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As someone wrote, ‘If you want new ideas, read old books’1 Here’s an example.
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As someone wrote, ‘If you want new ideas, read old books’1 Here’s an example.
Going through some of my late father’s books, I found a slim textbook from his schooldays in the 1920s, ‘On the writing of English’ by George Townsend Warner.2
It’s a masterpiece of simple explanation – aimed at schoolchildren, it explains how to organise your ideas and write good essays.
His technique is to start by writing down all your thoughts: ‘write them all down just as they come.’ This is your Heap, which you have to sort into categories that become a Skeleton.
Today we might suggest a brainstorming, followed by a card sort to develop your organising principles, and then your outline. There is research that demonstrates that people generate more ideas if they are freed from the need to produce polished writing as they do so.3
For abstract concepts he proposes another familiar technique: ‘Try this. Say to yourself: What? Where? When? How? Why? and take a piece of paper.’ I wonder if he was the first to come up with this formulation.
He moves on to talk engagingly about style, and rhetoric. His ‘two great merits’ are:
1. To have something to say. 2. To say it neatly.
And a word for academics:
‘Another product of the cowardly mind is the desire to qualify’.
1. I found this in a dictionary of quotations, ascribed to Lord Lytton: ‘Do you want to get at new ideas? Read old books.Do you want to get at old ideas? Read new books.’ But googling it, I find it also attributed to Ivan Pavlov.
2. George Townsend Warner (n.d) On the writing of English, London: Blackie & Son. It is undated, but published after his death in 1916. He was a renowned history teacher at Harrow School and probably wrote this in the early 1900s. You can find an online scan at https://archive.org
3. Glynn SM, Britton BK, Muth D & Dogan N (1982) ‘Writing and revising persuasive
documents: cognitive demands’, Journal of Educational Psychology, 74, 557-567