanistic approach. Include anecdotes, talk about how you came to consider a topic. Discuss the uncertainties and confusions that you went through as you came to your conclusions.
A mathematical proof is completely different from a description of how one came to discover the proof. In some contexts the latter is far more interesting and useful.
In software there is a not-much-used technique invented by Donald Knuth called literate programming. It tries to move away from the program as a static object, with its constrained sequences of variables, data structures, functions and algorithms. It allows a more discursive and roundabout way of presenting the program, one which exposes the author's reasoning and something of the sequence of thoughts he went through to develop the program. Basically, the writer can intersperse program code with commentary, in somewhat arbitrary order, and then there are tools that can go through, extract and re-order the software fragments, and assemble a classical program. Other tools can produce outputs focusing more on commentary or documentation. While these techniques are not perfect in terms of presenting the act of creation of software (they don't seem to facilitate backtracking and recording mistakes) they do offer an interesting alternative way to look at software creation.
@Robin The essay says that classic style "makes its hard choices silently [...] all of which may be wrong". You could take a sequence of disclaimers, such as: Despite appearances in this essay, I have other motives than disinterested truth. Despite appearances in this essay, I am not an unquestioned authority on this subject. Despite appearances in this essay, I do not have complete confidence in these claims. Et cetera.
I was trying to compress that sequence of disclaimers into a shorter disclaimer "I will be using classic style."
Does the disclaimer "Don't interpret anything I say as reflecting badly on me if another interpretation is possible." expand out to the same sequence? I can't tell that it does.
I don't think the solution has to be in the same domain as the stated symptom of the problem. The problem is a sort of implied canonicity of your perspective; classic style is just one way in which that's instantiated skillfully. One solution is make an active effort to seek out and engage with criticisms of the framing you're using, and your implicit premises, and not just objections within the terms you've set.
> Montaigne's style did feature the personal inspirational anecdotes you smuggle into the concept of classic prose.
Whether his style centered on it does not prove that classic style forbids personal anecdotes.
If anyone thinks Diamond is not up to his usual comment-section bullshit in berating me here and claiming I am clueless, diametrically wrong, and sowing confusion - well, I simply suggest that they read the online guide of the book (it's not *that* long, and some of the pieces are quite funny), and count how many of the museum pieces draw upon the writer's personal experience, life, anecdotes, or discuss how they came to think such thoughts.
Look, gwern, you've already sowed tremendous confusion in this thread. Your premise was diametrically wrong, and while you tried to minimize the implications, the fact is that Montaigne's style did feature the personal inspirational anecdotes you smuggle into the concept of classic prose.
Given that you're clueless on the subject and have appeared authoritative in dispensing misapprehensions, you should at least allow me to lead you (and any readers) to the correct answer.
[It would be useless to speculate on the confusions that made you think your extended quote was relevant. Give me a personal inspirational anecdote in classic prose. I've tried to be careful, but I doubt you'll find a single one. Why not, for the benefit of readers, clear up your misunderstanding.]
> I don't know what you mean by the "quotes you provided,"
What a world. You spend half a comment quoting from a book, in huge blockquotes, and you get asked, what quotes!
> Could you direct me to a single anecdote that I can inspect. If you want to use Pascal's provincial letters, give me a letter and a paragraph.
There is only one long excerpt from the _Provincial Letters_ in the online guide.
I don't know what you mean by the "quotes you provided," but my intent was to try to focus on a single example. You're correct that "important" is vague, but I'm trying to get at the misapprehension that led you to think Montaigne was a classic prose stylist. At this point, I'm not sure we mean the same thing by "personal anecdote."
Could you direct me to a single anecdote that I can inspect. If you want to use Pascal's provincial letters, give me a letter and a paragraph. I'm quite curious about what would lead you to think classic prose commonly uses "anecdotes," and I'd appreciate an example (just one) of the kind of thing you have in mind. [When I say just one, I'm not disparaging your ability to provide more; I'm only saying one good one is both necessary and sufficient for me to get your point.]
You're ignoring the quotes I provided, and almost every single piece in the Museum - for example, *every single* Liebling piece (Liebling, who is praised so often in the book!) centers on his experience, as does the Provincial Letters excerpt from Pascal (what is that excerpt *but* Pascal's personal anecdotes bouncing from disputant to disputant?).
> where personal anecdotes play an important role?
You're equivocating on 'important' here. I never claimed personal anecdotes defined the classic style, and as the quotes I supplied show, neither do the authors - but very often the classic style will start in personal experiences and anecdotes before moving to the generalizations and overall truth. The classic style permits and even encourages use of personal anecdote & explaining how one got interested in the topic, which is what I was replying to Finney about and which you seem to be studiously ignoring.
"To convince another competent person of what is being said does not involve ... anything other than a simple presentation of the order of reason leading to that conclusion, so that someone else can also reach it independently."
Personal anecdotes don't (usually) help someone else reach your conclusion independently--rather (to use Hansonian language) they facilitate the reader's "association" with the writer. They are prevalent in forms of the plain style.
Can you provide a single piece from the Museum where personal anecdotes play an important role?
Yes, my bad, I should've said Pascal (who Montaigne is repeatedly contrasted with), not Montaigne. But do you disagree with my actual point, not just a namecheck...?
Consider the comparison they make with the practical style, and the prophetic style; personal autobiography and how one came to be interested in it would be wildly out of place. The classic style is not oracular but personal and earned, even if the ultimate destination is accessible to all and universal:
"Paradoxically, classic style thus requires a strong revelation of personality even as it subordinates what is merely personal. The classic writer is not interested in mirroring the personal processes of her thought; certainly she is not interested in mirroring her personal sensations or emotions. Yet, since her only motive for speaking is the felt importance of what she has to say, she reveals herself through the topics she chooses and what she says about them....We can contrast a political text like the Declaration of Independence—whose model scene though not its actual scene is one individual talking to another—with unclassic political speeches such as the typical State of the Union address to Congress or the typical inaugural speech by a governor. There is always a jolt of passion behind the real classic writer, a little excitement because there is a personal conviction and commitment that is often completely missing from a plain statement of what politicians say when they have no intention of acting on it. In the typical State of the Union address, the president of the United States not only can but must speak pieties clearly inconsistent with his actions. Who believes what he is saying? Who thinks he means anything related to action when he says it? In the course of reading the Lettres provinciales, it is possible to believe Pascal is wrong, but it is not possible to believe he is saying something he does not really believe, something he would not act on himself....The classic writer stands fully behind what she has to say because she has thought it out independently. It may be that in thinking something out independently she has come to a common conclusion, but in expressing it she is neither joining a chorus nor embracing a platitude. Her conclusion is the product of her own thought. As a consequence, even when a classic writer reaches a common conclusion, it has the freshness of discovery. It does not come from camaraderie or conformity. She does not expect its common acceptance to be the evidence that causes it to be believed. It is possible to repeat clichés or say what you think you must to get people to believe you, but the classic stylist appears to have nothing to do with these activities.It is not the accumulated acceptance of other people—even if these other people are right—that gives force to classic writing. It is the writer’s conviction that she has earned a conclusion. To convince another competent person of what is being said does not involve appeals to authority or traditional wisdom or anything other than a simple presentation of the order of reason leading to that conclusion, so that someone else can also reach it independently.This sort of thing happens every day. When a high school geometry student proves the Pythagorean theorem, she is not breaking new ground in mathematics. But if she has actually worked out the proof herself, she—not Pythagoras—stands behind the theorem. She can respond to any possible challenge by presenting her authentically personal—even if quite common—proof. Someone who copies the identical proof without understanding it cannot stand behind it. Under challenge, the inauthentic geometer has nothing better to offer than lame appeals to widespread acceptance: “Every geometry book since Euclid says this theorem is true, so it must be.”"
(Particularly if you look through the Museum, it's hard to imagine any long classic style piece which *doesn't* "Include anecdotes, talk about how you came to consider a topic"!)
No, gwern; you are completely, 180 degrees wrong. You have an inaccurate conception of the classic style, confusing it with a very different style: Montaigne's reflexive style.
The following is quoted approvingly in the paper version of Clear and simple as the truth:
"Montaigne already had found in his Cascony and in his tower at Montaigne a style of genius, but a completely individual one that drew no followers. Pascal discovered a style at once individual, marked by genius, completely his own, that no one could take from him, and yet a general style, logical and regular with the force of law, one that everyone can and should more or less adopt as a standard: he established French prose." (at p. 176 of 1st edition).
Pascal, not Montaigne, founded modern French classic style.
[Personal anecdotes are usually out of place in classic style.]
> But for blog postings, you could adopt a more warm, humanistic approach. Include anecdotes, talk about how you came to consider a topic. Discuss the uncertainties and confusions that you went through as you came to your conclusions.
That's compatible with the classic style; in fact, for many topics, the classic style would encourage talking about how a topic became interesting to you and including the personal anecdotes - Montaigne is a sterling example of the classic style. Hanson's excerpts may not've covered that aspect, but if you look at http://classicprose.com/csg... (not sure if it was online in 2009), you see it's heavy on personalized writings and particularly praises 'how you came to consider a topic'.
Here's a recent talk by Steven Pinker on writing style and science communication. (Pinker's forthcoming book will be a style manual informed by cognitive psychology.) He relies heavily on, and speaks highly of, Clear and Simple as the Truth.
What makes you tie this to Cicero specifically? The Sophists were active centuries before Cicero, specializing in forensic oratory and arguments.
Interesting. Especially interesting in the context that the classic style is basically derived from Cicero's writing style in Latin. Cicero was probably the first writer who crafted his political and legal arguments precisely to convince the judge or the voter that his "purpose is purely the presentation of the truth. Neither writer nor reader has a job to do. The writer writes and the reader reads not for the sake of some external task--solving a problem, making money, winning a case, getting a rebate, selling insurance, fixing a machine--but rather for the sake of the subject--in this case, the birds--and for the sake of being united in recognizing the truth of this subject." But of course inherent in the classical style is that this purely fact-based, utterly rational manner is in fact the most persuasive of all, which is why Cicero's style became the mainstay for rhetorical argument over the centures.
The postmodern style takes the opposite tack: Assume everything is ambiguous; instead of refusing to acknowledge doubt, refuse to acknowledge certainty; instead of transparency, attempt to draw attention to the style; instead of communicating truth, communicate that there is no truth.
Yet it has the same function. It "is flattering to the writer, flattering to the reader, and intellectually collusive. It takes the stand that there is no external pressure on the writer and certainly nothing that the writer is trying to beat out of the reader... The writer is unquestionably competent, absolutely interesting, entirely disinterested, at leisure, and articulate."
In some situations you are pretty much forced to write in classic style, such as an academic paper. But for blog postings, you could adopt a more warm, humanistic approach. Include anecdotes, talk about how you came to consider a topic. Discuss the uncertainties and confusions that you went through as you came to your conclusions.
A mathematical proof is completely different from a description of how one came to discover the proof. In some contexts the latter is far more interesting and useful.
In software there is a not-much-used technique invented by Donald Knuth called literate programming. It tries to move away from the program as a static object, with its constrained sequences of variables, data structures, functions and algorithms. It allows a more discursive and roundabout way of presenting the program, one which exposes the author's reasoning and something of the sequence of thoughts he went through to develop the program. Basically, the writer can intersperse program code with commentary, in somewhat arbitrary order, and then there are tools that can go through, extract and re-order the software fragments, and assemble a classical program. Other tools can produce outputs focusing more on commentary or documentation. While these techniques are not perfect in terms of presenting the act of creation of software (they don't seem to facilitate backtracking and recording mistakes) they do offer an interesting alternative way to look at software creation.
@Robin The essay says that classic style "makes its hard choices silently [...] all of which may be wrong". You could take a sequence of disclaimers, such as: Despite appearances in this essay, I have other motives than disinterested truth. Despite appearances in this essay, I am not an unquestioned authority on this subject. Despite appearances in this essay, I do not have complete confidence in these claims. Et cetera.
I was trying to compress that sequence of disclaimers into a shorter disclaimer "I will be using classic style."
Does the disclaimer "Don't interpret anything I say as reflecting badly on me if another interpretation is possible." expand out to the same sequence? I can't tell that it does.