Advice from the World's Worst Writer

To be fair, Scotsman Sir Thomas Urquhart (1605-1660) was only intermittently the world's worst writer. His translation of The Works of Rabelais remains eminently readable. On the other hand, his studies of mathematics (Trissotetras), genealogy (Pantochronachanon), and language (Logopandecteision) are largely impenetrable, marked (in the words of critic George Saintsbury) by "a pedantry which is gigantesque and almost incredible."

Nick Page, author of In Search of the World's Worst Writers (HarperCollins, 2000), celebrates "the essential weirdness" of Urquhart's "marvelously bad writing." His overwrought prose, Page says, was "obscure, bizarre, and written in a language entirely his own."

A look at the introduction to Urquhart's The Jewel ("a vindication of the honor of Scotland') makes it clear that he enjoyed word play and most likely wrote with just one reader in mind--himself:

Why, I could truly have enlarged my discourse with a choicer variety of phrase, and made it overflow the field of the readers understanding, with an inundation of greater eloquence and that one way, tropologetically, by metonymical, ironical, metaphorical, and synecdochical instruments of elocution, in all their several kinds, artificially effected, according to the nature of the subject, with emphatical expressions in things of greater concernment, with catachrestical in matters of meaner moment; attended on each side respectively with an epiplectic and exegetic modification; with hyperbolical, either epitatically or hypocoristically, as the purpose required to be elated or extenuated, with qualifying metaphors, and accompanied by apostrophes; and lastly, with allegories of all sorts, whether apologal, affabulatory, parabolary, aenigmatic, or paraemial. And on the other part, schematologetically adorning the proposed theme with the most especial and chief flowers of the garden of rhetoric. . . . I could have introduced, in case of obscurity, synonymal, exargastic and palilogetic elucidations; for sweetness of phrase, antimetathetic commutations of epithets; for the vehement excitation of a matter, exclamation in the front, and epiphonemas in the rear. I could have used, for the promptlier stirring up of passion, apostrophal and prosopopoeial diversions; and, for the appeasing and settling of them, some epanorthotic revocations and aposiopetic restraints. . . . But I hold it now expedient, without further ado, to stop the current of my pen . . . and write with simplicity.

Urquhart's comic roll call of the figures of speech (a forerunner, by the way, of Monty Python's "Announcement for People Who Like Figures of Speech") suggests that his obscure prose style was deliberately crafted for his own amusement. Nonetheless, there is a lesson in this for the rest of us, and it appears in the last three words of Urquhart's introduction.

If we write not just to entertain ourselves but to inform and delight our readers, we'd be wise to follow Urquhart's advice (rather than his practice) and write with simplicity.

More About Keeping It Simple:

• Top Five Tips to Cut the Clutter
• Five More Ways to Cut the Clutter
• Practice in Cutting the Clutter

Image: Sir Thomas Urquhart, from Nick Page's World's Worst Writers website (HarperCollins, 2000)