English language
Published June 14, 2012
Style
by F. L. Lucas
3 stars
(1 review)
F. L. Lucas's Style (1955) is a book about the writing and appreciation of "good prose", expanded for the general reader from lectures originally given to English Literature students at Cambridge University. It sets out to answer the questions, "Why is so much writing wordy, confused, graceless, dull?" and "What are the qualities that endow language, spoken or written, with persuasiveness or power?" It offers "a few principles" and "a number of examples of the effective use of language, especially in prose", and adds "a few warnings". The book is written as a series of eleven essays (with much quotation and anecdote, and without bullet-points or note-form), which themselves illustrate the virtues commended. The work is unified by what Lucas calls "one vital thread, on which the random principles of good writing may be strung, and grasped as a whole". That "vital thread" is "courtesy to readers". It is upon …
F. L. Lucas's Style (1955) is a book about the writing and appreciation of "good prose", expanded for the general reader from lectures originally given to English Literature students at Cambridge University. It sets out to answer the questions, "Why is so much writing wordy, confused, graceless, dull?" and "What are the qualities that endow language, spoken or written, with persuasiveness or power?" It offers "a few principles" and "a number of examples of the effective use of language, especially in prose", and adds "a few warnings". The book is written as a series of eleven essays (with much quotation and anecdote, and without bullet-points or note-form), which themselves illustrate the virtues commended. The work is unified by what Lucas calls "one vital thread, on which the random principles of good writing may be strung, and grasped as a whole". That "vital thread" is "courtesy to readers". It is upon this emphasis on good manners, urbanity, good humour, grace, control, that the book's aspiration to usefulness rests. Discussion tends to circle back to 18th-century masters like Voltaire, Montesquieu, Gibbon, the later Johnson, or their successors like Sainte-Beuve, Anatole France, Lytton Strachey and Desmond MacCarthy.
