Style Exercise 1: What Does It Mean?

Conducted: Tuesday, 2 September 2003

Summary: In this exercise, you will have the opportunity to edit some fairly unreadable prose quoted in the first chapter of Style.

Purposes: (1) To give you the opportunity to think about how one might write readable prose on a potentially-complicated subject. (2) To remind you that it is your responsibility to understand what you read, even the intentionally difficult-to-read examples.

In chapter 1 of Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, Joseph M. Williams presents us with the following early example of gummy, turgid, obtuse, prolix, complex, or unreadable prose.

If use and custom, having the help of so long time and continuance wherein to [re]fine our tongue, of so great learning and experience which furnish matter for the [re]fining, of so good wits and judgments which can tell how to [re]fine, have griped at nothing in all that time, with all that cunning, by all those wits which they will not let go but hold for most certain in the right of our writing, then our tongue ha[s] no certainty to trust to, but write all at random. But the antecedent, in my opinion, is altogether unpossible, wherefore the consequent is a great more th[a]n probable, which is that our tongue ha[s] in her own possession and writing very good evidence to prove her own right writing; which, though no man as yet by an public writing of his seem[s] to have seen, yet the tongue itself is ready to show them to any whosoever which is able to read them and withal to judge what evidence is right in the right of writing.
-- Richard Mulcaster, The First Part of the Elementary, 1582

Perhaps not so surprisingly, this quotation is one of the few that Williams did not rewrite into more readable prose. Hence, you have the opportunity to play translator: To the best of your ability, rewrite that paragraph so that a typical first-year college student could quickly understand it.

I am likely to ask you to share your rewrites.