Σπιτάκι

Σήμερα, μαζί με το Δημήτρη, προσπαθούσαμε να καταλάβουμε πότε ακριβώς πρέπει η στίξη να μπαίνει μέσα στα εισαγωγικά και πότε όχι. Είπα να κοιτάξω λοιπόν και το Elements of Style, ένα θρυλικό βιβλιαράκι εκατό σελίδων των $8, που υποτίθεται ότι είναι must-have αν γράφεις στα Αγγλικά. Το έχω εδώ και πολύ καιρό, μα δεν είχα κάτσει να το ανοίξω. Το βιβλίο είναι πολύ καλογραμμένο, αλλά δεν είπα να γράψω γι’ αυτό ακριβώς.

Βρήκα ένα section του βιβλίου, το “An Approach to Style (With a List of Reminders),” το οποίο περιέχει και κάτι το οποίο είναι μάλλον αρκετά επίκαιρο για τους bloggers, including εμού, αν μη τι άλλο από την φύση των blogs και μόνο. Ιδού, από την σελίδα 73.

9. Do not affect a breezy manner
The volume of writing is enormous, these days, and much of it has a sort of windiness about it, almost as though the author were in a state of euphoria. “Spontaneous me,” sang Whitman, and, in his innocence, let loose the hordes of uninspired scribblers who would one day confuse spontaneity with genius.
The breezy style is often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that comes to mind is of general interest and that uninhibited prose creates high spirits and carries the day. Open any alumni magazine, turn to the class notes, and you are quite likely to encounter old Spontaneous Me at work - an aging collegian who writes something like this:

Well, guys, here I am again dishing the dirt about your disorderly classmates, after pa$$ing a weekend in the Big Apple trying to catch the Columbia hoops tilt and then a cab-ride from hell through the West Side casbah. And speaking of news, howzabout tossing a few primo items this way?

This is an extreme example, but the same wind blows, at lesser velocities, across vast expanses of journalistic prose. The author in this case has managed in two sentences to commit most of the unpardonable sins: he obviously has nothing to say, he is showing off and directing the attention of the reader to himself, he is using slang with neither provocation nor ingenuity, he adopts a patronizing air by throwing in the word primo, he is humorless (though full of fun), dull, and empty. He has not done his work. Compare his opening remarks with the following - a plunge directly into the news:

Clyde Crawford, who stroked the varsity shell in 1958, is swinging an oar again after a lapse of forty years. Clyde resigned last spring as executive sales manager of the Indiana Flotex Company and is now a gondolier in Venice.

This, although conventional, is compact, informative, unpretentious. The writer has dug up an item of news and presented it in a straightfoward manner. What the first writer tried to accomplish by cutting rhetorical capers and by breeziness, the second writer managed to achieve by good reporting, by keeping a tight rein on his material, and by staying out of the act.