On the Need of an Orderly Mind

That is a section heading in the introduction to William Follett’s Modern American Usage, edited and completed by Jacques Barzun and others in 1966, and if my sense of our cultural moment is at all vivid, the phrase will strike us as piquantly quaint—a nice enough idea, but surely old fashioned these days. In that same section of Follett’s classic guide to writing, the editor takes up the topic of wordiness and says this about the relationship between the use of words and a well working mind:

Wherever we can make twenty-five words do the work of fifty, we halve the area in which looseness and disorganization can flourish, and by reducing the span of attention required we increase the force of the thought.

That is a beautifully sharp argument. It connects the material of the craft, the words we write, directly to the mental effort a reader must take to compute, as it were, the thoughts we intend to communicate. In our contemporary world of progress and quantification and production, we are predisposed unconsciously to believe that more will produce the better, but in writing (and formal speech, as well), that assumption is woefully misguided. It is true that our first attempts at composing our thoughts into a document of sentences will almost inevitably be verbose; our early drafts follow a conversation we hear in our head as we write, and that is all to the good because we are often sketching out in large design what it is we want to say.

But disorderly beginnings are not ordered ends, and what lies between these two points of creativity is the ongoing effort, technical and specific, to reduce our early wordy attempts to their essentials. What is not in order is in disarray. In such a condition, things—whether objects or ideas—are thrown here and there; they belong to the place or the subject, but they’re not connected one with the next. In a sentence or paragraph, that means we’ve mentioned an idea, usually with a vague, abstract noun, but have not told the reader how that one idea fits and belongs to another idea we have introduced. The paragraph, like a room, is disorganized, disarrayed, disordered—and the clutter is not inviting.

If instead, though, we say exactly what we mean, the reader’s mind can concentrate. It can center around (con + centrum) a single, pointed subject, sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph, with subordinate ideas attached like spokes to the hub of a wheel. That arrayed concentration results in energy, the unobstructed flow of unified arrangement which can then both convince and persuade the reader of the truth about something as we see it because they can see it too. This is why revising and editing are said to be subtractive efforts: we almost always better our sentences by removing, not adding, and that studio work produces a lean, lithe prose.

This intent to write just the right word or phrase or sentence according to what we see reflectively in our mind’s eye is exactly what accounts, in turn, for our distinctive style. How we write is who we are. We inevitably reveal our character in our language, and it is only when we wish to hide our forthright beliefs about something that we distort both our language and ourselves. More often than not we become too talkative, and in doing so we make the work of writing unpointed and unenjoyable. The written word, however (and by that I mean the ordinary prose we write most often), is not a casual conversation; it is the product of our thinking which we are presenting to someone else to consider, along the same smooth lines of thought that we have finally come to in our recursive effort to write and rewrite until the essential is achieved. The same editor of Follett’s guide puts it this way:

To make our words count for as much as possible is surely the simplest as well as the hardest secret of style…. When we can do this habitually (even though it never becomes easy) we shall find ourselves honing the faculty that can do more toward this end than a mastery of prescriptive grammar…. And what is this faculty? It is the blessing of an orderly mind.

The blessing of having worked to possess such a mind: to choose that noun is to invoke an entire world of assumptions about human nature and the place of language in it. We would have to believe that words and their syntax are more than conventional signs devised merely for practical control. We would have to believe that they are ultimately symbols reflective of ordered realities both within ourselves and without, understanding which would be to the advantage of our own person and of our human community. Quaint, perhaps, but a veritable blessing, yes.

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