The Project Gutenberg EBook of Write It Right, by Ambrose Bierce

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Title: Write It Right
A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults

Author: Ambrose Bierce

Release Date: May 29, 2004 [EBook #12474]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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WRITE IT RIGHT

_A LITTLE BLACKLIST OF LITERARY FAULTS_

BY AMBROSE BIERCE

1909

AIMS AND THE PLAN

The author's main purpose in this book is to teach precision in
writing; and of good writing (which, essentially, is clear thinking
made visible) precision is the point of capital concern. It is
attained by choice of the word that accurately and adequately
expresses what the writer has in mind, and by exclusion of that which
either denotes or connotes something else. As Quintilian puts it, the
writer should so write that his reader not only may, but must,
understand.

Few words have more than one literal and serviceable meaning, however
many metaphorical, derivative, related, or even unrelated, meanings
lexicographers may think it worth while to gather from all sorts and
conditions of men, with which to bloat their absurd and misleading
dictionaries. This actual and serviceable meaning--not always
determined by derivation, and seldom by popular usage--is the one
affirmed, according to his light, by the author of this little manual
of solecisms. Narrow etymons of the mere scholar and loose locutions
of the ignorant are alike denied a standing.

The plan of the book is more illustrative than expository, the aim
being to use the terms of etymology and syntax as little as is
compatible with clarity, familiar example being more easily
apprehended than technical precept. When both are employed the precept
is commonly given after the example has prepared the student to apply
it, not only to the matter in mind, but to similar matters not
mentioned. Everything in quotation marks is to be understood as
disapproved.

Not all locutions blacklisted herein are always to be reprobated
as universal outlaws. Excepting in the case of capital
offenders--expressions ancestra