HOW I WRITE
BERTRAND RUSSELL
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Bertrand Russell led the British "revolt
against idealism" in the early 1900s.
He is considered one of the founders of analytic
philosophy along with his predecessor Gottlob
Frege and his protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein,
and is widely held to be one of the 20th
century's premier logicians. He co-authored,
with A. N. Whitehead, Principia Mathematica, an attempt to ground mathematics on logic.
His philosophical essay "On Denoting"
has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy."
His work has had a considerable influence
on logic, mathematics, set theory, linguistics,
and philosophy, especially philosophy of
language, epistemology, and metaphysics.
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How I Write
I cannot pretend to know how writing ought
to be done, or what a wise critic would advise
me to do with a view to improving my own
writing. The most that I can do is to relate
some things about my own attempts.
Until I was twenty-one, I wished to write
more or less in the style of John Stuart
Mill. I liked the structure of his sentences
and his manner of developing a subject. I
had, however, already a different ideal,
derived, I suppose, from mathematics. I wished
to say everything in the smallest number
of words in which it could be said clearly.
Perhaps, I thought, one should imitate Baedeker
rather than any more literary model. I would
spend hours trying to find the shortest way
of saying something without ambiguity, and
to this aim I was willing to sacrifice all
attempts at aesthetic excellence.
At the age of twenty-one, however, I came
under a new influence that of my future brother-in-law,
Logan Pearsall Smith. He was at that time
exclusively interested in style as opposed
to matter. His gods were Flaubert and Walter
Pater, and I was quite ready to believe that
the way to learn how to write was to copy
their technique. He gave me various simple
rules, of which 1 remember only two: "Put
a comma every four words", and "never
use 'and' except at the beginning of a sentence".
His most emphatic advice was that one must
always re-write. I conscientiously tried
this, but found that my first draft was almost
always better than my second. This discovery
has saved me an immense amount of time. I
do not, of course, apply it to the substance,
but only to the form. When I discover an
error of an important kind I re-write the
whole. What I do not find is that I can improve
a sentence when I am satisfied with what
it means.
Very gradually I have discovered ways of
writing with a minimum of worry and anxiety.
When I was young each fresh piece of serious
work used to seem to me for a time-perhaps
a long time-to be beyond my powers. I would
fret myself into a nervous state from fear
that it was never going to come right. I
would make one unsatisfying attempt after
another, and in the end have to discard them
all. At last I found that such fumbling attempts
were a waste of time. It appeared that after
first contemplating a book on some subject,
and after giving serious preliminary attention
to it, I needed a period of sub-conscious
incubation which could not be hurried and
was if anything impeded by deliberate thinking.
Sometimes I would find, after a time, that
I had made a mistake, and that I could not
write. the book I had had in mind. But often
I was more fortunate. Having, by a time of
very intense concentration, planted the problem
in my sub-consciousness, it would germinate
underground until, suddenly, the solution
emerged with blinding clarity, so that it
only remained to write down what had appeared
as if in a revelation.
The most curious example of this process,
and the one which led me subsequently to
rely upon it, occurred at the beginning of
1914. I had undertaken to give the Lowell
Lectures at Boston, and had chosen as my
subject "Our Knowledge of the External
World". Throughout 1913 I thought about
this topic. In term time in my rooms at Cambridge,
in vacations in a quiet inn on the upper
reaches of the Thames, I concentrated with
such intensity that I sometimes forgot to
breath and emerged panting as from a trance.
But all to no avail. To every theory that
I could think of I could perceive fatal objections.
At last, in despair, I went off to Rome for
Christmas, hoping that a holiday would revive
my flagging energy. I got back to 'Cambridge
on the last day of 1913, and although my
difficulties were still completely unresolved
I arranged, because the remaining time was
short, to dictate as best as I could to a
stenographer. Next morning, as she came in
at the door, I suddenly saw exactly what
I had to say, and proceeded to dictate the
whole book without a moment's hesitation.
I do not want to convey an exaggerated impression.
The book was very imperfect, and I now think
that it contains serious errors. But it was
the best that I could have done at that time,
and a more leisurely method
(within the time at my disposal) would almost
certainly have produced something worse.
Whatever may be true of other people, this
is the right method for me. Flaubert and
Pater, I have found, are best forgotten so
far as I am concerned.
Although what I now think about how to write
is not so very different from what I thought
at the age of eighteen, my development has
not been by any means rectilinear. There
was a time, in the first years of this century,
when I had more florid and rhetorical ambitions.
This was the time when I wrote The Free Man's
Worship, a work of which I do not now think
well. At that time I was steeped in Milton's
prose, and his rolling periods reverberated
through the caverns of my mind. I cannot
say that I no longer admire them, but for
me to imitate them involves a certain insincerity.
In fact, all imitation is dangerous. Nothing
could be better in style than the Prayer
Book and the Authorized Version of the Bible,
but they express a way of thinking and feeling
which is different from that of our time.
A style is not good unless it is an intimate
and almost involuntary expression of the
personality of the writer, and then only
if the writer's personality is worth expressing.
But although direct imitation is always to
be deprecated, there is much to be gained
by familiarity with good prose, especially
in cultivating a sense for prose rhythm.
There are some simple maxims-not perhaps
quite so simple as those which my brother-in-law
Logan Pearsall Smith offered me-which I think
might be commanded to writers of expository
prose. First: never use a long word if a
short word will do. Second: if you want to
make a statement with a great many qualifications,
put some of the qualifications in separate
sentences. Third: do not let the beginning
of your sentence lead the reader to an expectation
which is contradicted by the end. Take, say,
such a sentence as the following, which might
occur in a work on sociology: "Human
beings are completely exempt from undesirable
behaviour-patterns only when certain prerequisites,
not satisfied except in a small percentage
of actual cases, have, through some fortuitous
concourse of favourable circumstances, whether
congenital or environmental, chanced to combine
in producing an individual in whom many factors
deviate from the norm in a socially advantageous
manner". Let us see if we can translate
this sentence into English. I suggest the
following: "All men are scoundrels,
or at any rate almost all. The men who are
not must have had unusual luck, both in their
birth and in their upbringing." This
is shorter and more intelligible, and says
just the same thing. But I am afraid any
professor who used the second sentence instead
of the first would get the sack.
This suggests a word of advice to such of
my hearers as may happen to be professors.
I am allowed to use plain English because
everybody knows that I could use mathematical
logic if I chose. Take the statement: "Some
people marry their deceased wives' sisters".
I can express this in language which only
becomes intelligible after years of study,
and this gives me freedom. I suggest to young
professors that their first work should be
written in a jargon only to be understood
by the erudite few. With that behind them,
they can ever after say what they have to
say in a language "understanded of the
people". In these days, when our very
lives are at the mercy of the professors,
I cannot but think that they would deserve
our gratitude if they adopted my advice.
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