Читать книгу The Lure of the Pen: A Book for Would-Be Authors - Flora Klickmann - Страница 15

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Equal in importance to the cultivation of a modern style in writing, is the necessity for having a wide selection of words at your command, and a keen sense of their value. Some people think the chief thing in writing is to have ideas in one's head. Ideas are essential, but they are not everything. Your brain may be crammed full of the most wonderful ideas, but they will be useless if they get no farther than your brain.

It is one thing to see things yourself, and quite another to be able to make an absent person see them.

It is one thing to receive impressions in your own mind from your surroundings, or as the product of imagination, and quite another to record those impressions in black and white.

Tens of thousands of people are conscious of vivid mental pictures, for one who is able to reproduce them in such a form that they become vivid pictures to others. And one reason for the inability of the majority to express their thoughts in writing is the paucity of their vocabulary, and their lack of the power to put words together in a convincing and accurate manner.

Girls often write to me, "I think such wonderful things in my brain; I'm sure I could write a book, if only people would give me a little encouragement," or, "if only I had time."

But if they had all the encouragement and all the time in the world, they could not transfer those wonderful thoughts from their brain to paper unless they had practice, the right words at their command, and the experience that comes from hard regular working at the subject.

What people do not realise is this: wonderful thoughts are surging through thousands of brains. They are fairly common inside people's heads; the difficulty is in getting them out of the head—as most of us soon find out when we start to write! I shall refer to this later on.

If you wish to write down your thoughts—no matter whether they are concerned with the emotions, or religion, or nature, or cookery—you must employ words; and the more subtle, or elevated, or complex the subject-matter of your thoughts, the greater need will there be for a wide choice of words, in order to express exactly the various grades and shades of meaning that will be involved.

If your vocabulary be small—i.e. if you only know the average words used by the average person—there is every chance that your writings will be flat and colourless, and no more interesting, or exciting, or instructive, or entertaining than the ordinary conversation of the average person.

Hence the necessity for enlarging your vocabulary, so that you have the utmost variety to choose from in the way of suitable words, expressive words, and beautiful words, (this last the modern amateur is apt to overlook).

The Average Person's Vocabulary is Meagre

The smallness of the vocabulary used by the average person to-day is partly due to the mass of feeble reading-matter with which the country was flooded in the years immediately preceding the War.

In addition to this, life had become very easy for the majority of folk in recent times; money was supposed to be life's sole requisite. Work of all kinds was "put out" as much as possible; we shirked physical labour; lessons were made as easy as they could be; games were played for us by professionals while we looked on; effort of every sort was distasteful to us. It has been said, that as a nation we were becoming flabby and inert, and were fast drifting into an exceedingly lazy, commonplace mental attitude. We boasted that we couldn't think (even though with many this was merely a pose); we seemed quite proud of ourselves when we proclaimed our indifference to all serious reading, and our inability to understand anything.

That pre-War period, given over to money-worship, not only curtailed our choice of words by its all-pervading tendency to mind-laziness, but it had its vulgarising effect upon our language, just as it had upon our dress, our mode of living, and our amusements.

The dull Monotony of English Slang

Not only did we cease to take the trouble to speak correctly, but we almost ceased to be lucid! We made one word—slang or otherwise—do duty in scores of places where its introduction was either senseless or idiotic, rather than exert our minds to find the correct word for each occasion. Many people appeared to think that the use of slang was not only "smart," but quite clever; whereas nothing more surely indicates a poor order of intelligence.

My chief objection to a constant use of slang is not because it is outside the pale of classical English, but because it is so ineffective and feeble.

As a rule, slang words and phrases are, in the main, pointless and weak, for the simple reason that we use one word for every occasion when it happens to be the craze; and before long it comes to means nothing at all, even if it chanced to mean anything at the start—which it seldom does.

Our grandmothers objected to their own set using slang on the ground that it was "unladylike." The modern girl smiles at the term. "Who desires to be 'ladylike'?" inquires the advanced young person of to-day. Yet our grandmothers were right fundamentally; with their generation, the word "lady" implied a woman of education, intelligence, and refinement. The user of slang is the person who lacks these qualifications; she has neither the wit nor the knowledge to employ a better and more expressive selection of words.

Slang indicates Ignorance

Slang indicates, not advanced ideas, but ignorance—any parrot can repeat an expression, it takes a clever person always to use the right word.

Many people who constantly employ any word that happens to be current, do not really know what they are saying, neither do they attach any weight to their words; they merely repeat some inanity, because they have not the brains to say anything more intelligent, or they are too indolent to use what brains they have.

Notice how a set of big schoolgirls will, at one time, use the word "putrid," let us say, and apply it to everything, from a broken shoe-lace to examinations. And women will call everything "dinkie," or "ducky," or something equally enlightening and artistic, working the word all day long until it is ousted by another senseless expression.

What power of comparison has a girl, such as one I met recently, who, in the course of ten minutes described a hat as "awf'ly niffy," a man as "awf'ly sweet," a mountain as "awf'ly rippin'," and another girl as an "awful cat"?

What does it all amount to, this perversion of legitimate words or introduction of meaningless ones? Nothing—actually nothing. That is the pity of it. If these "ornaments of conversation" enabled one to grasp a point better, to see things more clearly, or to arrive at a conclusion more rapidly, I, for one, would gladly welcome them, as I welcome anything that will save time and labour. But, unfortunately, they only tend to dwarf the intelligence and to lessen the value of our speech.

I have enlarged on the undesirability of slang, because many amateurs think it will give brilliance, or smartness, or up-to-date-ness to their work. But it doesn't. It obscures rather than brightens; it tends to monotony instead of smartness. The beginner will be wise to avoid it, unless it is required legitimately in recording the conversation of a slangy person.

Some Books that will Enlarge your Vocabulary

To enlarge your selection of words, you must read books of the essay type rather than fiction, as these usually give the widest range of English. Two authors stand out above all others in this connection—Ruskin and R.L. Stevenson. Both men had an extraordinary instinct for the right word on all occasions—the word that expressed exactly the idea each wished to convey.

Read some of Stevenson's essays slowly and carefully. Don't gobble them! You want to impress the words, and the connection in which they are used, on your mind. It is an effort to most of us to read slowly in these hustling times; yet nothing but deliberate, careful reading will serve to teach the correct use of words and their approximate values. And I need not remind you to look up in a dictionary the meaning of any word that is new to you.

Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies you will have read many times, I hope; if not, get it as soon as ever you can. His Poetry of Architecture will make a useful study; also Queen of the Air and Praeterita (his own biography). His larger works, while containing innumerable passages of great beauty, are so often overweighted with technical details and principles of art (some quite out-of-date now) that they become tedious at times. Yet there is so much in all of his writings to enlarge your working-list of words, that you will benefit by reading any of his books.

Among present-day writers I particularly recommend Sir A. Quiller-Couch, Dr. Charles W. Eliot; Dr. A.C. Benson, Dr. Edmund Gosse, Coulson Kernahan, and Augustine Birrell, whose volumes of essays will not only enlarge your vocabulary, but will prove particularly instructive in suggesting the right placing of words, and in giving you a correct feeling for their value.

Of course this does not exhaust the list of authors with commendable vocabularies; but it gives you something to start on.

It is the Value of a Word, not Its Unusuality, that Counts

Notice that the writers I have suggested do not necessarily use extraordinary words, or uncommon words, or very long-syllabled words, or ponderous and learned words. One great charm of their writings lies in the fact that they invariably use the word that is exactly right, the word that conveys better than any other word the thought or sensation they wished to convey. Sometimes it is an unusual word; sometimes it is a familiar word used in an unfamiliar connection; but in most cases you feel that the word used could not have been bettered—it sums up precisely, and conveys to your mind instantly, the thought that was in the author's mind.

Many amateurs fall into the error of thinking that an uncommon word, or a long word, or a word with an imposing sound, gives style to their writings, and they despise the simple words, considering them common-place. I heard an old clergyman in a small country church explain to the congregation, in the course of a sermon, that the words "mixed multitude" meant "an heterogeneous conglomeration"; but I think his rustic audience understood the simple Bible words better than they did his explanatory notes.

I remember seeing an examination paper, wherein a student had paraphrased the line—

"The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,"

as, "The bellowing cattle are meandering tardily over the neglected, untilled meadow land."

This is an instance of the wrong word being used in nearly every case; and as a complete sentence it would have been difficult to construct anything, on the same lines, that conveyed less the feeling Gray wished to convey when he wrote the poem!

Good writing is not dependent upon long or ornate or unusual words; it is the outcome of a constant use of the right word—the word that best conveys the author's idea.

If there be a choice between a complex word and a simple word, use the simple one.

Remember that the object of writing is not the covering of so much blank paper, nor the stringing together of syllables; it is the transference from the author's brain to other people's brains of certain thoughts and situations and sensations. And the best writing is that which conveys, by the simplest and most direct means, the clearest reproduction of the author's ideas.