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On the art of writing de Sir Arthur…
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On the art of writing (edição: 1919)

de Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

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2355113,558 (4.06)18
A renowned critic and scholar addresses the artistic and vital nature of language as well as the skills needed to convey and receive the written word. A compilation of principles and practical guidelines, this enduring guide examines the practice of writing, the use of jargon, style, and the history of English literature.… (mais)
Membro:livingbookslibraries
Título:On the art of writing
Autores:Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
Informação:1919.
Coleções:JAS, FLDMN
Avaliação:
Etiquetas:Language Arts, Writing

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On the Art of Writing de Arthur Quiller-Couch

Adicionado recentemente porcoldspur, AlanWatkins, rbegley, merrileer, ASKier, wildeabandon, clodiap, molliejo55
Bibliotecas HistóricasNelson Algren
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I decided to read these century-old lectures because I was curious to check out the source of the dictum “murder your darlings,” made famous by Stephen King. The lectures contained some interesting insights mixed with stretches of what struck me as benign babbling.
Most jarring is Quiller-Couch’s invariable address to his listeners as “gentlemen.” A stark reminder that, although Cambridge had begun to permit women to attend lectures a decade or two previously, they were not allowed to sit for exams or take a degree. So they are not among Quiller-Couch’s addressees. No, he speaks to elite males in the making, whom Quiller-Couch will form by exposure to the “masculine, objective writers” he admires.
Not that I have much to quibble about with the authors he holds up for admiration and emulation, such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Thomas Wyatt (which Quiller-Couch spells with one “t”). There are others he admires less, for example, Samuel Johnson and Wordsworth, but Jane Austen rates no mention and George Eliot but one, a passing mention not as an author but as a responsive reader.
Equally risible is his survey, spread over two lectures, of the lineage of English literature. He is as allergic to the notion that Chaucer owed anything to Beowulf or other Anglo-Saxon poetry (other than the language, no small matter!) as he is to the suggestion that Great Britain should be reckoned among the Teutonic nations. Context, I remind myself. He gave these lectures in 1913, when the sound of saber-rattling filled the air. And he is reacting to the equally suspect Romantic Nationalism of the generation before him.
Nevertheless, it strikes me as nothing less than cranky that he devotes a lengthy portion of one of twelve lectures to speculation that some Romans who settled in Britain may still have descendants. The fact that newest DNA evidence confirms this suspicion doesn’t change Quiller-Couch’s lack of demonstration that this has anything to do with the influence of the Greek-Roman tradition on English literature.
Balanced against these oddities are other things I did like. These include Quiller-Couch's instinctive mistrust of the “-isms” often used to lump writers into categories and his emphasis that language is living, ever-changing, and that therefore good style can’t be reduced to rules. On the other hand, it is a bit of a letdown to hear in the final lecture that good style is merely a matter of politeness toward your reader.
From the outset, he declares that he will aim to have students read great literature “absolutely,” by which he means the texts themselves in preference to commentary and other secondary literature. He does allow that, with certain highly allusive writers such as Milton, notes on the references might be necessary for beginning students.
Quiller-Couch seems confident that in this “absolute” encounter with the texts it will be possible to discern authorial intent. A century on, we are less sure, but he also seems to recognize the role of what is now called reader-response: “the success of [literature] depends on personal persuasiveness, on the author’s skill to give as on ours to receive.”
Quiller-Couch’s aim is not only that his students will learn to appreciate great literature, but that they will become, if not great, at least good writers. Although chary of rules, he does set out four hallmarks of good writing. Aim to write, he urges, with accuracy, perspicuity, persuasion, and appropriateness. He might have helped his case had he said “lucidity” or “clarity” instead of perspicuity. Perhaps he thought his formula would be more memorable if two words began with the prefix “per-” alongside two that began with “a.”
I also liked his suggestion that the key to the Dark Ages was the suppression of literature. This was not done because the church had something against it as literature, nor—at first—because it was voluptuous, but because it was imbued with the polytheistic religion of the Greeks and Romans, something the church had only recently and narrowly overcome.
His fifth lecture, on jargon, is lamentably as relevant now as it was then. He decries it not because it is ugly, but because it is “a dead thing, leading no-whither, meaning naught. There is wickedness in human speech, sometimes. You will detect it all the better for having ruled out all that it naughty.”
One of the things I liked most about these lectures: although Quiller-Couch has his favorites, as well as writers he doesn’t admire, he is charitable toward all. It is not easy to write, he stresses, and all struggled to express themselves in language. This earns his respect and merits ours. In spite of my criticisms of parts of this book, this respect is something I’m glad to accord Quiller-Couch as well.
He seems to bristle that Chesterton, in a review of one of Quiller-Couch’s books, calls his tone “avuncular.” I smiled when I read this since that’s an adjective that already crossed my mind before I reached that point. But that’s not all bad. I think I would have enjoyed an evening and a sherry with him. These lectures, however, because of their unevenness, can be passed over in favor of other good books on writing. It’s not a bad book—I enjoyed much of it—but it’s not essential. ( )
  HenrySt123 | Jul 19, 2021 |
This most congenial introduction and summary to writing English Verse and Prose is replete with hard won insights, presented like gifts. Among the insights, for example, are the following: the connection of Verse to Music, --its nature of the tonal (in literature "tonal" means attitude of the author and/or his/her subject), rhythm ( accentual word, phrase, verse), and metrical/non-metrical line), as well as issues of narrative in poems and prose. Thereʻs an engaging old world charm in the presentation of this often felt stolid grind of a subject. Quiller-Couchʻs quiet, personable reasoning tone causes one to forget the presentation is in lecture form. "The Practice of Writing" (Lecture 2), "On the Difference between Verse and Prose" (Lecture 3), "On the Capital Difficulty of Verse," (Lecture 4), "On the Capital Difficulty of Prose," (Lecture 6), "On the Lineage of English Literature, I, II," (Lectures 8, 9), "On Style," (Lecture 12) are superb distillations of his life long experiences with the English language and its forms. He is courtly from long years of intimate concourse. The effect is a talk, not lecture, delivered out of a deceptively simple, quiet life, taken from the cold stones of the best of Oxfordian scholarship and set in warm sunlight for reflection. It welcomes neophytes and the seasoned. Itʻs an experience. Almost of an age long gone yet delivered as fresh, true --the findings are inspirited, yet concrete, mellow, yet abiding. Like old, fine wine. The questions asked remain pertinent today. Except for the late Modern and the Post-Modern in English literature. This is a scholarly work, originally published in l916 (Cambridge), re-published in 2006 (Dover). An old voice, strong. A style, elegant. An Unforgettable discourse. ( )
  leialoha | Mar 29, 2014 |
It is probably fair to say, as bell7 does in one of the other reviews here, that these lectures are seriously out of date and contain little actual useful advice. Reading them won't necessarily help you to become a better writer. But to condemn them for that is to miss their point seriously. Anyone who can read these lectures without being infected by Q's enthusiasm for the subject is probably immune to the pleasures of English literature. And pace bell7, Miss Hanff's evident pleasure at discovering this little book is a strong indication that you don't have to be an Edwardian undergraduate, or even British, to get something out of it.

Unlike many published sets of lectures, these are really written as lectures, not as essays to be read out. There are jokes in the right places to wake the audience up and plenty of topical references to Cambridge life. When he is illustrating the difference between verse and prose, it is a chunk of exam regulations from the Cambridge handbook that he mischievously converts into iambic pentameters; when he is talking about Romano-British culture, he reminds the audience that they will have passed the archaeological site in question on their way to Newmarket races. And so on. Anyone who's been a student knows that the most entertaining, imaginative lectures you attend are likely to be the least useful in passing exams. Examiners don't give many marks for originality. But those are precisely the lectures you remember decades later, when the finer points of the Greek aorist, Cauchy-Riemann equations, or whatever it was you were studying, have faded completely (after thirty years, I only have the vaguest notion of what a Cauchy-Riemann equation might be, but I remember very clearly that the lecturer on that subject wore galoshes). I'm sure that the undergraduates who attended Q's lectures the year before the outbreak of the Great War must have remembered them with great affection — those who survived, that is.

The pretence that Q is teaching undergraduates "the art of writing" is his little joke against pedantic notions of what the study of English literature should involve. He does issue Fowlerish warnings against some bad habits. As with Fowler, some is sensible and universally applicable, some (e.g. his warnings against mixing elements from different languages, as in "antibody") has been overtaken by the evolution of the English language in the last hundred years. He makes it clear in his final lecture that good writing depends on the writer having something original to say and finding an appropriate, personal style to say it in. Anyone who has listened to him carefully should find it a bit easier to criticise their own writing, but will still have to find something to say first.

Similarly, a modern literary theorist won't find all that much to agree with in Q's analysis of how literature works (some of which is actually just polemic against the academic obsessions of the time, like the excessive focus on philology of the Germanic languages in the Oxford and Cambridge English courses). But the amateur can take a lot of pleasure in his off-the-cuff summings-up of great and not so great writers. And there are lots of interesting little pointers to writers we might not know much about. Many of whom, coincidentally enough, feature in Q's Oxford Book of English Verse.... ( )
1 vote thorold | Jan 15, 2012 |
Dear Miss Hanff,

First off, let me say that I adore your books. 84, Charing Cross Road is my favorite, but I also enjoyed learning about the origins of your love of Literature in Q's Legacy. You made me want to read the lectures of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch - "Q" - and love them as much as you did.

I confess I did not. I read On the Art of Reading first. It was slow going, but I gave him the benefit of 80 plus years' change in the English language for what I didn't understand and liked what I did. Then I came to On the Art of Writing, the lectures you fell in love with.

Miss Hanff, were we reading the same book? In nearly one hundred years, these lectures have not aged well. Q comments about such neologisms as "antibody" - he deplores the word as incorrect - a statement that is reduced to humor now that it has become such an acceptable word in our language. His argument that Beowulf was not the beginning of English Literature, then 30 years out of vogue (as he admits in his lecture), is now 120 years out of date.

He had a tendency to quote Greek, Latin, and myriads of authors. Actually, I freely take the fall for that issue. The scholars of that time undoubtedly had a different mental library from my own, and studied Greek and Latin as a matter of course. I am much more familiar with works that were printed after Q's lectures, such as Death of a Salesman and Beloved than I am with the Iliad.

Finally, he is short on practical advice (though what he advises is practical and practicable, I grant you) yet long-winded. I admire you, Miss Hanff, for having the stamina to go back and read the many works from which he quotes. I certainly could not. Most of the time I was trying so hard to decode his point and how a given quote illustrated it that I neglected to admire the Literature you were so taken with.

Please be assured that this will not diminish my enjoyment of your books; I will, however, refrain from reading any more of Q's lectures. ( )
9 vote bell7 | Feb 9, 2011 |
First published 1916.
Points of interest:
Refers to democracy as if it is not a derogatory term [helps to date when the change came in].
"Mr George Bernard Shaw having to commit his novel Cashel Byron's Profession to paper in a hurry, chose to cast it in blank verse as being more easily and readily written so: a performance which brilliantly illuminates a half-truth. Verse - at any rate, unrhymed iambic verse - *is* easier to write than prose, if you care to leave out the emotion which makes verse characteristic and worth writing. I have little doubt that, had he chosen to attempt it, Mr Shaw would have found his story still more ductile in the metre of Hiawatha."
"While the capital difficulty of verse consists in saying ordinary things the capital difficulty of prose consists in saying extraordinary things; ...while with verse, keyed for high moments, the trouble is to manage the intervals, with prose the trouble is to manage the high moments."
Comparison of passages from Burke and Brougham to show the value of the concrete example.
Rules for prose: prefer the concrete word to the abstract, the direct word to the circumlocution. Use transitive verbs and few adjectives. To wrote melodious English you need a good ear, but you can start by noticing i) how the placing of a word in a sentence affects its emphasis, ii) the effect of vowel sounds.

The author's own skill in the art of writing is not beyond reproach: in particular the massed batteries of foreign quotations and the use of almost 17th-century conceits annoyed me. The final chapter, on style, says almost nothing. As far as matters of substance are concerned, the two chapters on the lineage of English literature play down the importance of Old English in a way that would hardly find favour today. However the book has the merit, like Sir Hubert Read's, that it does on the whole avoid platitude and say something definite.
(notes written 1956)
1 vote jhw | Apr 22, 2006 |
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A renowned critic and scholar addresses the artistic and vital nature of language as well as the skills needed to convey and receive the written word. A compilation of principles and practical guidelines, this enduring guide examines the practice of writing, the use of jargon, style, and the history of English literature.

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