The Sound on the Page: Great Writers Talk about Style and Voice in Writing [Paperback]

This book has a very nice cover--really, a very cool design. I'm a little more equivocal about its insides. I was excited enough by the advance blurbs I read for this book to purchase it in hardcover a week or so after it was published--an extravagance that would shock those who know me well. But this topic appeals to me, and I like to throw a little support behind this sort of publishing enterprise once in a while.

The book is interesting enough, and Yagoda does a good job of keeping things moving with lots of examples of and chatter about style from practicing writers. My problem is with one of the book's enabling conventions: The idea that Strunk & White's The Elements Of Style presents an outmoded and "soul-deadening" idea of style and that only books such as Yagoda's truly plumb the subject to its core.

I've seen this sort of thing before, most notably in Clear and Simple as The Truth, by Thomas and Turner--a book weirdly bent on defying its own title and premise. The idea is to construct a straw man out of the immensely popular The Elements Of Style and then throw eggs at it. But it's an approach that anyone who knows Strunk & White well will recognize as a canard.

It's largely a made-up polemic, probably caused by the fact that writers are constantly being prodded to find and exploit "the angle" of the story. Magazines prod this way, so do agents and book publishers. It's not good enough to present a solid proposal for an article or book that simply discusses an interesting subject; there must be an angle, and the more controversial the better. And though it's hardly Watergate, smearing The Elements of Style is what passes for provocative in this crowd.

Yagoda states that Strunk & White's goal is prose that offers "...no trace of the author--no mannerisms, no voice, no individual style...." And then, in refutation of this fabricated Strunk & White "ideal," he fills his book with examples of writers who write with identifiable styles--ranging from subtle to sledgehammer. The examples are fun--these are really good writers--but he's wrong about The Elements of Style.

The first four fifths of The Elements of Style are largely about style in the sense of mechanics and word usage. No trouble there--that's not the kind of style we're talking about in the Yagoda book. In section five of The Elements, though--the section titled "An Approach to Style"--E. B. White takes a stab at offering beginning writers some simple, sound advice for clearing their prose of dross and deadwood so that they can begin the project of developing their own voice and personality on the page.

White's project, then, is to help a writer clear the decks so that the "self" can escape "into the open." Yagoda's mistake (and Harold Bloom's, on page xxi of Yagoda) is in thinking that White wants writers to stop once they've swept their prose free of clutter--to end with complete, bland transparency. But he doesn't; transparency, in White's view, is simply the necessary precondition for achieving one's individual voice as a writer--just as an empty canvas is the necessary precondition for painting a picture. "As he becomes proficient in the use of language," White says, "his style will emerge, because he himself will emerge." Does that sound like a recipe for "no mannerisms, no voice, no individual style"?

I am an editor who has worked with nonfiction writers for sixteen years. I press The Elements of Style on many of them--particularly those having trouble organizing their thoughts or getting their words out in a clear, compelling way--and it usually helps. It is only after mastering the fundamental tools of clear expression (the craft of bringing thought to page relatively intact) that a writer's personality, his "voice" or style, can begin to permeate his prose.

I have to believe it's been a long time since either Yagoda or Bloom spent an evening grading undergraduate essays (if indeed undergraduates are still required to write essays). The usefulness of The Elements of Style for such writers (if they study the book and apply its lessons) is incontrovertible.

Yagoda and Bloom, in fact, recognize the validity of White's approach, in spite of their trendy protestations. Bloom, page 159: "I have made the conscious effort to write in a more straightforward and accessible way." (Thank you, Harold.) Yagoda, page 236: "...the clearing of brush to create a walkable path, is never-ending for a writer." (That as near a restatement of White's thesis in "An Approach to Style" as you're likely to find.)

As for whether or not a writer can learn to write with "style" by reading this book, as Alex Beam's blurb on the back cover promises, the answer is no. A book such as this, while providing fun examples of style at work, is really no more or less instructive than the rest of a writer's (preferably wide) reading, from which he will sift and sort (consciously or not) the possibilities of voice, tone, and style in the ongoing effort to develop his own sound on the page.

With this engaging, entertaining and thought-provoking book, Ben Yagoda continues the discussion of what constitutes good writing that he initiated in "About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made." Well researched, considered and reasoned, the book opens with a fascinating cultural history of the concept of style. Arguments over whether it is best to write like Hemingway or Faulkner (or the middle-of-the-road Fitzgerald) date back, Yagoda notes, to the Greeks. In "On Rhetoric," for example, Aristotle emphasized clarity, transparency and decorum with an approach that presages some of the modern -- albeit, as Yagoda demonstrates, far from universally accepted -- message of Strunk & White's touchstone, "The Elements of Style." Yagoda then takes us on a journey across two hemispheres to discuss, with 40 different writers as diverse as Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and best-selling humorist Bill Bryson, how they got their grooves. In short thematically arranged snippets and later, in extended monologues, they talk freely about: the writers who influenced them; how they arrived at their style, or styles; even the nuts-and-bolts question of how their writing implements (pen, typewriter, computer) and methods of revision affect the sound that we hear when we read their works. If you're like me, you'll find yourself endeavoring to read for the first time, or re-read, some of Yagoda's interview subjects and those they cite as seminal influences, such as the grand dame of essayists, Joan Didion.
For any reader or writer who gives a damn about the written word, this is a richly rewarding book.

Yagoda's thesis of this highly intelligent, generous book is that the dogma, championed by Strunk and White's Elements of Style, which shames us for having our own writing style, contradicts the joys and pleasures of writing, namely, that writers have their own individual finger-print style or voice. A writer's voice, his or her style, is the sensibility or personality giving life to the page. Yogada interviews several writers, including humorist David Barry, for the subject. Yagoda's own voice is smart and lively but never adademic. I should emphasize that the lack of academic-speak is one of the book's greatest virtues and triumphs. Here Yagoda has taken a book about the style of writing, a topic that could have easily been hijacked by some stuffy pretentious academic, but keeps the passion and accessibility on the level of a delicious pop book. Anyone interested in writing and style and literature in general should love this book.