Clear and Simple as the Truth — Writing Classic Prose

Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner. Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose. Princeton University Press, 1994. Second edition, 2011.

The book identifies and anatomises a particular prose style — classic style — and argues that a style is not decoration applied to thought but the expression of a stand: a set of assumptions about truth, the reader, the writer, and what writing is for.

Every style rests on a stand — a tacit answer to questions the writer rarely asks aloud. Classic style's stand is confident and generous: truth can be known and can be presented; the writer has seen something clearly and shows it to a competent equal who could have seen it too. Prose, on this view, is a window, not a performance. The writer's labour is invisible by design; the reader is meant to look through the sentence at the thing, not at the sentence.

This is why classic style reads as effortless and is anything but. Its plainness is achieved, not given — the residue of everything refused. The style cannot tolerate hedging, throat-clearing, or the display of process, because each of these turns the reader's eye back onto the writer.

The wiki takes Clear and Simple as the Truth as a statement, in the medium of prose, of its own governing principle. Classic style is Selection applied to the sentence: the elegance of the writing is the elegance of what has been left out. Its refusal of the superfluous is the same refusal that Elegance is Selection makes of the wardrobe and The Decoration of Houses makes of the room. The window is clean because nothing unnecessary has been allowed onto it.

The book is a source for Domain V — Philosophy and a cross-domain touchstone for Restraint and Selection. It supplies the wiki's account of why plainness is an achievement rather than an absence — the argument that a clear surface is the visible form of a disciplined choice.