Acceptable Style at VoegelinView

The Editors at VoegelinView believe good style is inseparable from content.  Anything submitted for publication must be written in clear prose.  If it is not, but the subject is worthy and the thinking is persuasive, we will try to sharpen the prose.

Voegelin was a competent stylist.  Even when his subject was difficult, he was clear and forceful.  He despised the writing of academic hacks that filled the universities. In his Autobiographical Reflections he mused on a campus encounter he had with a faculty acquaintance:

"The nature of the problem can be gathered from a conversation with Cleanth Brooks. Once, when crossing the campus, I met him deep in sorrow and thought, and I asked him what worried him. He told me he had to prepare a chapter on typical mistakes for a textbook on English style that he was re-editing with Robert Penn Warren, and that it was quite a chore to find typical mistakes. I was a bit surprised and innocently told him, "Well, it is very simple to find typical mistakes. Just take any education textbook and you will find half a dozen on every page." He then explained to me that he could not use this method because educationists were far below the level of average literacy, and their mistakes could not be considered typical for an average English-speaking person. Instead, he was using sociology textbooks and sometimes had to read twenty pages of that stuff before running into a really good example. But even so, he had to worry because social scientists could not be considered to write typical English either but were below the average, though not as far below as educationists.

 

"This is the type of stratification of which I had gradually to become aware in order to achieve a moderately tolerable English, free of ideological jargon and free of the idiosyncrasies of the vulgarian levels in the academic community."

The standard reference on good style remains Strunk and White, The Elements of Style, (Penguin, many editions.) There is an earlier volume by Wm. Strunk alone that has been slipped back into print.  Please do not buy this unintentionally. E.B.White was the brilliant and pellucid essayist who published in the New Yorker magazine for many years.  Other stylists whom we admire include C.S.Lewis and G.K.Chesterton.

Also recommended is the little manual of punctuation, Eats Shoots and Leaves, by Lynne Truss (Gotham, 2006).  It is obvious that otherwise capable writers are unfamiliar with the semi-colon; and others find the colon and dash confusing.

Here is a list of rules we will try to follow:

1.  We will use the active voice.  The passive voice is not normally acceptable. This sentence is less than acceptable: "In order to be deemed impractical in this particular case, there would have to be some problem with the candidate or the environment." This is acceptable: "If there is a problem with the candidate or the environment it may be impractical..."

2.  We will not make abstractions into actors. This sentence is unacceptable:  “This additive strategy of educational change assumes that increasing emphasis on the practical and ethical social skills of the profession will reduce time for and ultimately affect the extent to which students develop skills in legal analyses.” If it sounds like it has been badly translated from German, it better have been badly translated from German.

3.  We will be suspicious of neologisms. We shall be particularly suspicious of jargon: "Regardless, I'm not sure whether the distribution of maximal temperatures is very significant anyway.  I would guess that variance is sufficiently high here to make the distribution of maxima a poor measure of the series as a whole."

4.  We will not allow the familiar and ugly words that are associated with impersonal systems such as governments, large corporations and universities.  Please do not  finalize or concretize anything. And if you think you must conceptualize, please contextualize it at the same time. If you explicate anything, you will have to explain why. If you insist on adding "ontological" in front of " truth," we hope you will be able to explain why the adjective is needed.

5.  If we can turn an abstruse phrase into an obvious thought we will do so. This is unacceptable: "On the other hand, if we are restricted to documents and the like for investigating the engendering experiences co-constituting the symbols we investigate in the historical record, maybe there is some way to avail ourselves of the wider possibilities for contemporary experiences and symbols." This may mean: We can learn from observing those around us as well as from history.

6.  We will try to publish prose that will be readable 200 years from now.  To that end, we will preserve the economy of the traditonal pronoun while respecting the reader.  (People do not have genders. Nouns have genders-at least in most European languages.  In English, an uninflected language, "he" has been used as an impersonal pronoun for several centuries, with no ambiguity of meaning and no offense given or taken.)  If a writer thinks he or she will offend a woman by using the male pronoun, he or she will have to get around the problem in a way that avoids he/she barbarisms or she will have to explain to the editor why he can't and she won't.

7. Voegelin regularly pointed out that lies are concealed in language and  crooked intellectuals rely on concealment. He does what George Orwell did in his famous essay, "Politics and the English Language," but he does it with greater breadth and precision.

8. James Rhodes has expressed his concern about a new "Voegelinian scholasticism" and although his comments can be found elsewhere on this site, we repeat them here for convenience:

[We need to] recognize that Voegelin is analyzing [Greek] thinkers who appropriated the common Greek meanings of [various] terms for special uses, to designate specific movements of the spirit. Then stop worrying about the words and concentrate on the designated movements. It is important to grasp the movements of the spirit that occurred in the cases analyzed, not the words for their own sakes.
[Above all we need to] avoid falling into a new, Voegelinian scholasticism. Do NOT reify either the words or the movements of the spirit analyzed. Kierkegaard's "physician of souls" cannot compile a [descriptive medical manual] of the spirit, as if allotriosis could be a syndrome parallel, say, to schizophrenia, always with such and such characteristics, traceable to certain damaged genes or chemical imbalances or what have you. The spirit can devise infinite possibilities of messing up. New ones will always come along. So, confine the words appropriated for the cases analyzed to the cases analyzed. If you apply them to new cases, note well the analogous character of your usage. Concentrate on the reality under observation, whatever words you find to describe it.
Lastly, take Plato's example and to the greatest extent possible avoid the creation of a technical vocabulary. Use ordinary language to talk to ordinary people. Generally, people are not impressed or enlightened by terms that they do not understand. "Periagoge," for example, was not a weighty technical term when Plato used it, nor did he mean it to become that. It just meant "turning around." When you talk to your students, just say "turning around."

We will do all we can to maintain a sense of humor.

The Editors