You Want What The Martha Brown School
Calls 'distinction' In Prose.
My little friend, I know how it is done,
and I find it contemptible.
People write their articles at full speed,
putting down their unstudied and valueless conclusions in English as
pale as a film of dirty wax - sometimes even they dictate to a
typewriter. Then they sit over it with a blue pencil and carefully
transpose the split infinitives, and write alternative adjectives, and
take words away out of their natural place in the sentence and
generally put the Queen's English - yes, the Queen's English - on the
rack. And who is a penny the better for it? The silly authors get no
real praise, not even in the horrible stucco villas where their clique
meet on Sundays. The poor public buys the _Marvel_ and gasps at the
cleverness of the writing and despairs, and has to read what it can
understand, and is driven back to toshy novels about problems, written
by cooks. 'The hungry sheep,' as some one says somewhere, 'look up and
are not fed;' and the same poet well describes your pipings as being
on wretched straw pipes that are 'scrannel' - a good word.
Oh, for one man who should write healthy, hearty, straightforward
English! Oh, for Cobbett! There are indeed some great men who write
twistedly simply because they cannot help it, but _their_ honesty is
proved by the mass they turn out. What do you turn out, you higglers
and sticklers?
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