Late last year Nick Eustance kindly sent me a copy of a 1977 Stylus titled A Guide for Contributors to the Initial Reports of the Deep Sea Drilling Project. Nick said he had been given the volume while working with BP many years ago, but felt most of the advice remained relevant today. I couldn’t agree more.

The Stylus was written by J.D. Shambach, of La Jolla, California, with special material credited to Ansis Kaneps and Ray Silk.

I was fascinated from the first page by the passion Shambach brought to his writing. His words seemed to come from another time and place and, given the pace of change in English usage in recent decades, I guess they did: 1977 is past enough to be another country.

The Stylus was written to assist contributors to the Initial Reports but Shambach’s subject is good writing, not simply good geological writing. He was trying to help, as he put it, “the writer who would have readers”.

I felt great sympathy with two thematic points in the preface and opening pages. The first is the fundamental link between clear thinking and good writing: if the text is rambling or obscure or confusing, it usually means the authors grasp of the subject is the same. The second is the link between the idea or subject, with its different parts and paths, and the writer’s expression of all that – what Shambach calls “rhythm”.

Shambach says in the Preface that “the first part of the Stylus, deals with problems of style. Style is not frippery or show; in discussing it here we are not dusting off a quaint relic or asking that authors become decorators. Every editor’s files brim with unreadable manuscripts by writers who in their pride or ignorance have no concern for style. Scientific writing, along with certain other kinds of expository writing, seems indeed to have reached a crisis of style, in which reader and writer alike are sinking in a morass of jargon and muddled syntax. The author owes his readers and his ideas at least a passable command of the generally accepted standards of good English. No one has to read bad writing; a discerning reader assuredly will not”.

“The second part of the guide reviews the mechanics of editing, without which good style is impossible. It also establishes certain conventions, not only of preferred spelling, capitalisation, and the like, but also of specialized geological terms. Editors are here to edit your contribution; writing it is your job.”

In the first part, Shambach says “style means expressive language” and has several key characteristics: clarity, directness, simplicity and conciseness.

Regarding clarity, Shambach is, naturally, very clear. “An obscure style is a bad style. A style must be clear to be good.” He cites three quotations beloved of editors to support his point.

Anatole France: First clarity; then again clarity; and finally clarity.

Quintilian: One should aim not at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.

Defoe: [Good style is] that in which a man speaking to five hundred people, of all common and various capacities, idiots and lunatics excepted, should be understood by them all.

It may be too much to hope, Shambach suggests, that “any” five hundred people will understand manuscripts submitted to a geological journal but “manuscripts should at least be intelligible to geologists in general, not merely to specialists in a particular field”.

Shambach’s keen understanding of the link in all good writing between the thought and its expression in words is first mentioned here and he returns to it in detail in the section on ‘rhythm’.

“Style should strive toward clear and exact representation of thought. In the best writing, the thought seems to mould and accentuate the style, and the style reacts to mould and accentuate the thought. It is one process.”

“Obscurity is not always easy to avoid, especially in scientific writing, but most of it is indefensible. Here are some common causes of obscurity, together with suggested remedies.

1. Incoherence, resulting from awkwardness with words or thoughts or both. Remedy: be direct. Writein the active voice. Be sure to use correct grammar. Choose concrete, not abstract terms.

2. Inconsiderate assumption that the reader shares your knowledge. The use of needlessly abstruse language may spring from this assumption – or from pretentiousness. Remedy: always choose simplicity. Use ordinary English wherever possible.

3. Overcrowding of ideas. This results from trying to say too much at once – from having too many ideas and too little sense of what is essential to the moment. Remedy: delete everything that is inessential to the immediate argument.

4. Uncertainty about ideas, resulting in too many subordinate qualifying clauses which suffocate the central idea.”

Shambach then discusses what he calls “rhythm” – the selection of style to fit the subject matter. This concept first intrigued a long time ago, though I was looking at the subject overall (and dealing with fiction), whereas Shambach is looking mainly at the paragraphs and, to a lesser extent, the sentence.

It’s not an easy thought he’s expressing, but it is one worth considering. Reduced to essentials, it says that clear writing comes from clear thinking, and that the individual thoughts and the combining of them to develop the idea, step by step, should flow through into the sentences and paragraphs and, indeed, into the whole of the paper.

“Rhythm here means shape, not regulated. It is not a pattern to which words are fit. It is born with the thought. The unit of rhythm is the sentence, and every sentence, even if it consists of one word and a period, is a rhythmic grammatically self-contained entity. But it is the paragraph which has the rhythm, the shape, of a complete thought. (This is not the same as saying that a paragraph is the ‘full development of a single idea’, a definition which has not proved useful.)”

“Good writing is also the visual actualisation of thought. When a thought forms in the mind, it takes a definite and particular shape. A well-written paragraph is the perception of that shape, which we here call rhythm. This rhythm is like the contours of a sculpture or the configuration of forms in a painting. Within its self-created boundaries, it produces a hierarchical unity of its parts. Violating the rhythm destroys that unity, and so changes the quality of the thought. Thus, at the very least, ending the paragraph before the end of the argument distorts the persuasive flow and makes it more difficult for the reader to apprehend the thought.”

“Words are to a writer are what clay is to a modeller: the paragraph, the plastic mass, takes its shape from the thought it is to express – its shape is the thought. Such a paragraph is a living paragraph.”

“From all this it should be clear that length alone is not an index of readability. This also applies to the sentence. The short sentence is not always easier to read or understand, or more economical. The long paragraph, like a long sentence, may be more readable and intelligible than a short paragraph that is badly put together. It is true that too many long sentences (or paragraphs) make the writing seem laborious, and that too many short ones make it seem jerky. Variety of length is needed. But the variety can and should come naturally, not mechanically.”

“A sentence obviously should not be so long that we forget the beginning by the time we reach the end, but there are no rules about sentence length. The problem usually is not length, but a faulty construction.”

“The sentence should sound right. Natural cadence and sound-relationships make reading easier and more pleasing. Primarily it is a question of ‘ear’. Listen to your prose. The ear is often first to detect that something is wrong with a sentence. If the ear balks, the whole process of communication stops.”

Remember that this was not written for a creative writing course. It was for contributors to a fairly dry geological journal. But why shouldn’t that be creative writing, I can hear Shambach chasten me. Isn’t all good writing creative writing? All still very relevant today, as Nick said.

Peter Purcell