C.R.I.S.P. your sentences by using this proven revision method. PREAMBLE
Will Strunk, Jr. both taught and later collaborated in revisions with the legendary stylist E. B. White on Strunk’s important manual, THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE. This tome was a self-published small text that Strunk used at Cornell University. He called it simply “the Little Book.” It has as, perhaps, his most important rule: “Omit needless words!”
George Orwell, in his important essay, “Politics and the English Language,” had as one of his six precepts: “If a word can be left out, always leave it out!”
One of America’s premiere rhetoricians, Richard Lanham (REVISING PROSE, A HANDLIST OF RHETORICAL TERMS, and others), also advocates what the ancients called “the plain style” — what Lanham calls the “C.B.S. Method”: Clarity, Brevity, Simplicity.
This and following installments on this topic will present a method of sentence improvement that offers many more specifics than “style needs work,” or “awkward phrasing here,” or “needs revision.” Yes, but the writer has usually been left with: “OK, but HOW?”
The C.R.I.S.P. Method of Sentence Revision was developed through my study of theorists on good speaking and writing across the centuries. Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian made up the core of the “ancients” who contributed. My favorite medieval rhetorician, Erasmus and Geoffrey of Vinsauf (fl.1200 A.D.) in his POETRIA NOVA had many things to offer. In the Renaissance, Erasmus of Rotterdam with hid DE COPIA had much to offer. And moderns such as Strunk and White, Orwell, G. K. Chesterton (mostly by example), and definitely Richard Lanham — all contributed immensely.
Thus, the “method” I’ve compiled is just that: a compilation of good ideas from great theorists on style over millennia. It’s certainly nothing I can claim to have “invented.”
C.R.I.S.P. is, of course, an acronym. The letters stand for: CLARIFY, REPLACE, INVIGORATE, STRUCTURE (in its sense as a verb), and POETICIZE. In naming the method, at first I was thinking of ACTIVATE rather than INVIGORATE — but “CRASP” isn’t a word. And I also had, at that early point, not yet thought about POETICIZE — and I didn’t wish to call it the “CRAP” Method :-O
So, C.R.I.S.P. it is. Briefly, the separate techniques of this method (I call them techniques or practices, since they need not be sequential in the sense of methodical STEPS) involve the following:
- C. for CLARIFY pretty much means: “Cross Out” / “Delete” / “Omit” certain types of words (as with Strunk’s rule as noted above). This isn’t necessarily a “step,” but it might often come first in revision.
- R. for REPLACE essentially means the use of various rules of substitution of some words with others that better serve the purpose and effect of the writing.
- I. for INVIGORATE means to find — if at all possible and if it fits the purpose — an action verb rather than some form of “To Be.”
- S. for STRUCTURE means to try various means of RE-structuring the sentence for the desired — and greatest — effect upon the reader.
- P. for POETICIZE means to draw upon the writer’s developing arsenal of rhetorical and poetical figures and proven “ways with words” that — Alas! — along with the formal teaching of style, have generally dropped out of the American system of teaching writing.
MORE SPECIFICS in the next installment on the C.R.I.S.P. Method. A backgrounding Philosophy of Style will be presented as well as an overall Rationale behind this method.
To LINK to the several individual articles on parts of THE C.R.I.S.P. Method for Style Revision — USE THE FOLLOWING: