13  The style for the purpose

Every writer, by the way he or she]uses the language, reveals something of his spirit, his habits, his capacities, his bias. (E. B. White, Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, Chapter 5)

We have identified several qualities that make up a writer’s style in previous chapters: notably rhythm, pace and euphony. In this chapter we ask what sort of style is effective in description, narration, exposition and argument, by studying good examples. These may also reveal the less definable quality that will make the whole greater than the sum of the parts, and some of the writer’s originality.

DESCRIBING MEMORABLY

Laurie Lee in Spain (page 208) reveals a poet’s eye. Such descriptions, plunging the reader into the whole experience, depend on sharp observation and precise detail (which animals, what kind of food, what sort of old woman’s face?) and the occasional figure of speech (like a watchful moose?).

When doing legwork, if you know that a description of a place or a person will be required, you will be wise to take plenty of notes, of measurements and other precise details. ‘Big’, ‘fat’, ‘short’, ‘comfortable’, ‘beautiful’ and suchlike adjectives are vague if you’re trying to create a picture in the reader’s mind. For a travel article you might use your camera to record sights you will want to describe as well as to take pics that may be used in illustration. You might use a tape recorder to remind you of interesting sounds as well as to record interviews. Don’t get too absorbed with your equipment, though, or you’ll forget to use your imagination and may miss the essence of what you’re trying to capture.

Description typically moves from the general, or larger detail, to the particular, or smaller. Consider the difference between a scene described from a plane and a scene described from a train. Description for its own sake is out: the reader must see its purpose within the whole.

The modern newspaper or magazine article likes description that is meaty with facts and pacy. Here is Tony Parsons in an Arena article, ‘Slaves of Milan’, inside the cathedral:

In the cool shadows inside, among the massive white columns and the infinite stained glass windows, Milanesi businessmen in their lunch hour kneel before the Madonna and child, make the signs of the cross and clasp their hands in prayer. One of them – wrapped up against February in a deep camel hair coat, squat and heavy bearded, like a company man Martin Scorsese – catches my eye. He looks like the archetypal hard-nosed, go-getting Milano corporate cowboy. The sight of him – with his head bowed, his lips muttering in supplication, not worried if he gets the knees of his million lire suit messed up – is strangely moving. After long minutes lost in prayer he eventually rises and checks his watch. Five past two. Time to get back to the office.

NARRATING COMPELLINGLY

That generally means sweeping the reader along, wanting to know what happened next, with short, vigorous sentences round meaningful, active verbs. Aidan Hartley in The Spectator (‘Me Frodo, You Jane’) tells how one of Dr Jane Goodall’s chimp study groups in Tanzania murdered a child:

The story begins on a morning in May. The wife and toddler son of Moshi Sadiqi, a park attendant, were collecting firewood in Gombe, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Like many staff families, they lived inside the park. The pair ventured into the rainforest. Frodo struck without warning. He swung out of the jungle, snatched up the boy and, as the distraught mother looked on, retreated into the trees. Here, Frodo flung his prey against the branches repeatedly, until the boy was as limp as a rag doll. The mother ran for help and park rangers rushed to the scene. Frodo had by this time disembowelled the boy and eaten part of his head.

Most of the description needed is supplied by the verbs – ‘swung’, ‘snatched’, ‘disembowelled’.

When your story is expository narrative (history), you will be looking for devices that help you to leap through the years. Here are some in a feature by Kevin Roberts in FHM – ‘Lockdown’ – which told of the extraordinary power of cocaine traffickers in Rio de Janeiro:

Aged just 34, Seaside Freddy has enjoyed a swift – and vicious – rise to become Brazil’s cocaine kingpin. Born into the Rio ghetto, he started out as a slum-dwelling pot dealer and, through a mix of street smarts and ruthlessness, rose to become a major trafficker and the undisputed head of Red Command a Rio gang with extensive national criminal influence] while still in his twenties. At his peak he was believed to be supplying more than two-thirds of all Brazil’s cocaine – an estimated 30 tons a year. Arrested in 1996, he escaped and spent five years on the run. Finally, after a three-month manhunt involving thousands of troops, he was recaptured in the Colombian jungle in April 2001, when his plane was shot down by an air force fighter. Fleeing on foot, after losing two fingers in a gunfight with soldiers, Brazil’s Public Enemy No. 1 was collared trying to sneak into Venezuela.

Note how the chronological order is sustained and the leaps economically achieved by the links starting each sentence: ‘aged just 34’, ‘born into’, ‘at his peak’, ‘arrested in 1996’, ‘finally’, ‘fleeing on foot’. Note also how the sentences pack in the events of many years by the skilful use of adverbial clauses and participles to link up the actions of the verbs.

EXPLAINING FULLY

A great deal of all feature writing is exposition. Newspapers’ background features put the daily news into perspective by explaining the significance of the facts. Such features may make forecasts, anticipate problems, suggest solutions.

Much of a foreign correspondent’s work is putting into perspective the events of the country reported from, making sure that everything that needs explaining – customs, ethnic balance, the governing system – is explained clearly.

How-to features are legion: gardening, cookery, fashion, DIY, lifestyle, etc. Such a straightforward how-to piece as following a recipe is not as easy to get right as it looks. It is easy to forget to say what you do with a particular ingredient, and putting the instructions in the best order requires careful thought if disaster is to be avoided.

In India they have both class (inherited from British colonials) and caste. In New Internationalist’s Equality issue of January/February 2004, Mari Marcel Thekaekara explored these ‘evil twins’ from an Indian perspective. After a mention of the only class-free society of indigenous or adivasi people, we get two paragraphs explaining the origins of the caste system:

Then came caste, a system devised by Machiavellian minds to keep an entire sub-group in bondage forever. Caste was invented by the Hindu Brahmin or priestly group some 2000 years ago. They took what were essentially divisions of labour and dictated that everyone had a predestined, preordained station in life. To ensure that the diktat was obeyed, they created an elaborate religious system which insisted that your birth in this life was directly related to your sins or good deeds in the last one. Hence everyone had to accept this rigid system which controlled society and totally prohibited social mobility.

Knowledge was closely controlled by the Brahmins. Disobedience could mean death or worse. For example Manu, the Hindu lawgiver who codified a great deal of caste-dictated social behaviour into rigid laws, decreed that ‘a Dahlit’ (person below or outside the caste system) who listened to the chanting of the Vedas (holy texts) should have molten lead poured into his ears. (New Internationalist, www.newint.org)

The tone is reassuringly calm and without ornament. Every word of an exposition should indicate authority. You show that you know your subject, that you have studied it thoroughly and are experienced. If you leave something out because you are unsure about it, the reader will sense that there’s a gap.

The extract has the essential qualities of good expository writing: comprehensiveness (as far as it goes), logical order and, as always, clarity. The key techniques to achieve these are:

Analysis

First you see what the elements of your subject are. You divide and subdivide, and then decide in which order what you have to say will best be understood by the reader. Thus the material of books like this is divided into chapters, headings and sub-headings.

Definition

Above, ‘caste’, ‘Dahlit’ and Vedas had to be defined. Obvious enough. Special care needs to be taken with words that have more than one field or register. It’s probably clear when you’re referring to a geological depression and not a psychological one. But many legal terms, like ‘plead’, ‘contempt’ and ‘prejudice’, have different meanings outside the law and you may have to point out which field you’re in. You use ‘cool’ in a mention of an open-air concert: do you mean it was successful or that you should have taken a woolly? By ‘homeless’ do you mean staying with Mum between selling and moving to your new house, or do you mean sleeping rough?

A feature about the effects of divorce on children would need to make it clear by definition what the difference is between care and custody, and we’re now talking legal again.

From abstract to concrete

Again (see Chapter 12), you use analogy, illustration, examples, anecdotes and figures to help you explain.

ARGUING CONVINCINGLY

You are engaged in a debate about the Holocaust and Mr A says, ‘All right, there were concentration camps, and reportedly, a number of Jews and other unfortunates were exterminated, but six million is just propaganda’. You might try to move the argument forward by asking:

What do you mean by reportedly?

How many people do you think were exterminated?

I don’t think you’ll get satisfactory answers. First because the evidence is against Mr A. Sorry, no space to elaborate here. As a reminder though: to be convincing, arguments must be backed up by good evidence, facts or figures, or both. Keep in mind the gap between the facts and the truth that faces the deadline-pressured journalist, the problems that can make verification difficult and the limitations of different kinds of sources, matters that are spelt out in Chapter 8.

Second, Mr A doesn’t convince because his language (reportedly … just) doesn’t inspire confidence. To argue convincingly means leaving no doubt about what you mean by your language. Your language has determined how clearly you’re thinking as well as how clearly you’re expressing yourself.

Defining your terms is crucial, and not only your own terms but those technical terms or jargon that you’re confronted with by your subject.

A Reader’s Digest feature, ‘Outrageous! Now We Can’t Defend Ourselves Against Burglars’ (March 2003) by Alan Judd has at its core what exactly the Crown Prosecution Service means by allowing the use of ‘reasonable force’ to defend ourselves. Judd cites similar cases of killing or seriously injuring intruders into family homes, where it is hard to see why some defenders were prosecuted and some not.

The feature follows a classical structure of argument. It starts by getting the reader emotionally involved. Two burglaries are described in which householders were injured yet refrained from fighting back and had long waits for the police. We then get the For and Against arguments, concluding with the view that the emphasis of the law needs to be changed.

Judd wants ‘a shift of emphasis for the courts to make it clear that there’s a strong presumption against prosecuting any householder who injures an intruder’. He counters the anti-gun argument by noting that in the US ‘where the law is more robustly on the side of the victim the rate of burglary is less than half of ours’. (No comparisons are made about the rates of murders in the two countries but we’ll leave that aside.)

Emotion comes into the discussion again. As well as the phrase ‘reasonable force’ leading to confusion it is also ‘a question of attitude … Increasingly, our legal and judicial officials seem more concerned with covering their own backs in this rights-based culture, turning victims into perpetrators and perpetrators into victims’.

Emotion used appropriately is needed to persuade. It helps you to get past readers’ indifference, to encourage an attitude or mood, to make readers receptive. But reason must be in control. Emotion used dishonestly or carelessly can lead to the following common flaws in argument:

Emotionally weighted language

An often used illustration of emotionally weighted language that prevents us from thinking objectively (or from trying to) is: ‘I am firm, you are obstinate, he is pig-headed.’ Such terms are called ‘witch words’: they may be used either cunningly or unconsciously (by the prejudiced). ‘Freedom fighter’ or ‘terrorist’, ‘staunch Conservative’ or ‘hidebound Tory’, ‘unemployed’ or ‘work-shy’: whose side are you on?

Non-sequiturs

‘More children in this country are becoming obese. The main reason is that they’re eating the wrong kind of food.’ There are too many other reasons to be sure that’s the main reason.

Begging the question

‘More police on the streets will reduce crime.’ You assume to be true what you’re supposed to be proving. The crime might go somewhere else.

Sweeping generalization (or bias)

‘The Labour Party are purely interested in getting elected.’

‘The Conservatives are only interested in ensuring that the rich stay rich.’

In practice such faults appear in more subtle statements and are not so easy to avoid.

Essays, think pieces and polemics

The Op Ed (opposite the editorial or leader) pages of the national papers, the political weeklies and a few journals offer homes for features referred to as ‘think pieces’. They are journalistic essays, and may be designated as such. Some take up controversial topics of the moment and express a personal viewpoint that can vary from the publication’s stance. The style may approach that of the deliberately provocative pundits who use their personal columns to stir up debate, but they are more respectful, on the whole, of their content. They may give the email address of the author or publication to encourage readers to respond.

Here are some typical examples, starting with Op Eds plus standfirsts:

‘Stress’ by Angela Patmore (Daily Mail, 2 March 2004). ‘For most it’s utterly bogus. What’s more, treatment can make it worse.’

‘The uncomfortable truth about Putin’ by Mary Dejevsky (The Independent, 11 March 2004). ‘On every single count, Russia is a better place for more people now than it was.’

‘Never forget, Prime Minister, that Parliament is sovereign’ (The Daily Telegraph, 11 March 2004). ‘Thomas Strathclyde Lord Strathcl yde, Leader of the Opposition in the House of Lords] says the Government will suffer if it tries to break its word on Lords reform.’

‘Drug tests need more muscle’ by Christopher Caldwell (Financial Times, 6/7 March, 2004). ‘There are doping scandals at the highest level of sport in several countries.’

‘A grotesque choice’ by Max Hastings (The Guardian, 11 March 2004). ‘Israel’s repression of the Palestinian people is fuelling a resurgence of anti-semitism.’

‘The outlook is prosperous if only the stranglehold of regulation can be eased’ by Anatole Kaletsky (The Times, 11 March 2004). Anticipating the Budget of the following week.

Some magazine samples:

‘A private affair’ by Rachel Johnson (Spectator, 6 July 2002). ‘The amazing ubiquity of private education.’

‘Off their pedestals’ by Alain de Botton, a ‘Books Essay’ (FT Magazine, 6 March 2004). ‘The novel allows us to reject the standard lens through which people’s status in society is viewed.’

Among publications offering high level debate are:

‘Those I have loved and loathed’ by Keith Waterhouse (the quarterly British Journalism Review, Number 1, 2004 and reprinted in Press Gazette, 5 March 2004). Voted best contemporary columnist by the readers of the journal, Waterhouse discusses what makes a good columnist.

‘Which civilization?’ by Michael Lind (Prospect, the monthly magazine for the thinking classes, ‘Politics, Essays, Argument’, November 2001). ‘The idea of a liberal “west”, standing against fundamentalism, is a fallacy. Secular humanism is threatened by American as well as Islamic militants.’

Philosophy Now (bimonthly ‘magazine of ideas’) collects several essays in each issue under a heading such as ‘Philosophy and Sport’, May/June 2003. More on this in Chapter 16.

FINDING YOUR OWN STYLE

Your own style must develop naturally out of who you are and what you’re interested in. It’s integral to your outlook on life and comes from inside.

It’s your tone of voice. You can develop your own style as you go and if it has some originality, some distinction, editors will detect and value it. Extracts without attribution from feature writers with inimitable styles (the great columnists being obvious examples) can be recognized just as great novelists can. Meanwhile, you must let your style develop (improve?) naturally: you don’t consciously cultivate a tone of voice. Here are some guidelines worth considering.

1  Content must almost always come first, however recognizable your writing is. Don’t get too personal. Use the impersonal ‘you’ rather than the personal ‘have you ever locked yourself out of your house?’ Edit your features rigorously and complement this with feedback to weed out where you’re too self-absorbed.

2  Get on your readers’wavelength so as to avoid (a) overestimating or (b) underestimating them:

(a)  You may be knowledgeable about how chromosomes work and it may be an aspect of your subject. You’ll have to explain it without talking down (unless you’re writing for Lancet or suchlike). If you’re not sure how much your readers know, you can say something like: ‘The Parliamentary procedure, of course, is …’.

(b)  Few readers will need to be told what a café latte or a chicken en croute is.

3  Be natural. If your writing is based on the assumption that it’s leaking wisdom or great humour and it isn’t, you won’t get past an editor. Avoid showing off in any form. Don’t name-drop.

4  ‘Against the orange glow of the setting sun the towers of the council estate were sharply etched …’. So be gins a newspaper feature. ‘Sharply etched’ – haven’t you heard that somewhere before? Didn’t you put that in a school essay more than once? Find fresh figurative language and use it sparingly.

5  Read the great originals and learn from them, the journalists as well as the novelists, playwrights and poets.