It is believed that if students want to improve their writing, they need to learn mechanical skills such as punctuation and grammar. However, there is another opinion, and Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner expressed it in their book Clear and Simple as the Truth, which was written in 1994. Its authors claim that writing may be improved only by concentrating on style. The purpose of this paper is to discuss what Thomas and Turner mean by style and give their reasons for emphasizing it over mechanics.
In this book, style is suggested to be considered not as an elegant and special accessory of effective prose, like most people think, but as its soul and heart. It is “defined by its conceptual stand on truth, presentation, writer, reader, thought, language, and their relationships” (Thomas and Turner, p. 4). Style is inherent in action; it is like a certain type in which a book, poem, or any other text is written. Talented poets and writers have their styles, and sometimes it is rather easy to distinguish their works and difficult to imitate them. Not the mixture of techniques, but the attitude to writing itself defines the style.
There is several reasons for emphasizing style over mechanics. The authors claim that “writing is an intellectual activity, not a bundle of skills,” and it proceeds from thinking (Thomas and Turner, p. 3). They suppose that processes like writing must lead to specific abilities, but the activity itself does not come from and consist of using them (Thomas and Turner, p. 4). Just like learning the technique of golf does not mean a person can play it, mechanical skills do not improve students’ writing. Instead of merely acquiring some verbal techniques, writers have to work through intellectual issues. Hence, practicing grammar and punctuation will not affect writing improvement.
Work Cited
Thomas, Francis-Noël, and Mark Turner. Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose. Princeton University Press, 2017.