IT is flattering to be recognised in a library. Two students — one of them a police SHO anxious to become a DMG officer — asked me for advice on how they could improve their writing skills. It was a question I asked myself 60 years ago.
What better suggestion could one make except to point them towards masters like Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway, or V.S. Naipaul? Maugham believed that “writing should be simple enough to be read with ease, and the manner should fit the matter as a well-cut shoe fits a shapely foot”. Hemingway (a Nobel laureate) never forgot the rules he learned as a cub reporter: use short sentences. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative. Eliminate every superfluous word.
Naipaul (another laureate) espoused nine rules, among them: write sentences of no more than 10 or 12 words. Each sentence should add to the statement that went before. A good paragraph is a series of clear, linked statements. [Churchill suggested that paragraphs must fit into another like the automatic couplings of railway carriages.] Avoid big words when succinct ones will do. Avoid adjectives, except those of colour, size and number. Always go for the concrete, never the abstract. Practice every day.
Not everyone has the poet Dom Moraes’s talent........