Book Review

A Matter of Style: On Writing and Technique

by Matthew Clark
Oxford University Press
Toronto
CAN $15.95

Reviewed by John Thurston

Many editors and writers will find A Matter of Style useful, but as readers, most will find it frustrating. Matthew Clark, a professor of classical literature and a musician, addresses the book to editors and writers, both creative and non-fiction, and especially to academic writers. The book is not an introduction and Clark assumes that his readers "already have a good grounding in the basics of grammar and style" (p. iv). He skips quickly through a chapter called "A Few Points of Grammar" to get to his real target, "questions of artistry" (p. 1).

So far, so good, but problems soon develop around many of these nodes. The level of audience assumed by the book frequently varies. The book functions in many passages as an introduction to various classical arcana of questionable utility. Even more than questions of artistry, Clark deals with "questions about style" that are "questions of taste" and so "do not have definitive answers." As many critics before him, he claims that "taste can still be discussed" (p. 14). The question is, "How?"

First, for the good things in the book. One of the best things for those of us who earn our living through business or technical writing, but who appreciate literary writing, Clark proceeds as if he had never heard of "plain language" writing. Being a classicist, he has no problems with long, complex periodic sentences and his examples tend to favour such writing as well. He provides welcome relief from the condescension of the KISS principle, which is almost always anathema to any attempt to develop style in writing.

Useful tips and reference information are found throughout the book. In "The Arrangement of Words," for instance, Clark illustrates "two general principles: first, that words that function as a group should usually be placed reasonably close together; second, that the end of a sentence is a position of some importance" (p. 16). While these principles sound like common sense, the examples he provides show how frequently they are betrayed; having these principles explicitly demonstrated shows their worth. The two chapters on linguistic figures are also useful, although they seem like they might belong more in a handbook of literary criticism than a discussion of style.

But how do you discuss taste? Clark’s tactic is to enlist an endless parade of long quotations and then to discuss the quotations, pointing out why he thinks this one is good, that one bad. He rewrites some of the quotations, but often admits that his judgments may be personal, that one alternative "seems" better than another, or that he "prefers" one version over another. He has cultivated his taste through long and thoughtful reading, so the reader would like to trust it, but his constant hedging is a barrier.

The long quotations are a problem in themselves. In the chapter "Periodic Sentences," for instance, the quotations overwhelm Clark’s own prose by a factor of two-to-one. Even worse, he takes quotations that run on for three-quarters of a page and re-quotes them in their component parts for a page and a half.

Since Clark, quite rightly, will not divorce style from meaning, he often has to set up his quotations with long explanations of the context from which they are taken. In the process, we learn about ancient Rome and the European Renaissance. We learn about mythopoeic criticism and Darwinian theory. We learn about novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Henry James, John Hawkes, Salmon Rushdie, and Don DeLillo. Sometimes we learn about style.

As Clark hops about his lily pads of wonderful prose quotations, the reader is sometimes left splashing in the gaps between. One paragraph, for instance, ends with a comment on the narrator’s style in a novel by William Faulkner. The next launches off into an introduction to post-colonial literature. One paragraph concludes with a generalization about Hannah Arendt’s way of looking at the world, the next begins, "In ancient Rome …" (p. 85).

Clark’s use of quotations raises questions about his grasp of his audience. Even after he has demonstrated many times over how to break down a long, complex passage into its components, he still insists on filling his pages with the passage and then the break down. He does not trust his reader to be able to learn from him.

The intrusion of Clark’s classical training may also cause readers to wonder about whether they belong in the audience for this book. He includes a two-page discussion of the etymology of the names of common pieces of punctuation that really does not contribute to our understanding of how to use that punctuation. In "A Few Figures of Speech," he refers to "roughly two hundred named figures of speech," although "only twenty-five or thirty are useful for most writers to have in ready memory" (p. 54). He discusses around 12, all with hard Greek names, plus one "unnamed figure" (p. 77). On the one hand, he seems to assume that we should know these figures, but then he goes through pages explaining in basic detail the ones he chooses to discuss.

The chapter on rhythm is the one of the least useful in the book. Clark begins by listing the Greek names of 16 different units or feet of rhythm. His use of these units in the ensuing discussion peters out after a few pages. The discussion of rhythm is wholly unconvincing and, as Clark admits, other readers will scan the passages he uses as examples differently from him. Further, he is able to deduce no useful lessons from this scansion.

Led by his pursuit of style in writing, Clark has taken on the difficult task of discussing literary taste and how to satisfy it. Despite his book’s vulnerability to criticism for its odd structure and scattered focus, any reader of it who is also a writer will nonetheless come away more informed about how style in language is achieved.

John Thurston is an Ottawa writer who would really rather develop his own writing style than criticize that of others.