The word seems to have gotten out that writing is just a lot like talking: we should be able to do it without much thinking, and if we can’t, then we should try to write as we speak. Something, let’s hope, will come together. That is a grand illusion, and if we follow that assumption, we can find ourselves hovering over a blank screen or a clean piece of white paper with nothing to say for a very long time. The magic we need to make the mute speak is design, and as the artist and teacher N. I. Cannon wrote many years ago in her vastly suggestive book Pattern and Design, a plan will call out in order the ideas we have in mind:
The true meaning of design is not only ornament or decoration, but rather the order or plan on which any work of art is constructed. Good art is not the result of accident, but of clear logical thought combined with the artist’s vision and inspiration. It is good when based on the sound basic principles of order and unity and bad when there is a conflict of interests which produces disorder.
Cannon goes on to name and define thirteen such basic principles, four having to do with relation (unity, proportion, relation, and harmony), four more to do with disrelation (discord, contrast, domination, and subordination), and another four to do with consonancy (symmetry, asymmetry, duality, and balance). The thirteenth principle is rhythm, which, she says, is “closely linked with emotion and the artist’s idea. Only by using the principles of design with rhythm and emotion can there be life and movement, without which all art must be dead.”
If we take language seriously—reading it closely and writing it carefully—each of us is an artist, because we are working to conform our ideas with their adequate expression. Cannon maintains that “it is in nature that we find the fundamental origin of the principles of design,” and that artists will use these principles “to interpret their ideas into a unified whole.” And when something is unified, it has integrity and is intelligible.
Still the best introductory guide to English composition I know of is Thomas Kane’s New Oxford Guide to Writing, 1994. And with it, Joseph M. Williams’s Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, 1995, and then Edward P. J. Corbett’s more advanced Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, 1990. Any one of these (and many others) will explain the principles and craft to the end Cannon outlines. Then it’s time for practice. And reading. And practice and reading. And practice and reading….
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