Bad style

John Gross, who died recently, was said to be the best read person in England. Certainly, no person I ever met knew more about English literature—and many other things besides—than he. But his vast knowledge, the fruit of prodigious reading and prodigious memory, was not that of a pedant; everything he knew, he knew because he delighted in knowledge for its own sake. He had the gift of conveying that delight to others.

He was, among other things, the finest anthologist of his age. His The New Oxford Book of English Prose is an indispensable source for those who would write well, in whatever style they would like to write. Gross knew that there were many fine styles, none of them suitable to all occasions. He wanted, he says in the introduction, “to illustrate the resources and achievements of English prose as an artistic medium and an instrument of expression.”

It is pleasing to note that, of 490 writers anthologised, at least 11 are doctors (I might have missed some), surely a much higher percentage than could be expected by chance. They are Sir Thomas Browne, John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, Tobias Smollett, Oliver Goldsmith, Oliver Wendell Holmes, David Livingstone, Charles Sherrington, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Somerset Maugham, and Oliver Sacks. There are also at least two former medical students, John Keats and J G Ballard, and one other Nobel prize winner in medicine, Peter Medawar. And many of the extracts of other authors concern matters medical. Ours is a literary as well as a scientific profession, and if you want your doctor-son to be a writer, call him Oliver.

Not surprisingly the anthology has extracts on language and prose style. Hilaire Belloc, praising Cardinal Newman, says, “[He,] having to tell a certain number of facts, and to express a certain number of ideas, does so with the best choice of words in the best order—and that is prose.” George Orwell describes the purpose of Newspeak: “The intention was to make speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness.”

I turn now to a document I received from the General Medical Council recently through the post. Gross would surely have anthologised it if he had lived, because it certainly shows one of the resources of English prose. Here is what the UK Revalidation Programme Board will do: “(a) Clarify the assumptions and context for delivery; (b) Confirm the scope of the programme and its major interdependencies, including managing performance concerns in relation to doctors; (c) Define the workstreams needed to deliver all aspects of the model and identify who is responsible for delivery; (d) Provide a clear timetable and key milestones for starting revalidation and incremental implementation; (e) Ensure that all key interests are confident that readiness is being assessed on a robust and consistent basis against UK wide criteria; (f) Outline an end state picture across the UK as a part of the planning process for roll out and implementation.”

Social historians of the future will marvel that eminent, educated people should have consented to put their names to such a document, which in Newspeak would be esteemed as “doubleplusgood duckspeak.” Thomas Carlyle (not a doctor, though a hypochondriacal frequenter of doctors) asked his friend John Stirling in 1835, “Do you reckon this really a time for purism of style?” And he answered, “I do not.”