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Guidance in Writing Prose
Suggestions for Writing Good English
I wonder what to do in order to bring my essay up to the mark. Could you please make some suggestions?
I am afraid I can’t make suggestions. Just now I am too busy with other and more strenuous things to be very fit for literary
suggestions. I can only say generally avoid over-writing; let all your sentences be the vehicle of something worth saying and say
it with a vivid precision neither defective nor excessive. Don’t let either thought or speech trail or drag or circumvolute. Don’t
let the language be more abundant than the sense. Don’t indulge in mere clever ingenuities without a living truth behind them. I
think that is all. 14 June 1935
*
Your English is already correct as a rule. If you want style and
expression, that is another matter. The usual outward means is to read good styles and impregnate oneself with them; it has of
itself an influence on the writing. 27 May 1934
*
This book, returned herewith, is not in my opinion suitable for
the purpose. The author wanted to make it look like a translation of a romance in Sanskrit and he has therefore made the spirit and
even partly the form of the language more Indian than English. It is not therefore useful for getting into the spirit of the English
language. Indians have naturally in writing English a tendency to be too coloured, sometimes flowery, sometimes rhetorical and
a book like this would increase the tendency. One ought to have in writing English a style which is at its base capable of going to
the point, saying with a simple and energetic straightforwardness
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what one means to say, so that one can add grace of language without disturbing this basis. Arnold is a very good model for
this purpose. Emerson less, but his book will also do. It is surely better to write your own thoughts. The exercise
of writing in your own words what another has said or written is a good exercise or test for accuracy, clear understanding of
ideas, an observant intelligence; but your object is, I suppose, to be able to understand English and express
yourself in good
English. 16 May 1932
Poetry and Novel
No need to put poetry against novel and make a case between
them. Both can be given admission into the spiritual Parnassus ―but not all poetry and all novels. All depends on the consciousness from which the thing is done. If it is done from the psychic or the spiritual consciousness and bears the stamp of
its source, that is sufficient. Of course there are certain things that cannot be done from there, but neither poetry nor fiction is
in that case. They can be lifted to a higher level and made the expression of the psychic or spiritual mind and vision. When
that is said, all is said. I hope my brevity has been of the right kind ―and not left the question mystically obscure.
9 June 1936
Tragedy in Fiction
I did not like the tragic ending of Jyotirmayi’s story. The conditions of true tragedy are not fulfilled, so far as I can see. Why
create sorrow in literature wantonly?
That depends on the work itself. If it involves inevitably a tragic
end, that has to be allowed to come. It is only if the tragedy is dragged in unnaturally for the sake of a forceful ending that it
is inartistic. 13 January 1936
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