Hugh Trevor-Roper's Rules of Writing...

Not a post particularly within the usual scope of this blog, but I thought I should post this. Trevor-Roper's rules of writing, which circulated widely among his students and colleagues at Cambridge in the seventies and eighties. So I believe because I was given them by one of my supervisors a few years ago, who suggested that they passed in samizdat form from scholar's hand to scholars' hands. He had been examined by HT-R, newly made Lord Dacre of Glanton, in the mid-1980s, around the time when he had just made his misguided assessment of the Hitler Diaries for the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times. 


Dacre realised that the diaries were, in fact, not genuine on Saturday afternoon, around the time that the Times production line started up. Told this, Murdoch ordered the presses to roll regardless, with the famous blunt and graceless comment that you can find here, where is appears alongside HT-R's far more restrained judgment of Murdoch as "a megalomaniac twister, surrounded by yes men and hatchet men..." A shame that this error of judgment is what HT-R's remembered for the most, rather than the superb account of Hitler's last days published in 1947 and reworked at various points up until his death.


I'm not sure they're on the web, so thought I'd put these points on writing up as I've found them quite useful in thinking about how to write history. Or, for that matter, how to write almost anything more complicated than a shopping list...

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF WRITING

1 Thou shalt know thine own argument and cleave fast to it, and shall not digress nor deviate from it without the knowledge and consent of the reader, whom at all times thou shalt lead at a pace which he can follow and by a route which is clear to him as he goeth.

2. Thou shalt respect the autonomy of the paragraph, as commended by the authority and example of the historian Edward Gibbon; for it is the essential unit in the chain of argument. Therefore thou shalt keep it pure and self-contained, each paragraph having  within it a single central point to which all other observations in it shall be exactly subordinated by the proper use of the particles and inflexions given to us for this purpose.

3. Thou shalt aim always at clarity of exposition, to which all other literary aims shall be subordinated, remembering the rule “clarté prime, longeur secondaire.”* To this end thou shalt strive that no sentence be syntactically capable of any unintended meaning. To this end also thou shalt not fear to repeat thyself, if clarity require it, nor to state facts which thou thinkest as well known to others as to thyself; for it is better to remind the learned than to leave the unlearned in perplexity.

4. Thou shalt keep the structure of thy sentences clear, preferring short sentences to long and simple structures to complex, lest the reader lose his way in a labyrinth of subordinate clauses; and in particular, thou shalt not enclose one relative clause in another,  for this both betrays crudity of expression and is a fertile source of ambiguity.

5. Thou shalt preserve the unities of time and place,** placing thyself, in imagination, in one time and one place, and distinguishing all others to which thou mayest refer by a proper use of tenses and other forms of speech devised for this purpose; for unless we exploit the distinction between past and pluperfect tenses, and between imperfect and future conditional, we cannot attain perfect limpidity of style and argument.

6. Thou shalt not despise the subjunctive mood, a useful, subtle and graceful mood, blessed by Erasmus and venerated by George Moore, though cursed and anathematized by the Holy Inquisition, politicians and some of the media, and others who prefer to diminish language.***

7. Thou shalt always proceed in an orderly fashion, according to the rules of right reason: as, from the general to the particular when a generality is to be illustrated, but from the particular to the general when a generality is to be proved.

8. Thou shalt see what thou writest, and therefore shall not mix thy metaphors. For a mixed metaphor is proof that the image therein contained has not been seen worth the inner eye, and therefore such a metaphor is not a true metaphor, created out of the active eye of imagination, but from stale jargon idly drawn up from the stagnant sump of commonplace.

9. Thou shalt also hear what thou writest, with thine inner ear, so that no outer ear may be offended by jarring syllables or unmelodious rhythm; remembering herein with piety, though not striving to imitate, the rotundities of Sir Thomas Browne, and the clausulae of Cicero.

10. Thou shalt carefully expunge from thy writing all consciously written purple passages, lest they rise up to shame thee in thine old age.

                                                                                AMEN

* Some versions ascribe this to "the prophet Black."

** Another version adds "as commended by the High Priest Nicholas Boileau, (1636-1711)"

*** Another version has it ‘the Holy Inquisition, Pravda, and the late Lord Beaverbrook.’