Week 16: Clarity
C. S. Lewis and George Orwell teach writing.
Dear friends,
I’ve recently stumbled across two different blog posts about Jack’s relationship with language, both of which resonate with my own thoughts as I read his essays from the 1940s. So this week, I’m going to talk about Jack’s commitment to linguistic clarity and its implications for our present intellectual and political climate.
In an essay on Joseph Addison, Jack praises the essayist for “conveying a distinction of almost a scholastic precision in such manner that even a ‘tea-table’ could not fail to understand it,” calling this “the measure of his talent” (SLE 154). The same could be said of Jack himself.
He began writing and addressing the public on Christian themes during World War II, travelling across the country to speak at R.A.F. stations and delivering talks over the BBC (which would later become Mere Christianity). By the end of the war, he was in extremely high demand as a public defender of Christianity—largely because of his ability to express philosophical arguments in terms both accessible and engaging to the lay reader.
This isn’t a revolutionary observation, of course. Indeed, I think most people who pick up one of Jack’s books—fiction and nonfiction—notice his clear and convivial authorial voice. But I find those moments when he reflects explicitly on his approach to writing both interesting and inspiring. I’m going to share a few of those passages with you, and then reflect on how Jack, and his contemporary George Orwell, thought about linguistic clarity as a key political and intellectual virtue.
In a letter of October 1945, Jack reflects on his public-facing career and describes his method of composition:
People praise me as a ‘translator’, but what I want is to be a founder of a school of ‘translation’. I am nearly forty-seven. Where are my successors? Anyone can learn to do it if they wish. It only involves first writing down in ordinary theological college English exactly what you want to say and then treating that just as you treated a piece of English set for Greek prose school (The parallel is v. close. Popular English differs from ‘scholarly’ English in v. much the same way as Attic does: i.e. more verbs and particles and fewer abstract nouns). It is also a v. good discipline because nine times out of ten the bit you can’t turn into Vernacular turns out to be the bit which hadn’t any clear meaning to begin with. (Letters II.674)
I love the matter-of-fact grammatical analysis here. “Popular English” is for Jack as much a language to be mastered as Homeric Greek.
He expands on this in a lecture entitled “Christian Apologetics,” delivered to a group of Anglican clergy and youth leaders. Therein he argues that priests in Britain must approach their ministry with the same linguistic and cultural rigour they might apply if they were foreign missionaries. “We must learn the language of our audience,” he declares, and then follows with a brief glossary of theological terms which the average layperson misunderstands. “CHRISTIAN” he notes, “Has come to include almost no idea of belief. Usually a vague term of approval…. MORALITY means chastity” (EC 154).
He urges his audience to “translate every bit of your Theology into the vernacular,” a task he declares “very troublesome” (155). Yet he contends that this process is also profoundly intellectually useful: “It is also of the greatest service to your own thought. I have come to the conviction that if you cannot translate your thoughts into uneducated language, then your thoughts were confused. Power to translate is the test of having really understood one’s own meaning” (155).
This is a valuable reminder for me, as an academic. At the end of my Ph.D., I often struggled to writing for audiences beyond academia, especially if I was talking about a subject related to my research. It’s still a skill I’m trying to strengthen. Indeed, this newsletter is part of that enterprise—which is why, if any part of my writing is ever impenetrable to you, I hope you’ll tell me!
The reason academic prose so often seems impenetrable is because we use highly freighted language. Expressions like abjection, always-already, performative, problematise, or superstructure carry with them whole histories of meaning and debate. For academics, they can rapidly contextualise an argument, gesturing towards accepted premises or familiar methods without wasting space re-establishing them. But they can also become invisible, empty out over time, or—for want of a better word—become performative, a way of signalling one’s scholarly identity.
In other words, they can become jargon—language that excludes and conceals, rather than illuminating the reader.
It should be said that some scholars consider difficult writing a stylistic virtue—or even a moral necessity. Perhaps the most famous example is Judith Butler, winner of Philosophy and Literature’s Bad Writing Contest in 1998, who argues in Gender Trouble that “It would be a mistake to think that received grammar is the best vehicle for expressing radical views, given the constraints that grammar imposes upon thought, indeed upon the thinkable itself” (xix). Objections to the ungrammatical or obfuscatory may, in Butler’s view, “emerge from a consumer expectation of intellectual life” (xx).
As the Bad Writing Award attests, plenty of academics disagree with Butler—most famously, Martha Nussbaum. Others have attempted to recuperate Butler’s now-notorious prose style. This blog post offers a balanced summation of the issue, for those interested.
I have very little sympathy with any valorisation of linguistic difficulty, but I do acknowledge that it can have a coherent philosophical basis and positive motivations. Nevertheless, obscurity has its dangers—both practical and political.
Difficult prose might create productive intellectual labour for readers, but it can also simply prevent communication. Jack points out this issue in his remarks about the word “Romanticism” in the Afterword to the Third Edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress:
On re-reading this book ten years after I wrote it, I find its chief faults to be those two which I myself least easily forgive in the books of other men: needless obscurity, and an uncharitable temper…. I would not now use [Romanticism] to describe the experience which is central to this book. I would not, indeed, use it to describe anything, for I now believe it to be a word of such varying senses that it has become useless and should be banished from our vocabulary. (155)
Jack is right. While Romanticism usually something specific to literary scholars today (a particular movement of early nineteenth-century British literature), a hundred years ago, it carried all sorts of cultural and political connotations and couldn’t be relied upon to convey any one idea in particular.
Likewise, specialised terminology can create intellectual silos. As T. S. Eliot once quipped, “Ours is said to be an age of specialization; and for specialized departments of thought, we find specialized kinds of second-rate prose” (Prose V.3). I fear that a large percentage of the academic articles written in any given year would fit the category of ‘specialised second-rate prose’.
These failures of communication are, in many cases, minor intellectual impediments. But Jack was alert to the possibility that the vague use of language could, in certain contexts, prove disastrous.
In The Screwtape Letters, the titular demon advises his nephew that “Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping [your victim] from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous—that is the philosophy of the future” (11–12).
Five years later, George Orwell expanded on this notion of the dangers of imprecision in his marvellous essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946). I always make my first-year writing classes read this text, because it’s a wonderful summation of the dangers of sloppy prose and contains an outstanding list of writing principles.
“English,” Orwell argues, “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts…. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think more clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.”
He proceeds to skewer multiple examples of empty, deceptive, and pretentious language. And then he links them to politics: “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible…. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” In an election year, we can see every day how little political language has changed since Orwell—even if its insincerities are couched in less pretentious language.
He concludes the essay with six pieces of writing advice, which I will reproduce here because they’re excellent:
i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
I have these written out on a notecard which I keep near my desk, because I require these reminders on a daily basis. If I find myself unable to follow Orwell’s advice, then it is often the case either that I am being lazy, or that I don’t understand my argument. Let me reiterate Jack’s observation in “Christian Apologetics”: “if you cannot translate your thoughts into uneducated language, then your thoughts were confused.”
What is left, once we’ve cleared away jargon and misunderstanding? Well, one hopes for honest argument. As Jack writes in an article about “The Founding of the Oxford Socratic Club”: “We never claimed to be impartial. But argument is. It has a life of its own. No man can tell where it will go” (EC 592). That, to me, is the heart of the intellectual life.
I wish you all a marvellous week, cursed with an excess of linguistic self-consciousness thanks to this letter.
Sarah